Westerners explain away hostility by scapegoating rival colonial powers.

Evidence

In discussing the relative importance of these various political grievances, Middle Easterners will naturally give primacy to those in which they themselves are directly concerned. Westerners, on the other hand, incline to the view that if those grievances that are directed against other Westerners could only be met, their own more reasonable requirements would find easy acceptance—and there is always someone ready to serve an interest or a prejudice by encouraging this belief. Variants of this view have been put before many different audiences in the past and have been argued, asserted, suggested, or hinted, according to the ductility of the evidence and the skill of the advocate. A current form of this interpretation, which enjoys a measure of popularity in some quarters today, is that were it not for the existence and persistence of the Israelis, the incompetence and greed of the French, and the duplicity and rapacity of the British, there could be an idyllic marriage of American interests and Arab nationalism, in which the latter would be firm and independent against all others, but gracefully acquiescent in American requirements. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1188

Categorization

• XREF: Bears directly on the Said-adjacent cluster: Western knowledge production that constructs Arab nationalism as naturally pro-American absent European meddling — a self-serving representational move echoing Said’s critique.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘were it not for X’ apocalypse fantasy as a recurring Western idiom of blaming colonialism on rivals while exempting oneself — traceable from this 1950s passage to modern ‘if only not for Iran/Russia’ frames.