Zionist leaders marketed Palestine’s backwardness as an economic asset to attract Western capital

Evidence

Promoting Bezalel to British Jewry, Otto Warburg put it bluntly when he claimed that an advantage of Palestine as the location for Bezalel was that “the land is backward industrially and has not yet entered the epoch of capitalism. Hence the manual work which is languishing in most Western lands will hold its own there for many years.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 586

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how ‘underdevelopment’ gets rhetorically flipped into a virtue by modernizers — the ‘backwardness as asset’ argument recurs across colonial and development discourse.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of Western projection onto the Orient, and to Said-style orientalist analysis.