Zionist orientalist imagery of Arabs denied them contemporary reality and rights

Evidence

Zionists developed a myriad of approaches to dealing with the so-called Arab question, and produced a variety of images of “the Arab.” Most of these, however, remained within the confines of orientalist discourse: the East (as represented by the Arab population) was either violent, irrational, and evil, or authentic and antiquated—a culture some Zionists posited should be emulated. … In the literature and praxis of the radical “Second Aliyah,” and also in subsequent Zionist visual representations, the image of the Arab as the embodiment of the ancient Hebrew was a salient possible model for Zionist values and culture: the noble savage meets the biblical Israelite. … By appropriating the “nativeness” of the Arabs, the Zionists assumed the role of natives and rendered the indigenous population obsolete. … It is not surprising that the construction of the Arab as an ideal model coincided with the struggle for “Hebrew labor”; that is, the exclusion of Palestinians from the labor force in the Jewish colonies. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 646

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my reading on how settler-colonial projects appropriate indigenous identity for legitimacy — parallels the ‘native appropriation’ dynamic in Hawthorne’s grafting essay and in debates over Zionism-as-colonialism. — connects to: Zionism’s negation of exile caused the Palestinian exile and denial of homeland — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 376
• SEED: Could be the spine of an essay on how nationalist movements weaponize admiration (‘we love the authentic native’) as a cover for dispossession — the praise itself is the erasure, not the hostility.