ABSTRACT
In a famously provocative article, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Edward Said set out to detail the stark social, political, economic, and cultural consequences of Zionism for the non-Jewish population in Palestine.1 He explained how Zionist policy changed from a mission civilisatrice at the start of the twentieth century in which the Arab population, alongside the Jewish people, was to be “regenerated” to a policy of population transfer, mass exodus, and violent disappearance after 1948. In elucidating the historical justification of Palestinian displacement, Said argued that Zionism did not simply “[draw] its force” from the idea of Jewish selfdetermination and “Jewish national selfhood” (ZSV, 56) but also-and, for Said, certainly more significantly-from “the historical context of nineteenthcentury Europe” (ZSV, 57). The Zionist colonial mission-although different in a number of significant ways from the unchecked imperial ambitions of the modern European state-was nevertheless the product of the European imagination, in which overseas territories were to be variously inhabited, civilized, exploited, or conquered in the name of progress, culture, and Enlightenment. It is no coincidence, Said points out, that Zionism followed upon and even gained legitimacy through its comparison with the unprecedented expansion of European empires into Africa and Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.
