Guest article by Hanns W. Maull
“The Israelis,” “the Palestinians,” and “the Middle East”: many descriptions and analyses devoted to the region between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, which is once again in flames, are rather general. This obsessive focus on collective identities is by no means new: it ushered in the age of nationalism in the 19th century. The dangerous distortions of reality and, above all, the perception of the “other” led Europe into two world wars. In relation to the Middle East, the Palestinian-American scientist Edward Said demonstrated the power and dangers of these distortions, which were collective in both senses, in the late 1970s when he formulated his criticism of the mystifying perception of the East in the West. Said called this “Orientalism.” He used this to describe the West’s view of the East, in which it appeared mysteriously closed, uniform, exotically different, and backward.
