The Making of Primitive Palestine: Intellectual Origins of the Palestine-Israel Conflict

摘要

This essay analyses the Western perception of Palestine in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It elucidates how the way the West looked at Palestine and its population was deeply influenced by the anthropological invention of “primitive society”. This lens through which to view the Holy Land was not the result of an objective description of the subject matter; on the contrary, it was a narrative carefully constructed and designed to suit the narrators' purposes. Driven by religious and political motifs, Western scholars, travellers and religious writers set out to describe the land and people of Palestine in terms of historicized difference. Not only did this allow Christian scholars to demonstrate the reliability of the biblical narratives, but even more did it offer an intellectual justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine.