Sublime

Said’s book became canonical in many Middle East Studies departments, pressuring students and professors to prove they were not Orientalists. Israel’s history was subjected to withering revisionism.

Devoid of archival sources and tainted with inaccuracies—oil, of course, and not Israel, was America’s Middle East priority—“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” was even less academically sound than Orientalism. Utterly ignored were the vast advantages that Israel afforded the United States in intelligence sharing, weapons development, and hi

Such trends compelled me to stand my ground. I worked to expose Said’s Orientalism screed, noting that the first experts on the Middle East came from Germany and Hungary, neither of which ever colonized the region.