The Promise of a Post-Imperial Age
It is comforting to believe that Orientalism belongs to another century. When Edward Said coined the term, he was not describing a single prejudice or a handful of stereotypes, but a whole system of thought through which the West imagined, classified, and governed the East. Empires collapsed. Colonial rhetoric became unacceptable. Political leaders learned to speak carefully. Institutions learned to sound inclusive. Media adopted the grammar of diversity. Universities teach postcolonial critique. At first glance, the world seems far removed from the age of empire.
Yet that impression misleads. Orientalism did not vanish. It learned how to survive differently. In the age of formal empire, subjugation was explicit. The East was portrayed as incapable of governing itself. The West was presented as rational, organised, and entitled to rule. These claims were not innocent descriptions of culture. They functioned as political arguments. They transformed conquest into obligation and supervision into virtue. Violence was justified through governing ideas.
Today, such discourse would sound crude. It would provoke outrage. It would expose itself too clearly. So, it was replaced.
The Middle East is no longer described as inferior. It is described as unstable. Its societies are not declared incapable. They are characterised as unprepared. Empire no longer announces invasion. It stabilises regions.
Nothing essential changed. Only the framing did. Jared Kushner’s plan for Palestine reveals this with unusual clarity. Rather than confront dominance and history, the plan rerouted the discussion. Political claims were pushed aside. Economic promises moved to the centre. The conflict was no longer understood as a struggle over oppression and justice but as a problem of economic optimisation. Now investment displaced recognition. Construction displaced self-rule. Financial incentives displaced political expression. Palestinians were invited to imagine a future shaped less by their own political will than by externally designed economic opportunities. A people with claims became a population with needs.
The Managerial Turn of Power
This was not a technical adjustment. It was a logical shift. When political struggles are translated into economic projects, dominance becomes supervisory rather than coercive. Exclusion becomes policy design rather than violence. Force becomes invisible precisely because it appears reasonable. At the end, Kushner’s plan did not resolve the conflict. It redefined what the conflict was permitted to mean.
Once that shift occurred, the question was no longer who has the right to determine outcomes. The question became how reconstruction could be delivered. Justice was replaced by efficiency. Autonomy was replaced by administration. This is how Orientalism now functions. Not through crude stereotypes, but through technical speech acts. Not through occupation, but through development.
Peace Without Equality
Trump’s proposed Peace Board takes this logic far beyond Palestine. If Kushner’s plan neutralised liberation movement through economics, Trump’s board transforms global order into personal command. In this vision, peace is no longer the outcome of negotiation among equal states. It becomes a product delivered by a narrow circle of powerful actors. Membership is selective. Decision-making is concentrated. Influence is tied to alignment with American priorities.
The United Nations, despite its flaws and contradictions, rests on a symbolic commitment to sovereign equality. Trump’s board abandons even that fragile premise. It does not abolish international law. It bypasses it. It does not reject global norms. It renders them irrelevant by relocating authority elsewhere.
Seen together, Kushner’s plan and Trump’s Peace Board are not isolated initiatives. They are connected moments in a single trajectory. First, politics is reframed as economics. Then global order is reframed as management under Trump’s permanent chairmanship. In both cases, those most affected are excluded from participation. Palestinians are spoken about, not listened to. Smaller states are governed through structures they did not design. Participation and permanent status depend on money. In this arrangement, sovereignty is conditional, and equality is rhetorical.
Gaza and the Denial of Political Subjecthood
Gaza exposes the consequences of this idea with particular sharpness. It is repeatedly framed as humanitarian emergency, security concern, diplomatic complication. Rarely as a political struggle rooted in history and structural dominance. Palestinians appear as recipients of aid and objects of policy. Their resistance is recoded as instability. Their history becomes background noise. Politics is filtered through external institutions.
Colonial rule always claimed to act on behalf of populations while denying them political ownership. Kushner’s plan repeated this reasoning in economic form. Trump’s Peace Board institutionalises it at the level of global governance.
What is striking is not the brutality of this transformation. It is its ordinariness.
Such projects are presented as pragmatic, realistic, forward-looking. They are offered as solutions to disorder rather than expressions of control. Orientalism makes this framing possible because it trains political imagination to accept that certain regions require supervision, that certain peoples are not fully entitled to decide their own future.
The Middle East is not positioned as a domain of active citizenship but as a zone of perpetual crisis. Its conflicts are explained as internal failures rather than historical interventions. Its struggles are interpreted as irrational, not as claims to justice.
Orientalism today is not loud. It is administrative. It does not rely on stereotypes. It relies on procedures. It does not announce empire. It constructs governance. From Kushner’s plan to Trump’s Peace Board, the same pattern persists. The world is increasingly shaped not by universal principles but by the choices of a small circle of powerful men. Some determine outcomes. Others exist within outcomes imposed on them.
The Present Tense of Orientalism
To claim that Orientalism belongs to the past is not simply mistaken. It is convenient. It allows Western societies to imagine themselves as post-imperial while continuing to operate through imperial structures. It allows inequality to appear as technical complexity rather than political injustice.
The deeper question, however, is not institutional. It is philosophical. What does it mean when power is distributed selectively, when some communities are recognised as historical actors while others are reduced to administrative problems? What does it mean when peace is defined not through justice but through stability imposed from above? The shift from conquest to management can present itself as progress. But progress without equality is only a refinement of hierarchy. Violence has not vanished. It has become procedural.
This is the contemporary form of Orientalism. Not as a theory. Not as an ideology. But as a method of rule. From Palestine to global governance, the pattern repeats. Some peoples are invited to decide. Others are expected to accept decisions made for them. Some voices are heard. Others are filtered through institutions that translate them into manageable categories.
The question is whether the world is willing to confront a system in which political agency is unevenly distributed and justified through administrative reason. If it is not, the future will not arrive through dramatic collapse. It will arrive through normalisation, through silence. That is the unsettling thought.
Orientalism did not survive because it was defended. It survived because it was redesigned. It learned new vocabularies, new rationalities, new forms of legitimacy. In this sense, Kushner’s plan and Trump’s Peace Board are not aberrations. They are crystallisations of a longer shift.
What appears as stability is, in fact, a reorganisation of power. Decision-making is concentrated while responsibility is dispersed. Domination persists not through blunt force alone but through procedure. Empire does not vanish. It changes form. The danger lies here. When power no longer appears as power, it becomes harder to contest. When inequality is embedded in systems rather than imposed through overt violence, it becomes easier to normalise. Orientalism has not ended. It has morphed into its present, and perhaps most dangerous, form.
