5

EDWARD SAID AND THE CLASH OF IDENTITIES

EDWARD SAID, a Christian from West Jerusalem, raised in Cairo, and educated at British and American schools, is not an obvious fit in the panoply of foreign-born intellectuals discussed here. He inherited U.S. citizenship as the son of a Palestinian who had himself become an American citizen in 1930 after serving in the military for the United States during World War I. He first came to the U.S. to attend college, younger than any of the other intellectuals discussed here, and not forced to do so by a repressive state. If Arendt, Marcuse, and Solzhenitsyn were legally foreign as German or Russian nationals (even though the first two were naturalized) and culturally and linguistically foreign as their accent and behavior suggested it, Said appeared American. English was the household language of his bilingual childhood. He spoke it flawlessly and without accent. The adult Said showed in photos or portrayed in written evocations always appears as a strikingly handsome man, tall and impeccably dressed—vintage image for the New England intellectual, whether as the Harvard graduate he was or for the cultural icon Mary McCarthy called “the Yale man.”¹ In his writing, he was the champion of those who had been systematically misrepresented by the Western tradition. His taste in books and music was not just that of an educated Western man but indeed almost of a traditionalist with marked preferences for the canonical figures in the pantheon of European high culture. As one critic put it, “much of Said’s ‘critical consciousness’ was deeply ‘American,’ just as he was himself not just a scholar of American literature and culture but personally, existentially, and legally American.”2

Yet it is impossible to miss the consistent use of the plural first-person pronoun in his political commentary on the Palestinian effort at self-determination. There, Said spoke as a Palestinian. Moreover, he spoke in a political and intellectual climate defined by the “clash regime” that had been in the making since the Cold War (now with a different cast of characters), and that made it seem impossible that the same person could be Western and an Arab. The post–Cold War era continued to promote a political ontology centered on conflict. Said was one of the harshest critics of this worldview, which became all the more entrenched in the minds of many Americans after September 11, 2001. One month after the attacks, he criticized in the pages of the Nation Samuel P. Huntington’s famous thesis of the clash of civilizations, trying to convince American readers of how disturbing and simplistic it was to make “‘civilizations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not: shut-down, sealed off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history.”³

Said’s stranger persona was a product of multiple, even ambivalent, self-identifications as an intellectual, an exile, and a Palestinian. His reputation as author of Orientalism, key founder of postcolonialism, and professor at Columbia University was impressive enough but still not what made Tony Judt claim that Said was at the time of his death “the best known intellectual in the world.”⁴ It was not just the accolades and prestigious positions as chaired professor at Columbia University and president of the Modern Language Association but also the media bashing and hate mail that made him famous. As in Marcuse’s case, Said’s politics were controversial enough to place him in the attention of a public beyond academic audiences. He held unpopular views on highly sensitive topics, denouncing American imperialism in the Middle East and the Israeli destruction of Palestinians.

How did a comparative literature scholar come to take on such a difficult political mission? What is the relationship between his Palestinian origin and his intellectual production in the making of a stranger persona? I ask these questions because Said was not a Palestinian refugee in the common sense of the term, as Solzhenistyn had been an expelled Russian dissident. Yet toward the end of his career and life, Said identified increasingly as a Palestinian. I analyze the formation of his stranger persona by examining the arc traced from his academic self as exhibited in Orientalism and his influential BBC lectures on humanism, on Freud, and on intellectuals; to his journalistic and political self at the time he was a spokesperson for the Palestinian National Council and Yasser Arafat, while also publishing articles on Palestinian self-determination in major cultural media outlets; and finally to the protagonist of his memoir, Out of Place, presented as a Palestinian who overcomes adversity, learns from his misfortune, and becomes both intellectually and politically enlightened. The stranger persona that emerges from this trajectory is not the rootless cosmopolitan on a lecture tour, studying in a library, or playing piano in a concert hall or just an Arab struggling to defend the right to exist of a national entity—Palestine—but rather a stranger lamenting the loss of his nation and unwilling to join another one.

The apparent contradiction between his identification with the Palestinian people and the American consciousness his American colleagues especially appreciated in him was crucial to Said’s stranger persona. According to Jeffrey Williams, Said was “granted a position to speak for Palestine by virtue of his cosmopolitan, Western persona—by virtue of not being an oriental, but a leading Western man of letters and professor.”5 We find a similar perception in the claim that “the principal reason why Said [has] served so effectively in America as a TV pitchman for the Palestinians is that his self-presentation is thoroughly Western; he comes off as the very model of a tolerant, liberal Western academic, his distinguished appearance and civilized manner serving to dispel any notion of Arabs as irrational, zealous, terror-prone.”⁶

Said built his stranger persona by establishing that he was a foreigner, ironically enough by comparison to the other three intellectuals I have discussed in this book. Even as a foreigner, he was a “marvel of adjustment,” to use a label he applied to his own intellectual heroes, who were exceptional individuals able to gain recognition from their new country while also enriching its cultural and intellectual tradition. At the same time, though, the term “adjustment,” which made Said uneasy, might suggest compromise and lack of critical distance, resembling too much the art of “political trimming” he despised, as a strategy of success. Said preferred troublesome, maladjusted exiles, those who “remain outside the mainstream, unaccommodated, unco-opted, resistant” and adopted this stance in his political writing.7

In his criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Said spoke as someone who not only disagreed with, but felt removed from, American traditions and practices. Over the years, he wrote increasingly as a Palestinian. His critique had the pathos of an outraged outsider more than of a disappointed insider. In interviews, Said frequently described his interest in the Middle East as an awakening and as being “claimed by” Palestine.⁸ Throughout his career, Said’s persona gradually shifted from that of the intellectual as critic—a strongly epistemic stance focused on the task of investigating situations—to that of the critic as victim—a strongly emotional stance focused on eliciting compassion for all the other victims on whose behalf it argues.

In 1977, Said became a member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the equivalent of a parliament-in-exile for the stateless Palestinians. He began a political career committed to the ideals of moderation, avoidance of factional struggles, and strategic compromise. He rejected armed conflict and did not question the legitimacy of the Israeli state but asked for political recognition for Palestinians in the context of a binational state. This reconciliatory stance was equally ineffective with Arab and Israeli radicals and placed Said between two nationalisms that were not only competing political ideologies but also discourses that mobilized a different pathos of suffering and injustice. Although devotedly pro-Palestinian, Said was not always well liked in Arab countries, especially after his fallout with the PNC. Once seen as an advisor and even friend of Yasser Arafat, Said’s strong criticism of the decisions made by Arab leaders at key political junctions, especially the Oslo accords, pushed him, in the eyes of many Arabs, on to the other side of the debate. Said complained that his work was not even known in the Arab world because of a boycott against his ideas.⁹

Said withdrew from the PNC in 1991 in protest over the Oslo accords, and his direct involvement with the Arab leadership gradually dwindled, until it disappeared completely. Yet his political activity continued beyond an official role in regular interventions in public and political discourse both in the United States and abroad, especially in Britain and in Egypt. His political mission, thus redefined, was to engage with what Luc Boltanski calls “the topic of denunciation.”10 His mission was to denounce the role played by the U.S. government in Israeli policies directed against Palestinians, and alongside, the complacency and even collaboration of influential American intellectuals. Beyond this concrete objective, Said’s larger goal was denouncing the hypocrisy of Western liberalism and exposing its darker sides: colonialism and imperialism. He pursued this goal through regular interventions in major intellectual media outlets, in interviews, public lectures, keynote addresses, essays, and even in traditional academic papers. This forms a vast corpus that defies a comprehensive presentation or analysis within the confines of one chapter. I focus, therefore, on an intellectual and political course defined by three pivotal moments in his career as marked in Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Out of Place, while also drawing on several others, especially those written in the intervening decades.¹¹ These works are not only significant for Said’s career; they also anchor a trajectory from scholar to political actor and from abstract thinking about the problem of representation to making himself into a representative example of Palestinian identity.

Said studied the discursive mechanisms of representation through literary analysis in Orientalism. He retraced these mechanisms in depictions of Palestinians in U.S. media and intellectual discourse in The Question of Palestine. In the later part of his career, he presented a strategy for political resistance by telling his own story as a Palestinian in an account of suffering and dispossession that became his memoir, Out of Place. This shift from literary criticism to political journalism and finally to memoir presents an interesting case of rhetorical scaffolding: all three texts shared a denunciatory purpose but were conceived differently. Orientalism was already political, even though written within the conventions of an academic genre. The book “breathed insurgence,” by encouraging a radical rethinking of purportedly apolitical texts, novels, and poems.¹² The Question of Palestine used literary analysis as evidence for political claims while Out of Place blended political commentary with literary evocation. The understanding of representation as a discursive force, established by Orientalism, also constitutes the foundation of the later texts. But while The Question of Palestine justifies the accusation by using the analogy between Zionism and imperialism, the memoir reenacts the suffering of the victim, fashioning Said himself as a dispossessed and oppressed Palestinian.

Denunciation is a rhetorical task that presents several challenges. First, the accuser has to convince the audience to care about the alleged victims and be outraged at the purported wrongdoers. This becomes more difficult when the audience is physically and culturally distant in relation to the victims, as many Americans were to Palestinians, but closer in relation to the wrongdoers, as many Jewish-Americans were to the Israeli perspective. Thus, the accuser faces the challenge of representing the victims and the villains when, as Boltanski explains, “a clearly identified agent cannot be established for a sufficient length of time in place of the persecutor.” The legacy of the Holocaust made it hard to represent Palestinians as victims to an American audience concerned with the victims of Nazism, the Jews, as the scandal surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem had made clear. And because they saw Jews as victims, American audiences had a more difficult time shifting their representation to that of perpetrators, all the more so once the Palestinian Liberation Organization became involved in terrorist activity. This rapidly evolving and shifting dynamic of victimhood and villainy created a “crisis of the representation of the suffering.” How to know who the victim is, and thus where the suffering lies? In response to this referential uncertainty, Said used “systems of accusation,” which, in Boltanski’s terms, proceed by “constructing stable chains so that the places in a particular situation can be filled by connecting different actors to large entities, to collective persons.”13 Said accused intellectual leaders and opinion makers of failing to promote particular representations of reality. Said also took issue with the philosophical traditions in which representations take shape, targeting Zionism as the ideology that had served as the foundation for the state of Israel and continues to legitimate Israeli politics in the Middle East, especially toward Palestinians. He understood Zionism as part of Western liberalism and as the legacy of the Enlightenment, but he was especially interested in the American version with its emphasis on the politics of national emancipation through the Puritan narrative of a chosen people, the narrative that had also been at the center of Solzhenitsyn’s jeremiad.

Denunciation, as Said pursued it, is a pathos-driven discourse relying on tropes of indignation even in the midst of an objective and rigorous investigation. To strike the right balance between detached observation and outraged commentary is difficult. As Boltanski explains, “in a topic of denunciation . . . the statement is inserted within a structure of controversy. The speaker’s words must be more than just invective. Meeting with resistance, the statement must equally appear in a debatable form. It must set out and argue its positions. The violence of accusation must be justified by proofs.”14 But denunciatory discourses also tend to split their addressees into a projected “universal audience” expected to share the outrage and respond with prompt compassion and an adversarial audience likely to challenge the representation and assignment of the roles of victims and perpetrators. Said’s late reflections on humanism were designed to lend theoretical credence to the possibility of a universal audience who could understand the human experience in its manifold manifestations and thus be capable of compassion and sympathy across national, cultural, and religious divides. Yet his analyses of media depictions of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular frequently presented a Said concerned especially with the making of adversarial audiences.

The denunciatory goal of Said’s political writing gave it a distinctive emotional imprint. He wrote as an angry man, indeed appropriately so for someone denouncing oppression and wrongdoing. Yet the emotional and the investigative aspects of denunciation conflicted at times. The angry tone of his writing impacted the epistemic force of his arguments, rendering them less objective. Even a supporter like Homi Bhaba, while conceding that “there is much to agree with [in Said’s arguments],” added that there is “much to question also. The high Saidian style speaks with a moral passion that sometimes sacrifices analytic precision to polemical outrage.”¹⁵

In his review of Covering Islam, Clifford Geertz (who had already made it clear in his review of Orientalism that he was not a fan) grudgingly admitted that Said’s exposure of the media demonization of Islam is justified and valid, yet he bemoaned the shrill, unattractive tone of the denunciation. In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier (at the time a graduate student at Harvard University and not yet the powerful editor he would later become) began his own review of Covering Islam by calling it an “angry book,” and the overall negative assessment made it clear that such an adjective was not merely a neutral depiction. Peppered with phrases like “Said’s philippic,” “another apology for rejectionism,” “his jusq-auboutisme” (fanaticism), and “morally pusillanimous,” Wieseltier’s analysis rejected Said’s arguments consistently on the basis of their content as well as emotional tonality.16

Said’s rhetoric of denunciation was that of an outsider who set out to provoke and to disturb. Anger is a fitting accompaniment for the unmasking of a wrong that has remained so far ignored. According to Boltanski, the display of outrage draws attention to the denouncer: “it is through indignation that he renders himself present in person, because indignation cannot be impersonal.” Yet for Said the academic, such an emotional display was risky because it created a contrast with the ideal of the well-tempered scholar. As the denouncer is expected to move from an initial display of outrage to a dispassionate investigation, emotions are also expected to subside “because to gather proof [the denouncer] must direct reality.”¹⁷ The socio-political reality about which Said wrote was difficult to “direct” because the controversial nature of Palestinian-Israeli politics and U.S. involvement created a crisis of representation. Said intervened in this crisis by representing the Palestinian reality; therefore it makes sense that he would deemphasize his American identity. While it is hard to know if Said regarded the anger of the stranger more likely to be accepted in a denunciatory discourse, the rhetorical advantages of such a persona are clear. By positioning himself as a Palestinian, Said could also speak from the perspective of the victim. His anger was not the moral self-righteousness of a Western observer who at the end of the day falls asleep in a comfortable home but the authentic outrage of the harmed.

THE WISDOM OF THE EXILE

The very inclusion of Said in the cast of characters I discuss in this book requires some brief discussion. He was frequently called an exile, a term he often chose to identify himself, but is this “exile” comparable to Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, and Marcuse who were forced to leave their country of origin and only came to the United States in an attempt to save their lives? Or was Said a cosmopolitan for whom national affiliations or attachment to a particular culturally defined lifestyle meant little? These two categories meld into a third one, which represents Said’s most common characterization: as an intellectual whose mission is to “speak truth to power.” Said’s most sustained discussion of the role of intellectuals is featured in his 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC. In these lectures, his conception of the intellectual is informed by the synthesis of two sources rarely used together: Julien Benda and Antonio Gramsci. From Benda’s Treason of the Clerks, he took an idealized, heroic image of intellectuals as “thoroughgoing individuals with powerful personalities and, above all, . . . in a state of almost permanent opposition to the status quo.” The “treason” referred to in Benda’s title occurs when intellectuals abandon lofty ideals and become involved in “the organization of collective passions,” especially class-related, or nationalist-driven conflicts. Despite the conservatism usually attributed to Benda (who saw intellectuals as superior agents situated above the rest of society), for Said this position “remains an attractive and compelling one.” He was probably drawn precisely to the heroic requirement, which demands the intellectual be “someone able to speak the truth to power, a crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized and pointedly taken to task.”18 Because he stressed the political engagement of intellectuals, Said disliked specialization, critiquing it as a pernicious condition especially characteristic of American intellectuals. This idyllic return to the intellectual as a sage rather than mere professional reveals the underlying aesthetic motivation behind Said’s conception of political engagement: “the aestheticized intellectual transcends the mire of worldly interest, in profession or state. . . . [T]he category of the amateur is precisely disinterested, without the same stakes or sheer economic need of the professional.”¹⁹ If Benda furnished a heroic ideal of the intellectual, Gramsci offered Said realism, especially in the sociological context of the twentieth-century West with its emphasis on, and diversification of, professional expertise from academics to journalists and policy experts to government officials—all with a possibly legitimate claim to intellectual authority. The Gramscian thrust of Said’s conception of intellectuals is most evident in his interest in “organic intellectuals . . . who are actively engaged in society, that is, they constantly struggle to change minds and expand markets.”20

The imperative of speaking from the margins and facing institutional powers at any risk is a well-established idea in the sociology of intellectuals. Yet for Said the mission of “speaking truth to power” aligns with a position of double eccentricity, different from a bohemian marginality and significantly more challenging. His message also focused on events and peoples outside of the United States—the Palestinians and the Israelis. Insofar as the meaning of these events and the actions of those involved in them could be familiar or even accessible to an American audience, it would likely be so in a Zionist perspective. Said’s situational constraints were, as he himself described them, embedded in the Cold War and later its aftermath—a context equally shaped by “the United States’ domination of the Western alliance, in which a consensus has emerged about resurgent or fundamentalist Islam being the new threat that has replaced Communism.”²¹ The Palestinian-born intellectual was speaking of the plight of millions of Palestinians to an audience whose country had played a key role in establishing Israel as the state that was now their main enemy. Second, but more important, Said’s eccentricity is that of a critic who addressed a national polity within which his own status was ambiguous: a resident but not a native; a legal citizen but not a naturalized one who had desired himself, or asked to, acquire citizenship. This ambiguity led some critics to suggest that Said took advantage of his semi-outsider status to tackle the challenges of an intellectual climate ruled by an epistemic skepticism that could result in political sterility. By some accounts, “Said grafted Gramsci’s organic intellectual with the modernist cosmopolitan in an effort to salvage an independent, often elite, metropolitan ‘critical consciousness.’”²² Yet Said was also the epitome of Simmel’s cosmopolitan stranger, both detached from the American society he observes and immersed in it. He resembles the Arendtian pariah insofar as he could never, by his own admission, “understand what it means to love a country” just as she could never love a people.²³ Yet perhaps one reason Said could not love a country was precisely the political inexistence of the country he could have called his: Palestine. While Arendt and Marcuse’s Germany and Solzhenitsyn’s Russia were inhospitable to their own citizens, these countries never lost their status as nation-states. Germany became again a democratic culture in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. Said’s Palestine never gained a political existence during his lifetime. His pariah stranger persona, then, was a product of contingency as well as a credo.

That does not mean that Said simply accepted his status as an exile as the basis for his intellectual cosmopolitanism. At times he claimed his cosmopolitanism emphatically, critiquing the very idea of national ties and exhorting post-nationalism and exile as superior political attitudes conducive to peace and universal respect for others. American intellectuals liked him as a cosmopolitan rather than as a Palestinian. Fellow New York “exile” Tony Judt speaks for sympathetic readers of Said’s work in insisting that “despite his identification with the Palestinian cause and his inexhaustible efforts to promote and explain it, Said quite lacked the sort of uninterrogated affiliation to a country or an idea that allows the activist or the ideologue to subsume any means to a single end.”24 Indeed, Said was often critical of Palestinian political leaders and was especially put off by their recourse to violence so much abhorred by most Westerners. Said condemned not only the violent acts but also what he called the “worship of fetishized military postures, guns, and slogans borrowed from theories of the people’s war in Algeria and Vietnam.”²⁵

In his late political work, Said’s “rootless cosmopolitanism” appears to be replaced by a concern with his origins, which become a major trope in his comments on Palestinian identity in After the Last Sky and even more so in his memoir. Said identified as an “exile” in part because exile corresponds, in ontological fashion, to a type of existence he cultivated, that of the intellectual who always situates himself outside and in opposition to the state. His ideal exile was Theodor W. Adorno. The two men had a lot in common: both were sons of wealthy parents, highly educated, artistic, passionately committed to high culture yet also discontent with the political status quo and committed to an intellectual reflection that could establish the grounds for political transformation. In Adorno, Said saw the “quintessential intellectual, hating all systems, whether on our side or theirs, with equal distaste.” He shared Adorno’s musical aesthetic with its emphasis on the discontinuous and the fragmentary as well as the deriving negative dialectics it inspired in Adorno’s philosophy. Said embraced Adorno’s exilic belief that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”26 And he was probably assured by Adorno’s trajectory, from philosophical speculation to political reflection, all along taking delight in music while remaining focused on philosophy with all the earnestness of the expert. In Adorno, Said found the courage to be inopportune, both by living out of synch with one’s own time, and in a political sense, by forcing contemporaries to face unpleasant realities.

In an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Said famously declared himself to be not only the sole surviving heir to Adorno but also “the last Jewish intellectual.”²⁷ Besides the poignancy of this formulation coming from a Palestinian, the phrase is remarkable insofar as it reveals the main premise of Said’s political ontology: once the historic condition of the Jewish people, exile is a privileged standpoint from which the intellectual can engage the nation-state. Said embraced an idyllic vision of exile, which transformed the political and existential crises facing exiles into a moral and epistemic superiority. The painful aspects of Schutz’s stranger are missing from Said’s early reflections on the intellectual as exile, always depicted as someone in a privileged position, doubly estranged and equally objective in relation to the homeland and to the adoptive country. This displacement—a topos to which Said devoted more attention in his memoir—becomes an observation stand from which the exile has a bird’s-eye view on realities otherwise difficult to discern or to understand.

The Saidian exile is also different from Simmel’s wandering stranger, who moves from one world to another. This distinction can be traced to Said’s hesitation between Adorno and another model, Jean Genet, the French experimental writer who joined different national groups in search of a perpetual revolutionary mode, from the Algerian fighting for independence in his own country, France, to the Black Panthers in the United States, and finally to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Said admired Genet’s addiction to radical politics, reading it as the expression of the extraordinary freedom of “the outcast unconfined by ordinary social formality or ‘human’ norms.” The victim of abuse as a young man, Genet sought out other kinds of victims, and his solidarity with the oppressed deliberately transcended cultural, national, and civilizational boundaries. Genet joined the Black Panthers at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States and the Palestinian Liberation Organization when each started organizing as a potentially revolutionary organization. It was precisely because he did not affiliate with a nation (not even his native France) that Genet was willing to join movements from North Africa to the United States and then the Middle East. Genet was, as Said aptly put it, “the other great modern dissolver of identity” after Adorno. Both rejected identity because they saw it as something thrown on an individual by someone more powerful. “Here is a man in love with ‘the other,’” writes Said, “an outcast and a stranger himself, feeling the deepest sympathy for the Palestinian revolution as the ‘metaphysical’ uprising of outcasts and strangers . . . yet neither his ‘total belief’ nor ‘the whole of myself’ could be in it.”28 Said found Genet’s attachment to Palestine to be more aesthetic than political, even to the detriment of the political. Much as he admired this French writer, the Palestinian-born Said wondered if Genet was not ultimately using other people’s historic plight merely to stimulate his literary imagination.

Even though raised merely as an unlikely hypothetical, this question reveals Said’s concern with the authenticity of political engagement, an authenticity he seemed to judge in connection to owning up to a particular national identity. In contrast to Genet, he presented his political engagement in the Palestinian cause as a consequence, even requirement, dictated by his Palestinian identity. His unfailing commitment to the Palestinian cause, in the context of his comparatively limited interest in other sites of political injustice, suggests that Said was not attracted to a political revolutionarism per se. He was interested, however, in the epistemic and moral foundation of revolutionary patriotism. While Genet’s pursuit of revolutionary movements around the globe and Adorno’s cultivation of the exile condition were both at root metaphysical (neither saw or sought an end to this state), Said’s political commitment was focused on distinct, focused goals: self-determination for the Palestinians and the formation of a binational state in Israel. He was both less high-minded and more practically oriented than his idols to the point where he seemed unmistakably American: “In a sense the real model for Said was not the European theorists of high culture he so admired (whose own politics, especially in cold war afterlife, remained embarrassingly recessive at best) but the homegrown figure of Noam Chomsky.29

Yet Chomsky took a broader critical attitude toward American foreign policy that he deemed imperialist, whether applied in Bosnia or Indochina. Said acknowledged that “Palestinians are not alone . . . in being either misunderstood or ignored by the United States as it attempts to construct a foreign policy in Asia and Africa.”³⁰ Yet he remained singularly concerned with U.S. foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian problem. This exclusive concern with Palestine inflected Said’s stranger persona and required a careful elaboration of his own Palestinian identity. He had to position himself carefully as a Palestinian accusing the Western world, and especially America, for the plight of his people, without seeming like he only cared about the fate of Palestinians and not about the potential destructiveness of the West. This might seem strategic in a callous way, but it was rhetorically needed at a time when Western intellectuals concerned about global affairs might have cared about India or Algeria before they showed any interest in Palestine.

In an article published in his “Diary” column for the London Review of Books, Said recounts the disappointing encounter with several key French intellectuals (including Raymond Aron and Marcel Merleau-Ponty) at a meeting hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre in Michel Foucault’s apartment and dedicated to the Palestinian problem. The actual occasion was a seminar on the Middle East organized by Temps Modernes, a liberal journal which played a major role in intellectual and political life in France and Europe and which had published articles on the Middle East, including the 1967 Israel-Egypt war. Recounting the trip, Said opened with a hyperbolical description of his surprise upon receiving the invitation from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir themselves. The hyperbole he used was not merely tongue-in-cheek but also designed to give readers a measure of his original hope and the contrast with his later disillusionment:

At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that to dispatch my unconditional acceptance.31

The luminaries Said joined in the discussion turned out to be primarily supporters of Israel, including Sartre himself. Said described the discussion as superficial, dominated either by a rehashing of well-known ideas and arguments or by extended socializing over long lunches. The contrast between the intellectual reputation of those present and the mediocrity or bias of their reflections on a thorny and urgent political problem is presented by Said with undisguised bitterness. Sartre’s unflinching support for Algerian independence had inspired a veritable paean in Said’s Representations of the Intellectual. The Sartre that Said met in Paris was old and frail, his only intervention a series of “the most banal platitudes imaginable.”³² Only a few days later, Sartre’s pro-Israeli stance would garner praise from Bernard-Henri Lévy, the staunch conservative who had praised Solzhenitsyn and would have had every ideological reason to resent the once notoriously communist Sartre. The French Left and Right thus came together in their common support for Israel, confirming Said’s worst fear: that the Palestinian cause is lost on Western intellectuals regardless of their ideological beliefs.

The indifference or downright hostility of liberal intellectuals regarding the Palestinian problem is a function of the “crisis of representation” in which it is mired. Not only does each side claim to be the other’s victim, but the Israeli side fits no existent category of an oppressive power. On the contrary, Jews represent the iconic victim. To take this historic status into account, Said coined the phrase “victims of victims” to depict Palestinians. A state for the Jewish people was created in order to put an end to centuries of discrimination against the Jews by giving them an exit strategy from their oppressors and a safe political space. The legacy of the Holocaust was a morally unshakeable foundation for a bold political experiment: creating a state that would offer no political recognition to the population inhabiting its territory at the time of the founding. “It was the horrors of the Second World War that gave the Jewish people an unanswerable case,” points out Jacqueline Rosen, adding: “the UN commissioners of 1947 who recommended partition of Palestine did so after visiting the displaced persons camps of Europe.”33

The moral legacy of the Holocaust, a significant support for the Israeli state among Western liberal intellectuals who had previously shown support for colonized people around the world, and the special nature of the power dynamic in the Palestinian region—these were daunting constraints that defined Said’s challenge as a political commentator. It took more than sheer relentlessness—a systematic and renewed effort at defending the Palestinian cause to Western audiences more likely to understand the Israeli position. Said was able to address these constraints by targeting the very “crisis of representation” that made denunciation such a difficult rhetorical task. He designed a theory of representation focused on exposing hidden oppression and unmasking the effects of power on the construction of identity. This theory, first laid out in Orientalism, had an explicit emancipatory mission, as its purpose was to provide a method for rethinking purposeful misrepresentations. The purpose of his approach was to articulate an epistemic indictment that could identify the sources of misrepresentation (authors, texts, and practices) as well as the techniques they had used. While the accusation targeted a broadly defined Western tradition of thought and pleaded for a rehabilitation of its victims, the accuser was not only Said the intellectual, but rather Said the stranger, the Palestinian speaking on behalf of a misrepresented culture.

DENUNCIATION AS INVESTIGATION

Despite his broad political notoriety as a supporter of Palestinian self-determination, Said’s authority, as Timothy Brennan points out, “was always ultimately literary.” At the same time, however, this literary authority shaped Said’s political views by equipping him with a politically salient epistemology. As a theorist of representation, Said was concerned with the ways in which discourse depicts particular realities and thus makes them likely to withstand certain kinds of political, as well as moral, evaluations. Said’s understanding of literary representation had inconsistencies (as I show below) that carried over into his political representation of the Palestinian cause. At the same time, his recourse to “the tropes of literary criticism to express his political and social imagination” was more than a habit of mind.34 It allowed him to wrestle with the complicated hermeneutics of political conflict between competing interpretations of the same historical events and circumstances. The shift from the relativist epistemology fashionable in literary theory to a rather foundationalist political epistemology focused on “speaking truth to power”—and inevitably assuming that there is such a thing as truth—was not easy.

That Said made this shift is a consequence of his own apprenticeship in a literary climate keener on dividing literature and politics rather than on blending them. His graduate education was less the product of, and more a reaction against, its academic environment at Harvard University. By his own account, he was dissatisfied from the beginning with the approach in vogue in literary studies at that time, which was rooted in the American New Criticism and demanded an exclusive focus on the text rather than on the authors or historical settings. Harvard shaped his intellectual sensibility in ways he was not always happy to acknowledge because it pinned him against his own political beliefs. Said described the humanistic education that emerged in the United States during the Cold War (which was partly what he learned at Harvard and a version of which he would later teach himself at Columbia) as centered on “the notion of nonpolitical analysis . . . meant as a barrier against the overt politicization of art that was said to be conspicuous of socialist realism.”³⁵

The ideal of the “disengaged humanist” had an even longer American genealogy, going back to the nineteenth-century New England literati and their preference for reflection over action. Yet by stressing the political origin of the nonpolitical stance he adopted as a student in the humanities in America, Said revealed the paradox on which his stranger persona was founded: attracted to the idea and inherent value of the disengaged humanist invested in high culture until the very end of his life its inherent value yet also repelled by the repressed political consciousness such disengagement involved. Said pondered the problematic consequences of structuralist (and later poststructuralist as well) thought. These schools of thought had left out the “world” of the text, the beliefs and values that had inspired it, and to which the text responded. Pleading for a rejoining of the texte with the hors-texte—the use of French itself a snide comment on the “fashionable nonsense” that had inspired it—Said aimed at a redefinition of the very mission of the literary critic, and by extension, of the intellectual. He opposed the “pernicious analytic of blind demarcation by which, for example, imagination is separated from thought, culture from power, history from form, texts from everything that is hors texte, and so forth.”36

This analytic was the legacy of structuralism, which Said rejected. He recounted his disenchantment with structuralism as a political epiphany of sorts, focused on a concern with the disempowered:

During the 1960s and 1970s the advent of French theory in the humanistic departments of American and English universities had brought about a severe if not crippling defeat of what was considered traditional humanism by the forces of structuralism and post-structuralism, both of which professed the death of man-the-author and asserted the preeminence of antihumanist systems such as those found in the work of Lévi-Strauss, Foucault himself, and Roland Barthes. . . . This group of pioneers showed, in effect, that the existence of systems of thinking and perceiving transcended the powers of individual subjects, individual humans who were inside those systems . . . and therefore had no power over them, only the choice to either use or be used by them.³⁷

Yet in spite of his skepticism toward theory—especially in its French version—Said owed the conceptual inspiration for his most important work, Orientalism, to a key poststructuralist idea he had learned from Michel Foucault: that of epistemic power. As a study of representations of the Orient in the Western tradition, Orientalism bore the mark of Foucault’s understanding of power as a discursive effect rather than a form of control exercised, often through explicit violence, by a state, nation, or individual over others. Said defined Orientalism as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.”38 The book revealed the host of negative representations of the Orient produced, maintained, and disseminated over the centuries in Western discourse, and it argued that these representations reflected a colonialist gaze more powerful and oppressive than the imperial armies that had been the agents of colonization on the ground. The epistemic power of Western discourse about the Orient resided in its ability to encapsulate an entire civilization and its people into a series of negative statements—about the slow, lazy, untrustworthy, lascivious, and cunning Arab—that would degrade Arab civilization to the status of the dark, uncivilized underworld.

Orientalism offered an indirect theory of representation by denouncing strategies of misrepresentation. Theoretically, the book kept notions like accuracy and validity at arm’s length without fully discarding them. In Foucauldian terms, Orientalism acts as a gaze that seeks to capture disparate phenomena by imposing a fictive totality on them. The gaze is a form of epistemic capturing, as well as a violent act inasmuch as it erases or deceives in order to promote a particular representation at the expense of a competing one. Rather than examining the grounds on which the repressed representation can be deemed the correct one—which would have required answering how and who can establish its accuracy—Said was more concerned with how and who authorizes the misrepresentation. His depiction of the repressive (mis)representational act does not use the typical Foucauldian vocabulary but was still steeped in the rhetoric of surveillance:

The Orientalist surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him—culture, religion, mind, history, society. To do this he must see every detail through the device of a set of reductive categories (the Semite, the Muslim mind, the Orient, and so forth). Since these categories are schematic and efficient ones, and since it is more or less assumed that no Oriental can know himself the way a Orientalist can, any vision of the Orient comes to rely for its coherence and force on the person, institution, or discourse whose property it is.³⁹

The popularity of the book—translated into several languages and reissued in several editions—was in part the result of the fact that the concept of Orientalism invited applications and extensions, along with critiques. Said’s repertoire of Western texts scrutinizing and dehumanizing the Orient, inevitably incomplete, prompted repeated updates: not just the account of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt but also Gerard de Nerval’s travelogue, Renaissance paintings depicting harem scenes, English Victorian novels chronicling the adventures of Bedouins, and even the French realism of an unlikely suspect, realist Gustave Flaubert, not only in his Egypt travelogue but also in the reveries of his famous heroine Emma Bovary. Yet the approach, starting with the geographical grounding of the Orient in the Arab world begged methodological questions: if the Orient was the discursive product of the colonizing Occident encountering its Other, should it not include other regions that suffered this epistemic assault: not just the Middle East but also Africa and Asia, not just the Arabs but also the Africans, the Indians, and the Chinese. Finally, “the kind of totalizing epistemological critique made by Said” raised some conceptual concerns about the author’s assumptions regarding the issue of authenticity.40 If the Orient was what the Occident saw, rather than what it is, how could the Occident ever discover the proper Orient?

Although the question of truth would acquire a special poignancy for Said later on, the book may not have intended to address the distinction between deceptive and accurate representations. Instead, as sympathetic critics have pointed out, Orientalism was primarily “committed to revealing how representational strategies were implicated in figuring colonial otherness, from teasing out the political unconscious of novels to showing the involvement of scholarly research in constructing images of the colonized that would serve the interests of policy and domination.”⁴¹ By other accounts, Orientalism rarely refers to Western knowledge production as ontological, preferring from his subject position to increasingly privilege the rhetoric of cultural and political domination.⁴²

Since the book offered a sweeping indictment of colonialism as a form of intellectual oppression, it could not avoid questions about what the Orient actually was and how it related to the Occident. Orientalism, one critic astutely noticed, “did not arouse hostility only for its method or political critique, but also for the ontological anxiety it induced in Euro-American critics.”⁴³ Said did not try to allay such anxieties and indeed may have preferred to encourage them by way of prompting more and deeper reflection on the realities of the Orient. At the same time, he gave little guidance on how such reflection might unfold. Hence, one of the criticisms against the book is that it “invites oppositional strategies of representation for the brute realities of Oriental life, but seems to ignore the task of finding more adequate ways to give accounts of, and for, the Orient.” If one critiques representation while also admitting that representation can never aspire to the conditions of truth, then, as Nicholas Dirks put it, “why bother?”44

How to engage with the reality of the Orient?—this was a question anthropologists, more than any other professional group, complained that Said had left unanswered.⁴⁵ Geertz dismissed the book as an example of “ideological arguments cast as historiographic arguments.”⁴⁶ The ideological implications of Orientalism were indeed undeniable. The denunciatory subtext of the book prompted methodological objections from those who saw the long-range capabilities of the critique: an attack on the orientalist policy of Israel. Robert Griffin, for instance, professor of English at Tel-Aviv University, accused Said of subscribing “to two conflicting epistemologies, a postmodernist one for his political enemies who are enmeshed in a web of historical determinations, and a classical one for himself, whose perspective is consonant with truth.”⁴⁷ Also unanswered at this point was the question concerning the true value of any representational act. Can the Orient be depicted truthfully by anybody outside it? Can the native’s perspective be accurately presented? Some postcolonial critics have insisted that Said himself vacillated “between the idea that true representation is theoretically possible and the opposite position that all representation is necessarily misrepresentation.”⁴⁸ While primarily literary, such critiques also exposed the political vulnerability of Said’s work, whose main thesis could be read as positing an ontological rift between self and other. Thus framed, the contribution could appear both intellectually banal and politically insolvable, prompting easy dismissal from hostile critics:

Said’s thesis amounts to a truism: that people look at the “other” through their own eyes, and tend to judge alien cultures by their own culture’s standards. A problem? Yes. But Said’s take on it is problematic, too. Almost consistently, he condemns any negative commentary by any Westerner on any aspect of the Orient. Often he seems to imply that the only proper Western posture toward the East is to suspend judgment entirely and bathe everything in sympathy.49

Said parted ways with postcolonial understandings of power that drew heavily on Foucault, emphasizing the discursive production of power—ironically what informed so many of his own analyses in Orientalism—at the expense of more concrete, brutal forms of coercion and the pessimism that makes political transformation seem utopian. If all the domains of knowledge that exist in a particular period enjoin a discursive complicity, forging together a “regime of truth” that makes particular characterizations appear valid no matter how flawed they might be if judged by other epistemic standards, how can statements and representations be challenged, contested, and eventually amended?⁵⁰ Said relied on Foucault’s notion of epistemic power to indict the West on the level of its intellectual traditions rather than political institutions, but ultimately he saw the two, traditions and institutions, connected, just as Solzhenitsyn had attacked humanism for its creation of a legalistic materialist society. Said’s own political stance, as opposed to his literary views, was based more on a traditional conception of power still mainly concerned with governments and policy makers. In Said’s view, if the Occident relied on its scholars to construct a repulsive or terrifying image of the Orient, it was Western governments and politicians enforcing this representation as the basis of foreign policy decisions that had devastating consequences for the Arab world. Said’s response was to denounce those scholars by analyzing their misrepresentations. He acknowledged traditional institutional power. He not only agreed to join the PNC and participate in diplomatic negotiations, but he even attempted to act as advisor to Yasser Arafat. He saw such work as necessary and as comparable to the intellectual’s obligation to analyze and critique ideas.

As Said’s political career took on an unprecedented visibility through televised appearances and participations in high-level negotiations, The New York Review of Books published a devastating critique of Oriental-ism not by a pundit or extreme right radical but by a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University. The critic, Bernard Lewis, was well known for his studies of Islam and modern Turkey. Controversial in his own right, he had served as former Foreign Office officer and leading advisor to the White House on Middle Eastern affairs under the Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. administrations. Lewis accused Said of maliciously politicizing a set of intellectual issues in a domain about which he was largely ignorant. Orientalists are, in Lewis’s presentation, philologists and historians primarily, whose field of study deals with the languages and cultures of the Middle East. Yet once “students of the Orient . . . took to calling themselves philologists, historians, etc. dealing with Oriental topics . . . [they] began to use such terms as Sinologists and Indologists, Iranists and Arabists, to give a closer and more specific definition to the area and topic of their study.” Insisting on the scholarly dimension of Orientalism in contrast to the political one stressed by Said, Lewis defended Orientalists by insisting upon their political disinterestedness. The Orientalists themselves had abandoned the term Orientalism once they realized it was “polluted beyond salvation.” Respectable philologists and historians dedicated to the study of various geographic and cultural areas (including not just the Middle East but also Turkey, parts of Africa, southeast Asia, and Semitic culture) had thrown the term “Orientalism” into “the garbage heap of history.” Unfortunately, Lewis lamented, “garbage heaps are not safe places. The words Orientalist and Orientalism, already discarded by scholars, were retrieved and reconditioned for a different purpose, as terms of polemical abuse.”51

This metaphor of retrieval and recycling creates an image of uncleanliness to dismiss Said’s work as not only politically biased but also repulsive to true scholars. Disturbed by both the content and the style of Said’s book, especially by the language “with sexual overtones,” Lewis took issue with several aspects of the arguments presented by Orientalism, from bibliographical gaps to sheer lack of expertise.⁵² He alleged that Said had misspelled and mistranslated key terms, such as the Islamic term tawhid as “God’s transcendental unity” instead of monotheism.

Lewis’s critique puts into sharp contrast Said’s Foucauldian assumption about knowledge as a form of power (possibly repressive) and the more traditional, Cartesian notion of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge through academic inquiry. To stress what he considered the absurdity of Said’s approach, Lewis invited readers to consider an imaginary scenario featuring classicists instead of Orientalists:

Imagine a situation in which a group of patriots and radicals from Greece decides that the profession of classical studies is insulting to the great heritage of Hellas, and that those engaged in these studies, known as classicists, are the latest manifestation of a deep and evil conspiracy, incubated for centuries, hatched in Europe, fledged in America, the purpose of which is to denigrate the Greek achievement and subjugate the Greek lands and peoples. . . . The poison has spread from Europe to the United States, where the teaching of Greek history, language, and literature in the universities is dominated by the evil race of classicists—men and women who are not of Greek origin, and who have no sympathy for Greek causes, and who, under a false mask of dispassionate scholarship, strive to keep the Greek people in a state of permanent subordination.53

The point of this scenario is to introduce the trope of political innocence, presenting scholarly inquiry as completely divorced from political interests. It could not matter to the current state of Greece, Lewis expects his audience to presume, what a Homer scholar from Princeton writes about the Odyssey. The analogy between classicists and Orientalists capitalizes on the academic specialization of both, waged against political relevance, which is assumed to involve less abstruseness and a focus on the present. For Lewis, scholars keep their eyes on distant lands and eras and that distance removes them from the ills of the present. Those who refuse to withdraw in the reclusiveness of intellectual pursuits are fools and manipulators. Lewis’s sarcasm is a strategy of dismissing Said’s claims without actually engaging with their substance but also a strategy of eliminating Said himself from the world of pure intellectual activity. Ridicule further dismisses Said as a commissar of political correctness who would want us “to save Greece from the classicists and bring the whole pernicious tradition of classical scholarship to an end. . . . [S]teps must be taken to ensure Greek or pro-Greek control of university centers and departments of Greek studies, and thus, by a kind of academic prophylaxis, prevent the emergence of any further classical scholars or scholarship.54 Whether Lewis intended the scenario to be read as a double dismissal, of the native’s perspective and of a particular kind of political correctness, his criticism was an attack on Said as someone who does not belong in the world of ideas.

Yet Orientalism did not argue for the epistemic superiority or credibility of sources from inside the Orient. That Lewis read Said’s critique as a self-promotion reveals his concern with the potential authority of the non-Western voice. A detailed and sophisticated reading of the Western canon, Orientalism, however, is not the work of a non-Western but, on the contrary, of an elite representative and connoisseur of the very tradition under discussion. The conceptual foundation of the book, with its indebtedness to Foucault, is also Western. Significantly, though, Said has often stressed the Arab inspiration of Orientalism. He frequently narrated the intellectual discovery marked by the book as inspired by a request he received from his friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, who invited him to deliver a paper about Western depictions of Arabs to a conference in Beirut.⁵⁵ Furthermore, Said often traced the intellectual gestation of the book directly to the emergence of his political interests in the Middle East. The vector of the influence also pointed the other way: while describing Orientalism as the intellectual response to a distinctly political problem, the writing of this book also marked his political awakening:

I did not become politically engaged until 1967. Before then . . . there was a dissociation between my life in America during a time of extreme political quiescence and in the Middle East where I was aware of, but did not directly participate in, the major trends of the time. . . . [I]t was only with the publication of Orientalism in 1978 that I was forced to face the question . . . about the overlap between scholarship and politics.⁵⁶

It is interesting that Said was not involved in politics at a time when many other Americans were also not very politically active. It was originally a period of postwar reconstruction followed by the early hype of the Cold War. In the years that followed, major military conflicts between Israel and neighboring Arab states took place, and unrest among the Palestinian population increasingly escalated into violent attacks and counterattacks. In the 1980s, the situation worsened markedly with the two Palestinian intifadas and the continuing expansion of Israel into former Palestinian territory. A pro-Israel stance became less tenable even for Jewish Americans, even for the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. How could they continue to support a state that was connected with the continuing violence in the Middle East? By wrestling with this question, Said put in the final elements of his system of accusation, identifying the key political strategy of legitimization used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the discourse of Zionism. The conceptual breakthroughs of Orientalism informed the denunciation of Zionism as a theory of (mis)representation. Those who had criticized Orientalism had already positioned Said as an outsider (to the norms of Western scholarship) and contributed to the making of his stranger persona in its most politicized form.

DENUNCIATION AND ITS MASTER TROPES

In The Question of Palestine, published in 1979, only one year after Orientalism, Said’s conception of representation was, by political necessity, a foundationalist one. Distinguishing sharply between hard facts and their ideologically motivated, distorted representation, the essays included in this book approach the task of denunciation as an epistemic investigation. “We must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism,” he insisted, “as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter.” “What was this presence?”—he further asked. “No matter how backward, uncivilized, and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land.”57 In Said’s view, Zionism was responsible for the erasure of the Palestinian presence. Said’s challenge, as he saw it, was to make “the case for a Palestinian presence in a world that tended to deny it.”⁵⁸ Zionism provided Israel with a powerful mythology that allowed it to advance its territorial claims and unfold its state-building efforts. Palestinians had no comparable ideological advantage and often used the argument of physical presence to demand political rights.

American exceptionalism meant, among so many other things, no history of anti-Semitism in the sense that had stamped indelibly European history. American support for the new state of Israel did not stem from a guilty conscience about its treatment of Jews. From the beginning, the newly formed state of Israel had a tighter connection to the United States than to any other Western state. American Jewish organizations contributed heavily to the formation of the state of Israel through financial support and lobbying. After an initial and brief period of reservations, American high officials endorsed pro-Israeli policies. After the war, the ties of the Israeli state to the Jews living in America were especially important. In 1948, the Zionist Organization of America was “the largest single Zionist organization in the world with 250,000 members.”59 The link between Israel and the United States was not only a matter of political cooperation. Their deepest connection was the symbolic construction of their people as chosen nations. Furthermore, American Jews were able to reconcile their immigrant status with the postwar Zionist objective of ending the Jewish diaspora and bringing all of its children home to Israel. America, however, was itself a Promised Land, “not galut in the European sense [but] the country of economic opportunity and religious freedom.” There was no contradiction between living as a Jew in America and supporting and lobbying for the state of Israel. On the contrary, the two tasks seemed continuous: “American cultural Zionism presented a blueprint for the development of American Jewry in America, parallel to and intimately connected with, the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine, both inspired by the same ideals of Jewish national renaissance.”⁶⁰ The impressive success of Zionism in America led to more than initial support for Israel and continued to play out as lobbying for Israeli political decisions regarding relationships with the Arab countries. In his writings, Said went as far as to condemn American Zionism as the last tolerated form of racism and saw it as the source of anti-Palestinian sentiment in the United States.⁶¹ American Zionism, then, was the focus point in Said’s denunciation.

A Palestinian critiquing Zionism could easily appear biased, which could compromise the investigative purpose of the denunciation. To avoid such a pitfall, Said first framed the investigation as the analysis of a dissident-outsider, without identifying yet as an Arab. In standard Gramscian manner, he presented himself as a detached intellectual who is neither the Orientalist nor the Oriental but rather a mix of both, an Arab with a Western mind. This self-depiction is worth quoting at length:

Most of my education, and certainly all of my basic intellectual formation, are Western; in what I have read, in what I write about, even in what I do politically, I am profoundly influenced by mainstream Western attitudes toward the history of the Jews, anti-Semitism, the destruction of European Jewry. Unlike most other Arab intellectuals, the majority of whom obviously have not had my kind of background, I have been directly exposed to those aspects of Jewish history and experience that have mattered singularly for Jews and for Western non-Jews reading and thinking about Jewish history. I know as well as any educated Western non-Jew can know, what anti-Semitism has meant for the Jews, especially in this century. Consequently I can understand the intertwined terror and exultation out of which Zionism has been nourished, and I think I can at least grasp the meaning of Israel for Jews, and even for the enlightened Western liberal. And yet, because I am an Arab Palestinian, I can also see and feel other things—and it is these things that complicate matters considerably, that cause me also to focus on Zionism’s other aspects. The result it, I think, worth describing, not because what I think is so crucial, but because it is useful to see the same phenomenon in two complementary ways, not normally associated with each other.62

Such cautious self-positioning shows that Said understood the dangers involved in indicting an ideology widely assumed to have contributed in essential ways to ending anti-Semitic violence by giving Jews the safety of a land of their own. His criticism of Israel was often met with charges that he was an anti-Semite. He complained that “the refusal to accept the Zionist argument left anyone in the West with the poorest of alternatives: being simply negative, anti-Semitic, or an apologist for Islam and the Arabs.”63 His challenge was to design a stranger persona that could not be forced in the straightjacket of this dichotomy.

In The Question of Palestine, one of Said’s strategies is to distinguish American Jews from promoters of Zionism—the latter a much broader category that became his target. In the decades after World War II, several prominent American intellectuals had traveled to the Middle East to report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among them Catholic philosopher Ronald Niebuhr, writers Edmund Wilson and Saul Bellow, and others. The first three came under Said’s attack not as American Jews (as indeed not all were) but as epistemic agents who have the ability and authority to shape public perceptions of the Palestinian problem. Said reads the articles published by these intellectuals as distorted Zionist misrepresentations. For example, criticizing Niebuhr’s remarks in support of the partition of Israel in 1947, Said reads a Zionist erasure of the natives in the author’s glossing over of the perspective of the Palestinians who have lost their land, their homes, and their political right to exist. Niebuhr had formulated a series of desiderata for the improvement of the situation in the region, issuing suggestions from a plural first-person perspective “we” in conjunction with verbs indicating a particular preference or desire: “We would like to see,” or “we would want.” The formulation not only strikes Said as condescending but also as based on an internalization of the Zionist perspective. He interprets Niebuhr as suggesting that the Palestinian viewpoint “is of little interest.”⁶⁴

Niebuhr, nonetheless, was making an argument for U.S. foreign policy, not claiming to represent the Palestinian or, for that matter, Israeli view. Granted, he showed no awareness of, or interest in, a Palestinian perspective and how it might be different from the Zionist perspective. Similarly, upon reading Edmund Wilson’s Black, Red, Blond, and Olive, his account of his visit to Israel, Said bemoans the book’s portrayal of the Arab population “as totally disgusting and unattractive.”⁶⁵ Wilson had taken the precaution of stressing that he was conveying the Jewish perspective rather than offering his own: “In a large Arab town like Acre, the squalor of the swarming streets inspires in an Israeli the same distaste that it does in the visiting Westerner. For the Jew, who takes family relations so seriously . . . the spectacle of flocks of urchins, dirty, untaught, diseased, bawling and shrieking and beginning in the narrow and dirty streets, inspires even moral horror.”66

Said saw no difference between the Jewish perspective and Wilson’s own. How could they have been different, given that, as Said lamented, in the region “Israel is the norm, Israelis are the presence, their ideas and institutions the authentically native ones; Arabs are a nuisance, Palestinians a quasi-mythical reality?”⁶⁷

His critiques of Niebuhr and Wilson are two examples of Said’s attempt to identify and take to task the way in which American political discourse was internalizing the Zionist perspective on Israel as its own. While his vast political journalism work tirelessly exposed book after book and author after author, such a piecemeal approach had obvious limitations. Besides making Said look like a watchdog, it was inevitably repetitive, as the exposé often revealed the same mechanism of misrepresentation. Said’s political criticism was more effective and more consistent with his overall epistemological approach when he used techniques of estrangement to investigate the rhetorical mechanisms of Zionism, rather than just exposing it. He defined Zionism as “an avant-garde, redemptive Occidental movement” but hyperbolically emphasized its Western make-up by insisting that it “literally took over the typology employed by European culture.” By insisting on the Western nature of Zionism, Said laid the foundation for advancing an analogy between Zionism and imperialism: in its impact on Palestinians, Zionism amounted to a “process of dispossession, displacement, and colonial de facto apartheid.” Replete with the terms he had used to describe the mechanisms of Orientalism, his analysis depicted Israeli policies as imperialism writ large, as memorable phrases like “the Zionist colonial apparatus” suggest.⁶⁸ By reading Zionism in conjunction with an ideology he had already criticized in Orientalism, Said sought not just to track the source of the misrepresentation of Palestinians but also to explain its effectiveness.

The appropriateness of the analogy between Zionism and imperialism is subject to debate, and Said can be said to have privileged “the European, particularly British, imperial model.”⁶⁹ Yet he drew even more on the analogy between Zionism and American liberalism, through a common trait: the “‘pioneering’ spirit, which Americans in particular have found it very easy to identify with.” The analogy between Zionism and the American pioneering ethos is then turned on its head as Said points to the negative aspects of this ethos when used as justification for the destruction of natives and the claiming of a land already inhabited and owned. Zionism “occupied a place that made it possible to interpret Palestine and its realities to the West in terms that the West could understand and easily accept, specifically and generally.”70 The next step in the critique was to question Zionism as a story of national emancipation—the political making of the Jewish people.

As even his harshest critics admitted, Said tried to sympathize with the Jews’ desire to find a land for their nation.⁷¹ “In Jewish hearts,” he conceded, “Israel had always been there, an actuality difficult for the natives to perceive. Zionism therefore reclaimed, redeemed, repeated, replanted, realized Palestine, and Jewish hegemony over it.” Only an uninhabited territory can be a terra nova awaiting its pioneers. Palestinians had to be chased out to create “a place to be possessed anew and reconstructed.” Said admitted that Jews saw Israel as a place they owned because they believed they had been the original inhabitants. For the Jews, “Israel was a return to a previous state of affairs.” But such a view bore “a far greater resemblance to the methods and successes of nineteenth-century European colonialism than to some mysterious first-century forebears.”⁷²

That the pioneering enthusiasm promoted by Zionism resembles the pilgrim ethos at the center of American identity could explain the popularity of Zionism in the United States yet not necessarily (or precisely for this reason) justify its indictment. For this purpose, Said traced the pioneering ethos again back to European colonialism:

It is clear from Herzl’s thinking that [the international legitimization of Zionism] could not have been done unless there was a prior European inclination to view the natives as irrelevant to begin with. That is, those natives already fit a more or less acceptable classificatory grid, which made them sui generis inferior to Western or white men—and it is this grid that Zionists like Herzl appropriated, domesticating it from the general culture of their time to the unique needs of a developing Jewish nationalism.⁷³

The reference to Theodor Herzl is important because his work was the foundational text of Zionism. But Said’s reading of Herzl was challenged by Jewish scholars. It was indeed a simplified reading that left out complicated hermeneutical nuances to make an argument intended for a more general public. Critics dismissed it by claiming that it was grossly inaccurate. Israeli scholar Cameron Brown accused Said of changing Herzl’s original language in order to make it sound more anti-Palestinian that it was. “Mangled quotations,” Brown charged, helped Said depict Zionism as a colonialist ideology. Said’s critique of Zionism was vulnerable to criticism of this sort, but a far bigger challenge was the very status of Zionists as the sons and daughters of the victims of anti-Semitism. Against the symbolic power of the Holocaust in legitimizing the Israeli perspective, Said needed an event of comparable proportions: he described Palestinians as prisoners of “the Arab Gulag Archipelago.”74 When this phrase first appeared in print, the allusion to Solzhenitsyn could probably still resonate with some readers. In subsequent editions, terms like “Gulag” added historical specificity to the depiction of Palestinians as “victims of victims,” rather than victims of a colonial power.

In The Question of Palestine, the process leading to this presumed “complete hegemonic coalescence between the liberal Western view of things and the Zionist-Israeli view” was discussed, rather briefly, with a passing reference to the common capitalist roots of liberalism and Zionism.⁷⁵ Without a careful genealogy that could have an explanatory purpose, attacking Zionism by comparing it to imperialism posed a significant rhetorical risk. To some extent, this risk is inherent in the trope of analogy, which requires, somewhat contradictorily, both sufficient similarity and difference between the terms of the comparison. Too similar, and the analogy becomes banal; too different, and the analogy is far-fetched. Was the analogy between Zionism and European imperialism an allusion to the assimilated Jews—the parvenus, using Arendt’s term, who eagerly took on a European identity? On such a premise, the analogy was not only trite but also cheaply offensive. Or was Said overplaying the European dimension of the Jewish experience by comparing Zionist Jews to European imperial agents? If so, then the analogy was in part far-fetched. As critics complained, to emphasize the alliance between Zionism and the West amounted to an erasure of the non-European aspects of Jewish identity and to a glossing over of the historic significance to the state of Israel of those Jews who had lived in non-Western regions, the Arab Jews.76

Many of those who attacked Said’s analogy between Zionism and imperialism took it too literally and missed its symbolic function. It was one of Said’s most respectable opponents, philosopher Michael Walzer, who understood this symbolic function. Walzer had resorted to the trope of analogy himself from a radically revalorized perspective.⁷⁷ He proposed a rival account of Zionism, which compares it to anti-colonial political movements. In his reading of the Old Testament story of the Jewish exodus, Walzer finds the promise of salvation through national emancipation. His storyline was centered on events that remind the reader of the postcolonial, Third World, emancipatory revolutions: the departure of the Jews from Egypt is a response to political oppression; their exodus is a voyage of trials and tribulations and the arrival in Canaan is the reward for collective effort and commitment. Walzer’s account is studded with trademark terms like “liberatory,” “progressive,” and “emancipatory,” and the narrative he recounts is that of the Jews as similar to, indeed representatives of, oppressive peoples anywhere. Where Said compared Zionism to imperialism, Walzer compared it to national awakenings in the postcolonial world.

Walzer’s analogy between Jewish emancipation and postcolonial liberation exposed the rhetorical flaws of Said’s analogic argumentation but it was flawed itself. In response, Said challenged Walzer’s interpretation of the Exodus story as a liberal progressive narrative that “moves from bondage and oppression in Egypt, through the wanderings in Sinai, to the Promised Land,” featuring Moses as “not an Odysseus who returns home, but a popular leader—albeit an outsider—of a people undergoing both the travails and novel triumphs of national liberation.”⁷⁸ Said argued that the liberal progressive narrative of Zionism as the story of political emancipation (especially powerful in the aftermath of World War II) replaced the actual historic events of violent confrontation, usurpation, and extermination constituting the “return” of the Israelis to the Promised Land. Walzer’s conclusion makes sense only in a story that foregrounds events that depict the Israelis as an oppressed people yet backgrounds or omits contextual information that could place their oppression in a different perspective. For instance, Said reminded readers, once economic hardship hit, the Egyptians resented all foreigners, especially the affluent Jews. Walzer’s strategic choice of events created a narrative in which religious and racial oppression obscured class and economic privilege making Zionism into a metaphor of liberation that could be applicable to any disenfranchised group.

Such contest between different kinds of estrangement techniques and the radically opposed political tropes they produced—domination versus emancipation—was difficult to sort out within the crisis of representation produced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jews were both victims of the Holocaust and heavily armed soldiers while Palestinians were refugees as well as suicide bombers. These competing analogies required referential clarification: who are the victims and who the wrongdoers? Said addressed this question through a broader critique of the representation of Israel as the final destination on a nation’s road to salvation. Said understood Moses as Sigmund Freud had presented him in Moses and Monotheism, and Said relied on Freud’s conception to challenge the assumption that Jewish identity is based on sameness, whether religious or racial. The recourse to a text by Freud, a Jewish thinker, was itself a technique of estrangement, a strategic choice for pressing the case of a binational Israeli state: if Jewish identity contained “foreign traces” from its very inception, in the very figure of the Egyptian leader, why could a state for the Jews not also recognize the presence of non-Jews in it? The figure of the Egyptian Moses evoked by Freud was not only a non-Jew but also a non-European, and therefore all the more open to an Arab co-nationality:

For Freud, writing and thinking in the mid-1930s, the actuality of the non-European was its constitutive presence as a sort of fissure in the figure of Moses—founder of Judaism but an unreconstructed non-Jewish Egyptian none the less. . . . [O]ut of the travails of specifically European anti-Semitism, the establishment of Jewish identity politically in a state that took very specific legal and political positions effectively to seal off that identity from anything that was non-Jewish.79

Said presented his reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism in 2001 in a BBC lecture that had originally been scheduled as a talk to be delivered in Vienna during the 1999 centennial anniversary of Freud’s birth. Yet because of a highly controversial photograph that had just been published, which showed Said throwing a rock at an Israeli compound, the Freud Institute in Vienna withdrew the invitation. Some commentators have explained the decision as an attempt to avoid the complications that could have arisen in the midst of anti-Semitism charges leveled against Said in a Vienna dealing with its own scandals triggered by extreme right political candidate Peter Haider.80 Said delivered the lecture later in London where Freud had spent his own exile. The controversy turned out to be rhetorically fortunate because it allowed Said to draw attention to his own status as an exile. Boldly comparing himself to Freud, as both had been forced into exile by racism and political discrimination, Said staged his reflections as a dialogue with Freud, the Jew, addressing him as an alter ego. Both Said and Freud were exiles: one had been exiled from Jerusalem by the Israelis, and the other, from a European land by Nazis—their common fate forging a symbolic brotherhood.

The Egyptian figure of Moses was politically rich for the argument for a binational Israel, and Said drew on it emphatically. Some responses to the lecture challenged the politicization of Freud’s arguments and ignored the overdrawn comparison between Said and Freud. Those who openly supported Israel were not concerned about hermeneutic details, such as the accuracy or appropriateness of the analogy between the two authors. Instead, they challenged Said’s exile persona. In the New Republic, editor Leon Wieseltier began his refutation by accusing Said of denying Jews the right to have a distinctly Jewish identity.⁸¹ A New York Jew deeply committed to Judaism, Wieseltier charged that Said’s claims regarding the central role of the non-Jewish element in Jewish history were both misconceived and offensive. Such a reading of Freud amounted, in Wieseltier’s view, to nothing but “intellectual violence.” Wieseltier argued that Jewishness is a distinct identity, “neither European, nor non-European.” What seemed to incriminate Said in Wieseltier’s eyes included seemingly minor details, such as the misspelling of the first name of a Jewish historian as Josef (Yerushalmi) instead of Yosef. “‘Josef’ has a fine exilic ring, whereas ‘Yosef’ is so Hebrew, so housed.” Yet Wieseltier’s insistence on such detail, especially as steeped in sarcasm as it was, points to a deeper political subtext focused squarely on the national bounds of identity. In his view, the hybridity of Jewish identity does not mean that a Jewish state should allow other nationals in it (in other words, it does not constitute an argument for a binational state that would grant Palestinians political rights). “What matters, after all, is what a culture does with its heterogeneous material,” which to Wieseltier meant containing it within the bounds of a distinct identity. For Wieseltier, to be exiled is to abandon your identity. The sarcastic tone accompanying references to Saidian trademark expressions like “exilic” and “cosmopolitan” marks the dismissal of Said’s key point: the dissociation of the nation from the state. Yet the sarcasm is not merely a strategy of dismissing Said’s arguments—as in Lewis’s case—but also a dismissal of the authenticity of Said’s status as an exile:

And if the non-Jewish Jew, then why not the non-Palestinian Palestinian? Surely the blessing of cosmopolitanism, of all blessings, must be a universal one. If the Jews have been raised up by the spiritual blandishments of statelessness, then the Palestinians, too, should aspire to them. But Said likes it both ways. He enjoys the glamour of diasporism and the rectitude of nationalism.82

The absurd categories of the “non-Jewish Jew” and the “non-Palestinian Palestinian” are Wieseltier’s way of deriding the territorial claims of Palestinians, as well as an implied affirmation of the one-nation state, as opposed to a binational state. It is also significant that Wieseltier did not acknowledge Said as a Palestinian but only as a promoter of Palestinian interests. For Wieseltier, Said was the stranger lurking on the margins of the nation, just as Brecht had once been in his FBI file.⁸³ For Wieseltier, Said was too much of a cosmopolitan to belong to a nation but too politically involved in Palestinian nationalist politics to be an authentic cosmopolitan. Forcing the paradox becomes a form of double negation and thus a way of dismissing not simply a particular author, Edward Said, but also the exile persona he had used and the political claims this persona implicitly supported.

The critique echoes an earlier attack published by the journal Commentary. Describing Said’s prose as the “verbal equivalent of the weapons wielded by his colleagues on the Palestinian National Council” and his writing as “spill[ing] ink to justify their spilling of blood,” Eugene Alexander had drawn the image of an Arab Said as violent, uncivilized, and incapable of engaging in intellectual argument.84 Between this rendition of Said’s Arab origin as an inferior status and its contestation as being merely political pretense, Said is depicted in these criticisms according to the same logic he had analyzed in the Zionist account of the Palestinian: first “an inconsequential native; then . . . an absent one; then . . . a less real person than any individual person belonging to the ‘Jewish people,’ whether that person was present in Israel or not.”⁸⁵

ESTRANGEMENT AND EMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT: BEING PALESTINIAN

In The Question of Palestine, Said’s strategy for creating presence for the Palestinian had sometimes proceeded as a rather desperate litany of assertions:

There is a Palestinian people, there is an Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, there are Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, there are Palestinians—650,000 of them—who are Israeli citizens and who constitute 15 percent of the population of Israel, there is a large Palestinian population in exile: these are actualities which the United States and most of the world have directly or indirectly acknowledged, which Israel too has acknowledged, if only in the forms of denial, rejection, threats of war, and punishment.⁸⁶

These statements, however, did more than just repeat the same idea—the existence of Palestinians as an autonomous people. Repetition creates presence because with each statement the reality invoked gains more weight, more concreteness, and more detail.87 The most concrete form of presence for Palestinians comes in After the Last Sky, the volume coauthored by Said and photographer Jean Mohr. Here, the reader can see the faces of Palestinians, the landscapes of their land, and the houses in which they live. Such direct presentation taps into the commonplace assumption that what we see in a photograph must exist. Even then, however, Said confronts the ambiguity of presentation as inevitably a representation. One of the most moving photos in the book (Said’s own favorite) features a couple and a child in a terraced landscape with dense bushes and trees against the contours of houses and buildings in the foreground. The image is very hard to read: is it a family? Are they happy or sad? The multilayered structure of the setting suggests the multiplicity of meanings and the difficulty to arrange them in a coherent account. The image ends up confusing (to provoke and inspire) rather than merely describing.

To be politically effective, presence is not only what we can see but also what we understand, and an epistemic and moral, not just visual, display. In Said’s memoir, Out of Place, on display is the author himself, as his own life’s story is offered to readers as an analogic representation of Palestinian identity. Yet the memoir, too, treaded a difficult rhetorical ground. By the time it was published, Said was completely committed to politics and had become impatient with philosophical accounts that pontificated on political matters without showing a real solution and with philosophers who cared too much about their own welfare to be concerned about others. Said disliked what he deemed Foucault’s “shift from the political to the personal [which] was, among other things, the effect of some disenchantment with the public sphere, more particularly perhaps because he [Foucault] felt that there was little he could do to affect it.”⁸⁸ Yet such an inward turn echoes uncannily Said’s own trajectory, revealing at the same time all its deep political significance.

Said had already experienced great disappointment in his official political activity. In 1982, he participated in the United Nations convention on the question of Palestine and was commissioned to produce a “Profile of the Palestinian People.” The document, which outlined the history and identity of Palestinians, was eventually rejected by the UN. “Palestine yes, Palestinians no”—was Said’s bitter reflection on what he deemed a silencing of the Palestinian narrative.89 In After the Last Sky, he had complained that “the Palestinian story cannot be told smoothly” because it is too intertwined with discourses that negate the very existence of Palestinians and rendered them discontinuous by the experience of dislocation and dispossession.⁹⁰ What Mohr’s moving photographs and Said’s lyrical commentary tried to do in After the Last Sky, the memoir attempts in a more literary tradition and thus potentially more effective way: to tell the story of a Palestinian. Out of Place asserted the Palestinians’ “permission to narrate” as a strategy for bringing into public discourse the Palestinian perspective, confiscated by Zionist ideology and its supporters in the West.⁹¹ Retracing origins becomes Said’s strategy of representing the Palestinians in a way that connects this people now scattered across several Arab countries back to the land of Palestine. The recovery of origins is an act of symbolic grounding with political relevance. The trope of origins frames the narrative vignettes accompanying Mohr’s photographs, and Said insists on finding origins even when they are hard to uncover. In After the Last Sky, Said recounts his experience on a trip to Amman, Jordan—a key destination for Palestinian refugees—with his then thirteen-year-old son, Wadie, who made it a point of asking everyone they met whether they were Jordanian or Palestinian. When “one bearded taxi driver” answered that he was Jordanian, the boy pressed for the exact place of origin: where in Jordan, exactly? The father recounts what came next:

Predictably the answer was Tul-Karm—a West Bank town—followed by a verbose disquisition on how “today” . . . there was no difference between Jordanians and Palestinians. Wadie, perhaps sensing my sullen disapproval of the driver’s waffling and reacting to my unusual reluctance to press the point, insisted otherwise. ‘There is a difference,’ he said, only at his age he couldn’t quite articulate it. For our pains the man drove us at least five miles out of our way, and then dumped us at the edge of the city.⁹²

The difference between Palestinians and any other Arab nation has political consequences for the Palestinian claim to self-determination. This is why Said’s memoir, which is largely a story about national awareness, centers on difference in the most personal, and possibly most politically effective, terms possible. It is the story of a Palestinian—Said himself—who was forced to leave his birthplace, to endure humiliation and rejection in his encounters with the colonizers (be they teachers or Israeli police officers), and who overcame these challenges. Said does not lecture the reader on Palestinian-Israeli politics but focuses instead mainly on his own childhood and youth, ending with the death of his parents and the protagonist’s graduation from Harvard. Yet the political message is clearly conveyed through a careful juxtaposition of the child’s innocence and his gradual discovery of the injustices and oppression afflicting the Palestinian people. The story of an unhappy childhood marked by encounters with cruel teachers, mean schoolmates, and strict cold parents, Out of Place reads like a novel by Charles Dickens. It is first and foremost a story of victimization, all the more moving as the victim is a child and the aggressors are all adults. Said’s strategy of defamiliarization in the memoir is the Victorian trope of the “critical child,” whose pure and thus accurate perception of the world demystifies and reveals a hidden political reality: the repression of Palestinians.93

As he recounts in this memoir, Said discovered he was an Arab much in the same way Arendt once discovered she was a Jew: at school, from other children, or from the English or American adults or children who rejected him. Yet the Said family was made of prosperous business owners who could afford servants and were able to finance their son’s education at elite schools all the way into graduate studies. How could he recount his childhood as the story of a victim in the face of such obvious privilege? Said’s strategy was to emphasize psychological victimhood. He also made some (rather unconvincing) attempts at invoking concrete material suffering and dispossession, such as the loss of the family home in Talbyia, the West Jerusalem neighborhood where Said was born. This particular narrative detail, which he had mentioned in interviews as well, created a stir in the media.

In 2000, Commentary featured an article by Justus Weiner, a Jewish American lawyer and researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who charged that Said had fabricated his Palestinian past by lying about the years spent in West Jerusalem.⁹⁴ Weiner had spent a considerable amount of time and effort tracing down possible neighbors and schoolmates who could have confirmed Said’s presence in Talbyia. His research indicated, he claimed, that nobody in that neighborhood had ever known Edward Said or a member of his family and that they could not have resided there but had lived in Egypt all along. Contesting the veracity of Said’s autobiographical claims, Weiner explicitly aimed at more than discrediting him, or disputing the authenticity of this particular individual’s claims. The overarching argument of Weiner’s article is that Palestinian claims to a territory that belongs officially to Israel are spurious. The article outraged some of Said’s longtime allies, such as Alexander Cockburn, who defended Said publicly.95 Said himself offered biographical clarification, all the more needed as the attack was not merely personal. At the same time, precisely because the issue at stake was not merely factual but symbolic, an effective response required more than a denial of charges. The memoir legitimized Said’s claims of being a dispossessed Palestinian. In this regard, the book offered, more than a personal story, the political tale of Palestinians. It is a story of origin conceived both spatially and temporally. By identifying Jerusalem as his place of birth, Said is anchoring his life story, and by extension that of other Palestinian refugees, to the territory from which their presence had been erased by Zionism. By making this place a point of origin in the sense of what Hannah Arendt called natality—the beginning of life as a fundamental beginning—Said was claiming historical and not just physical presence.⁹⁶

Our family home was in Talbiyah, a part of West Jerusalem that was sparsely inhabited but had been built and lived in exclusively by Palestinian Christians like us: the house was an imposing two-story stone villa with lots of rooms and a handsome garden in which my two youngest cousins, my sisters, and I would play. There was no neighborhood to speak of, although we knew everyone else in the as yet not clearly defined district. There were no immediate neighbors, although about five hundred yards away sat a row of similar villas where my cousins’ friends lived. Today, the empty space has become a park, and the area around the house a lush, densely inhabited upper-class Jewish neighborhood.⁹⁷

This description contrasts starkly with Wilson’s report of dirty refugee camps crawling with filthy children. The house is a symbolic configuration designed to suggest, through its sheer size, social respectability and prosperity. The family residence is located in a kind of natural paradise, beyond any borders, outside a political space marked by the bureaucratic practices of a nation-state. The house (and by extension the family inhabiting it) relates to others in the community as neighbors and friends rather than fellow nationals or citizens. Indeed, the memoir emphasizes the different nature of the social life the author and his family lived even in multinational Cairo—a life defined not by bonds of citizenship (as not many of their immediate friends or acquaintances were Palestinian) but by deeper ties formed by a common subjection to colonial domination. Nationality is not assumed, as much as discovered throughout the experiences recounted as the protagonist gradually learns what it means to be an Arab and a Palestinian.

Throughout the book, the story faces the rhetorical difficulty of sustaining the analogy between millions of dispossessed Palestinians and the story of the Said family, seen by some as “an extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical.”98 An effective strategy appears in the opening scene, which centers on the image of the stately family house left behind in a territory forbidden to Palestinians. The house is a symbol of concrete, verifiable, origin against the mythical origin of Zionist Israel. It is all the more a sad irony that the house claimed by the Said family in West Jerusalem was later the residence of Martin Buber, who was not only a Jew arriving in Israel in his flight from Nazism but also an ardent proponent of Zionism as a philosophy of peacefulness and reconciliation and a supporter of Palestinian rights. Insisting upon the falsity of Said’s claims, Weiner presents the Jews, in this case Buber and his family, as the true dispossessed victims of a lawsuit brought against them by the Said family to deprive them of their residence. The reader of the Commentary article is expected to feel outrage not only at the very act of evicting the aging philosopher and his family but also because this old man happened to be the author of Zion, which was first a lecture delivered in 1948 and most likely known to the primarily Jewish audience of the newspaper. In this lecture, Buber described Zionism as a philosophy grounded in the idea of a sacred space to which the Jewish people belong so organically that to live outside it would lead to their spiritual death.⁹⁹ In Buber’s rendition of Zionism, Israel still features as the sacred land; for those Jews who do not inhabit it, life will be unhappy. This equation between living and being happy in the land is exactly how Said depicts his own family life, thus co-opting the Zionist trope of a life fulfilled through its roots and destroyed by uprootedness.

Weiner’s entire investigation into the veracity of Said’s autobiographical claims was staked on property and ownership as the main anchors that can legitimately ground identity. Was the house owned by the Said family or not? Is the land the property of Palestinians or the Israelis? As Amahl Bishara has shown, “The pairing of homeland and homes may seem transparent at first,” because “the house is idealized as stable and unchanging.” However, “domestic presence can exceed [it] in important and underrecognized ways.”100 While Weiner was looking for documents attesting to legal ownership of the house—and ignoring, of course, the dependence of such documents on the legitimacy of the authority that would have issued them—for Said inhabiting is created rhetorically through evocations of domesticity. The memoir did not include photocopies of property certificates, only evocations of everyday life: drinking tea on the balcony, running in the backyard, or a teenager locking himself up in his room to indulge in long periods of undisturbed reading. Said had already used this technique in his BBC documentary In Search of Palestine, which included a home movie of him and his sisters playing outside their Jerusalem family home with piano music in the background. The scene does not constitute hard proof that the family owned the house and the yard in which the children play as what the viewers see is just a home, not property documentation. But we also see the experience of being at home, which is what the Saids and the Palestinians lost. This distinction reveals a fundamental clash between different understandings of what counts as legitimate ownership, a clash that was relevant beyond Said’s experience. One of the letters published in Commentary in response to Weiner’s article echoed this conflict.¹⁰¹ The writer, Robert Werman, recounts his own shock at receiving an unexpected call from an Arab man who claimed to have lived in his house and requested permission to show it to his son and daughter. Werman was shocked because, as he repeatedly insists, his house was in a neighborhood that never had Arab homeowners. Yet the visitor, once allowed inside, was clearly familiar with the house. How could this be?—puzzles Werman, at a loss for how to account for the perfect match between his property purchase document and a stranger’s description of the property.

Stories like this put in stark contrast Said’s representation of the Palestinian at home in his land with the legal category of the citizen authorized by official state documents to issue claims of residence ownership. From the perspective of the citizen, a native like Said and the Arab man who visited Werman have to be illegitimate or mendacious, otherwise they remain a mystery. For Werman, the Arab man’s familiarity with his property is inexplicable because he would not accept the only possible (and rather obvious) explanation: that an Arab might have owned his house before any official documentation could even be available. While the discourse of legality and ownership behind such rejection is the discourse of the State (which issues property documents, street surveys, etc.), it is Zionism that gave it rhetorical power by representing the laws and rules issued by the state of Israel as divinely ordained rather than bureaucratic traces of a political power.

Zionism is centered on the trope of the Promised Land, the foundational myth of a sacred place left behind in a remote past and found again after centuries spent in diaspora. Said counteracted this myth with another foundational narrative: the Palestinians’ fall from their own paradise, symbolized by his own exile from the place of his birth. In his memoir, Palestine is the land of a content and peaceful family life and happy childhood. Said wrote Out of Place after being diagnosed with chronic leukemia. The time of the writing of this book is significant. The heightened awareness of mortality sets a tragic tone to the recollections and infuses the experiences narrated with an emotional significance beyond their concrete content. The dying Said writes as someone who no longer has anything to lose and has thus nothing to hide. After the exile, the family is unhappy: the father has a nervous breakdown, the mother struggles with loneliness and anxiety, and later both parents fight terminal diseases. More important, the child becomes unhappy, losing his innocence, and discovering fear before experiencing his ultimate political awakening.

Most of Said’s memoir presents the experience of colonization as a child’s encounter with hostile British and Americans teachers. The official agents of empire are teachers in the expensive imperial schools attended by young Edward, from the cruel Mr. Bullen at the Gezira Preparatory School, who beats him for an infringement so insignificant that the narrator Said cannot even remember to Miss Clark at Victoria College, who singles him out in veritable “ontological condemnation.” Said depicts his experience in an expensive exclusive school in a Dickensian manner, directing the reader’s attention to the school as the cold repressive environment. Yet despite a strong emphasis on registering painful experiences he had in school, it is at home, and in relation to his own parents, that the protagonist develops the identity of a victim: in his father’s constantly disappointed eyes, in the confusion created by his mother’s alternate outbursts of love and anger, and in both parents’ harsh rebukes for his minor “delinquencies” as well as for how he looks or speaks. It is the Westernized parents’ gaze that sees in the handsome man readers know from photographs the very opposite of someone presentable (or indeed even acceptable). Young Said’s body is judged by his parents as not just “imperfect” but also “morally flawed”—his face, too “weak,” especially the mouth; his tongue, “aggressive, unpleasant, uncontrolled”; his hands compared to “hammers, pliers, clubs, steel wires”; and his posture deemed so poor that it had to be corrected by “metal chest expanders” that his father forced him to wear well into Edward’s college years.102

The depiction of the pain inflicted by his parents on him psychologically and physically is far more moving than the narration of a scene in which a stiff, typically Victorian spinster teacher berates Said for being unruly during a school trip. Between the more conventional trope of the schoolteachers’ cruelty and that of his father (the memoir reports several beatings administered by a strong man who could inflict serious pain as well as systematic moral disapproval) the contrast heavily indicts Said’s own family over the English or American teachers. The teachers are placed in explicitly “colonialist” positions, which are fundamentally normative—judging the young Said and determining his “worth” as a student. Yet the parents’ confirmation of the judgment is what ultimately seals the “ontological condemnation” and creates the colonized victim. Edward’s mother, for instance, not only agrees with Miss Clark’s rebuke but continues to agree with it by repeatedly referencing it to express discontent with her son’s behavior.

In After the Last Sky, Said depicted the Palestinian family as united in grief for their stolen nation-land. He tried to address the contradiction created by depictions of his own family by insisting that, no matter what his parents said or did to him, he felt nothing but love for them. While such a statement can seem disingenuous, it need not have been so. Wadie Said, the father, embodied the paradox of the victim of colonization: he had accepted the demands of the imperial West to the point where he imposed them more strictly and more violently than Westerners themselves. The ideal posture he seeks to force on his son is, significantly, the posture of an idealized American body he had studied in a magazine. The cruel father is the colonized who, by being deprived of the life he could have had inside his nation, loses his very humanity and not just a nationality. He offers his son a life of economic comfort, financing his studies, paying for expensive trips to Europe but no affection. He supports him financially but not emotionally.

It is not a stretch to see in this representation of Wadie Said a political allegory in which the father stands in for a state that is willing and able to care for certain residents but will constantly look down on them. One of the arguments used by Israel against Palestinian claims to self-determination has positioned the state of Israel as economically more powerful than a Palestinian state could be and thus more capable of supporting Palestinians. The economic argument against the Palestinian presence, thus presented, is that it is not self-sustainable—just as the young Said could not amount to much, in his father’s view, without his constant assessment, condemnation, and forceful correction. Said came to America in 1951 on what he calls his “banishment” to enroll in a college preparatory school after which he would attend Princeton and Harvard. He and his parents made the trip on a luxury ocean liner—hardly the immigrant voyage to Ellis Island. Yet Said succeeds in depicting the arrival as nevertheless a crossing of borders into a new universe. It was a universe he did not find attractive, much like his mother who disliked America and never agreed to live here (only to die in an American hospital). Coming to America was a coming of age: away from his parents, the young Said was free to find himself. Yet he recounts his formative experiences in the United States and the rising of his political consciousness, carefully avoiding the plot of an immigrant story in which America is the final destination on the road to self-discovery. He was already an American citizen. The memoir emphatically presents his alienation from an American identity as a child, from statements of non-belonging among Americans—“it was as an American businessman’s son who hadn’t the slightest feeling of being American I entered the Cairo School for American Children”—to frequent reflections on his unusual name, which not only straddled the Western identity desired by his parents and the Arab genealogy of the family, but also lent itself, phonetically, to adoptions and rejections. Edward could become “Ed” (as it happened in America). Said could be pronounced “Sigheed.” At the same time, however, the amusement park in the vicinity of the school had an airplane ride called “Saida.” For the other children, that name became a way of reminding Edward that he was not really Sigheed, and not really American. Yet he was also discouraged (mostly by his parents) to see himself as an Arab. Said acknowledges candidly throughout the book the difficulty he experienced as a child feeling anywhere like a native, trapped instead in an “impossible subjectivity.”103

Said repeatedly said in interviews that he had written the memoir as a self-exploration, “laying open all the contradictions and irreconcilabilities,” probably not just his own but also those of Palestinians in general.¹⁰⁴ The reception of Out of Place was mixed. While most reviewers acknowledged the powerful personal narrative recounted in the book, several questioned the representativeness of this story for Palestinian identity and dismissed the political relevance of Said’s personal destiny. Some even ridiculed the attempt at finding political meaning in childhood experiences with strict teachers and camp counselors. In the New York Times, Ian Buruma sarcastically dismissed Said’s suffering as equivalent to political oppression. Said’s ill-at-ease with his European surname (which prompts a meditation on the European standard by which the Arab child is measured, mainly to be scolded for failing to meet it) and his disappointments caused by not being valedictorian, a table head, or a floor officer while in boarding school, which Said explains as discrimination against an Arab—such events and their interpretation strike Buruma as “rather grand political parallels and conclusions (drawn) from his personal experience of alienation and loneliness.”¹⁰⁵ Buruma discredits the analogy at the center of the memoir between the “private troubles” of such a socially privileged man and “the troubles of all the dispossessed, and of the dispossessed Palestinians in particular.” Dismissing the memoir as politically unconvincing, Buruma also challenged its literary merit, criticizing “the pompous tone.” He did acknowledge, however, that Said’s was powerful personal story:

The hero emerging from his memoir is not the Palestinian activist so much as the alienated intellectual. The modern image of the heroic intellectual is that of a marginal figure, the deconstructionist of the official “narratives,” the “exile.” One finishes his book with the strong impression that Said presses the suffering of the Palestinian people into the service of his own credentials as an intellectual hero.106

This dismissal of the political significance of the book appeared in other analyses, including academic reviews that were less sarcastic and more reflective than Buruma’s. Alan Confino, an Israeli-born historian, offered in the context of an overall positive review of the book, the same criticism as Buruma: “As long as Said keeps his focus on the personal, his narrative is touching and riveting. But he tends to leap from the personal and subjective to the political and impersonal in a way that challenges his credibility. . . . Sometimes a scolding is only a scolding, and a hot dog is only a hot dog.” Confino had literary objections to the story, which he found too much in the style of a grand narrative set around the classical themes of vulnerability, heroism, and uprootedness. He objected most strongly to a conflation of two plots, one that is a “parable of modern—or, better, post-modern—life” and the other “a unique story of a specific individual.”¹⁰⁷ Insofar as it was more than just one man’s autobiography, the story could appeal to various kinds of readers, including Confino himself, a Jew who recognized in the book many of his own experiences as an Israeli living in the United States.

Writing for the American Spectator, Edward Grossman faulted Said for failing to represent the experience of those closest to sharing his fate: Christian Arabs in the Middle East. For that reason, the political claims staked by Said on his own childhood experiences struck Grossman as “unconvincing,” unleashing his own analysis of the role played by Christian Arabs in the region. The memoir’s silence on the situation of Arab Christians is indeed surprising given Said’s own family background. But Grossman was not simply critical of an omission. He was also critical of what the memoir did cover and went as far as to suggest that the Palestinian plight has been rather convenient for people like Said—foreigners who come to the United States and invent strategic autobiographies. To support his claim, Grossman lists, among others, “the woman posing as Czar Nicholas II’s daughter” and a lot of “naturalized Jews: nineteenth century investor and climber August Belmont, the director Josef von Sternberg, the tycoon Menachem Riklis, the diplomat Madeleine Albright. Compared to their lies, the gap between the facts of Said’s life and the version he cultivated for so long is easily forgiven.”108 How could Said belong on this roster, other than as a target of nativist xenophobic rejection directed against all immigrants?

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and himself an author, reviewed Said’s memoir in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, which is published by the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Benvenisti stresses repeatedly that his response to the memoir was that of a native of Jerusalem reading the account of another native. From this authoritative perspective, Benvenisti confirmed the emotional truth of Said’s narrative and insisted that it did not matter whether the story was also factually true. He recognized the political subtext of a moving personal story and attacked by focusing directly on Said’s victim persona, and by extension, on the victimization claimed by Palestinians. Benvenisti found Out of Place “a fascinating portrait of a privileged family and a pampered youth in the midst of great suffering and destruction.” While willing to acknowledge Said’s Palestinian origin, Benvenisti also dismissed it by reading it in terms of class. The Saids were “the educated, affluent, urban, and Westernized Palestinians who inhabited the elegant houses of Talbiyah.” The contrast between the Jewish resident, Benvenisti, son of a teacher and nurse, raised in a two-bedroom apartment on the same street in Talbiyah, and the Palestinian native, Said, son of a wealthy businessman with a personal driver and numerous domestics, becomes a class conflict rather than one based on nationality. Palestinians like the Saids are not refugees but exiles, leaving behind a political mess they simply preferred to avoid. They abandoned “the Palestinian masses, both in the cities and the villages” to an Israeli force not only militarily superior but also more determined to win and more broadly supported by the Jewish population. “I do not think,” writes Benvenisti, “the likes of Edward Said were able to understand the desperate force that animated David and Leah Benvenisti. In the world of the Gezira Club or the garden parties of Mandatory Jerusalem, they did not count.”109 By reframing the conflict in terms of class, Benvenisti created a different interpretive context in which suffering and affluence are incompatible and thus reversed the roles: the Palestinians (at least those represented by Said) are not victims but privileged bourgeois without a national consciousness. The Israelis are not oppressors but merely fighters determined to win their land.

This response, compelling to some extent, does not take into account the Palestinians who had a different class background than the Saids. It can be an effective challenge to Said’s story but not to the Palestinian national narrative. All it did was to join a choir of critical voices clamoring that Said’s personal story cannot be taken as representative for the Palestinian experience. How to understand, then, Confino’s claim, that “as a Palestinian, Said has written a testimony more eloquent than all his political writing; the personal is often more powerful than the purely political.” Then what was the memoir a testimony to? Toward the end of his review, Confino revealed that he lives in the same neighborhood as Said’s family, a “bow shot” from their house. “For Said, Talbiyah is a home lost, for me it is home, even as I also recognize that it is Said’s lost home.”¹¹⁰ This unexpected affinity between the Palestinian author and his Israeli critic, nonetheless, is a subtle way to reject the political relevance of the memoir, an overemphasizing of its human (not national or state) dimension. Furthermore, the situation has changed now, Confino insists, as many Israelis like himself are not oblivious to the tragic fate of their Palestinian neighbors. By making Said’s childhood experience seem merely historical, Confino also implied that an anti-Palestinian Israel was anachronistic.

The critics who attacked Out of Place held Said’s privileged class status against him and charged that his experiences were not representative for the lives of most Palestinians. But the rhetorical function of the memoir was not to create an iconic timeless Palestinian identity, but to enact Palestinian identity in the particulars of a life. As Bishara notes, the memoir revealed “habits of emplacement that Palestinians would recognize to be in contrast with the decades of displacement that have followed.” Granted, many Palestinians did not have a personal chauffeur or a country club membership, features that conflict indeed with the experience of dispossession and displacement. But most Palestinians, the Saids included, enjoyed “certain pleasures or habits of home that many Palestinians have shared across class and geography, like drinking tea surrounded by one’s garden.”111 The intimacy of a family home and the simplicity of a life undisturbed by politics—such was the loss evoked in the book.

It remains hard to know whether the memoir appealed mainly to Said’s fans or to Palestinian supporters or whether it reached audiences who had previously been less inclined to accept such political views. Yet one response from an old enemy was quite eloquent. Writing for Forward, American-born Israeli writer Hillel Halkin reviewed Out of Place in connection to Justus Weiner’s allegations.¹¹² Halkin was convinced that Weiner was right and that Said had invented his West Jerusalem story. Nevertheless, he admitted, somewhat against himself, that the memoir had moved him deeply. He had read the book as a story of tribulation and triumph, and like Confino, had found parts of his own self, as a Jew, in Said. Said’s lifelong dream of reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians was thus achieved in a suspension of hostilities through narrative identification.¹¹³

CONCLUSION

Immersed for most of his life in the cosmopolitan world of New York and academia, Said neither aspired to Americanization nor was prevented from it. On the contrary, over the years he increasingly asserted his support for Palestinian liberation and a Palestinian identity that became a platform for his criticism of Israel and of its American supporters. His academic career as a scholar of Western high culture, along with a political commitment to the Palestinian indicate “the sign of an unevenness he actually lived, between a politics that was always about time and temporality and a culture than remained locked in fixed space if not in fantasy.”114 Yet this ambiguity only exists in a Western political tradition that separates reflection from action and the life of the mind from the life of the polis. While challenging this separation and advocating in passionate Benda fashion the responsibility intellectuals have to be politically engaged, Said admitted to struggling with the potential incompatibility between an academic and intellectual career and a political mission:

My whole background in the Middle East, my frequent and sometimes protracted visits there, my political involvement: all this exists in a totally different box from the one out of which I pop as a literary critic, professor, etc. . . . I am as aware as anyone that the ivory-tower concerns of technical criticism . . . are very far removed from the world of political, power, domination, and struggle. But there are links between the two worlds which I for one am beginning to exploit in my own work.¹¹⁵

Said forged these links in his theory of representation, used to advance political claims on behalf of Palestinian self-determination, and his strategies of de-familiarization, which develop common tropes and themes in the Western canon but read them against their own logic. As he moved between the bright ivory tower of academia and the dark alleys of Arab-Israeli-American politics, he also shifted away from his interest in Oriental-ism as an ideology that represses difference toward an ever growing interest in humanism as philosophical reflection on the universality of the human condition. He viewed nations and cultures as mutually intelligible rather than incompatible, and in his late work, devoted himself to a scholarship grounded in the “secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally . . . [that] we can know things according to the way they were made.”¹¹⁶ Said died in 2003, the year that marked the launch of the second Iraq war and the official beginning of an era that saw significant changes in how America is perceived around the world as well as how many Americans relate to their own nation. In 2004, Samuel P. Huntington’s book Who We Are: The Challenges to America’s National Identity argued that America is not a nation of immigrants but descendent of European settlers and thus fundamentally a Western culture potentially threatened by every non-Western foreigner seeking to come here.

Asked whether he felt more at home in America or in the Middle East, Said responded: “I’m at home in both places. But I’m different, in a way. In the American context, I speak as an American and I can also speak as a Palestinian. But in neither case do I feel that I belong in a proprietary sense or, let’s say, in an executive sense, to the central power establishment. I’m in the opposition in both places.”117 Those who saw him solely as a Palestinian activist often confused his arguments for the creation of a binational Israel with anti-Semitic banter. Those who only detected exilic melancholy in Said’s work missed the significance of his Palestinian politics as well as the political implications of his literary ideas. It is significant and encouraging that it was in America where Said felt free to speak both as an American and as a Palestinian. Perhaps this explains why Said made his political home in the United States, no matter how much he may have felt, culturally and emotionally, at home in the Middle East.