by NADA ELIA
Professor Edward Said (1935-2003) PHOTO/Palestine Studies
September 25, 2016 marked the thirteenth anniversary of the passing of Professor Edward Said, one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century, and a political icon for anyone invested in the Question of Palestine. And as happens with many historical icons, Said’s legacy is causing a tug-of-war between “liberal Zionists” on the one hand, and the thousands of anti-Zionist critics and BDS activists his radical scholarship and political engagement have spawned.
For decades, while still among us, Said was smeared as a “professor of terror,” including by the right-wing Commentary magazine, which also accused him of leading a “double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism.” In 2000, he was vilified as embracing violence when he threw a rock towards Israel from a village in southern Lebanon, newly-liberated from twenty-two years of Israeli occupation. Throughout his career, there were concerted efforts to discredit his scholarship, and even deny his Palestinian identity. The latter is an offense millions of Diaspora Palestinians are subjected of: even as the Palestinian refugee status is the only such status globally to be passed down from one generation to another, those of us born outside of the historic homeland, but without the UN-issued “refugee status” documentation, are denied our Palestinian identity, as Zionists seek to erase our right of return, and deny that hundreds of thousands of us were displaced during the Nakba. (The pro-Israel organization StandWithUs, for example, has declared me Iraqi, a “fake Palestinian,” because I was indeed born in Bagdad, but to Palestinian parents, both from the old city of Jerusalem.) Said, his detractors claimed, was Egyptian, because he grew up in Cairo.
In Orientalism, his foundational work that launched the field of postcolonial studies, Said insisted that the West’s narrative about “the Orient” cannot be decontextualized, and that it must be understood as a tool of colonialism and imperialism. Long before the proponents of cultural boycott wrote essays explaining that art does not rise above politics, Said was publishing one book after another exposing, dissecting, and illustrating this very point.
Edward Said, of course, also joined Daniel Barenboim in 1999 to found the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an Israeli-Arab initiative that brings together aspiring young Arab and Israeli musicians to perform in European concert halls, under Barenboim’s direction. I say “Arab” not in the Zionist lingo, which seeks to erase Palestinian identity, but because musicians from various Arab countries, including Palestine, joined the orchestra. And I say “Israeli-Arab,” placing Israeli first, because the orchestra was and remains directed by an Israeli conductor. Even though it has had musicians from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, the Orchestra focuses exclusively on Israel/Palestine, thus reducing “Arab” to “Palestinians,” which it seems reluctant to name as such. If its focus were indeed “Arab,” it would consider the socio-political situation in countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt.
On the other hand, Said’s entire oeuvre persuasively rejects Zionism and forced concessions from the dispossessed to the privileged, centering Palestinian concerns, Palestinian sovereignty, the Palestinian narrative. He firmly believed that it is impossible to change US policy about Palestine without changing the discourse on Palestine. Indeed, the fact that we now speak of “The Question of Palestine” rather than “The Middle East conflict,” or that we can immediately recognize the bias of those who insist on saying “the Middle East conflict” or “the Arab-Israeli conflict” when speaking of Palestine, must be credited to his persistence. The conversations he opened up in the 1970s, as he insisted on discussing “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” a chapter in The Question of Palestine in which he argues that Palestinians have an inherent right to national self-determination, are the conversations that allowed so many more of us to denounce Israeli abuses today, they are the precursors of the conversations amplified by BDS, as they gave us the theoretical framework to speak of settler-colonialism and the politics of dispossession.
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