The Question of Palestine

"Edward Said was a Palestinian American scholar and probably one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century. Mainly through his book Orientalism , although he wrote much more, he supplied the foundations for sustained criticism of colonial knowledge and culture which has no parallel in terms of its impact on the critique of colonialism and in particular colonial knowledge and culture by artists, writers and scholars who were shaped by and at the same time actively shaped colonialism. Concerning scholars specifically, the book’s basic thesis is that they laid the intellectual foundations and context for colonialism and were part of it, not aloof producers of objective knowledge on the Orient as it really was. Said was born in Jerusalem to Palestinian parents. He grew up in Cairo. His father was a very successful, wealthy businessman. His parents sent him to finish his studies at a prestigious boarding school in New England and from there he proceeded to study and work at the top Ivy League universities. He went to Princeton, Harvard and then spent his entire career at Columbia University as professor of comparative literature. He was also politically active as a public intellectual and discovered at a certain point in his life, although not at an early stage, the issue of Palestine. He became one of the most important champions of the cause of the Palestinians and had a very interesting interaction and relationship with critical Israelis like myself. I myself had a personal friendship with him. I initiated the translation of Orientalism into Hebrew for which he wrote a special preface. He was influential on me not only in terms of his writings but also as a friend. The book was a sequel to Orientalism and is one of three books, the third being Covering Islam , that Said wrote at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s. The Question of Palestine is his take on how Palestine was dispossessed and how Zionism is really a European project. In that sense you can say that The Question of Palestine was for him a personal case study of Orientalism. If Orientalism was the way that Europe came to view the rest of non-Europe, especially Arabs and Islam in general, The Question of Palestine looks in particular at the colonial venture in Palestine, the way Palestine was viewed in Europe and how it came to be regarded as belonging to the Jews who had a right to return there. The importance of The Question of Palestine for me is the second chapter, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victim”. What he does is to look at how the idea of Zionism and the return of the Jews to Palestine emerged in Europe. He looks mainly, although not exclusively, at three thinkers and writers – Moses Hess, George Eliot and Theodor Herzl. With George Eliot he looks at her novel Daniel Deronda . What is so significant for me in this chapter is that although Said is studying European thinkers, he is constantly showing their influence on the eventual fate of the indigenous people of Palestine. In other words, Said offers a way to look at the colonial settlers that doesn’t deteriorate into uncritically reproducing their own story of themselves, which is a trap that one can easily fall into because the West and the Zionists were and are victors and clearly their culture is hegemonic, so it’s not easy to study them without actually reproducing their own concerns, their own vantage point, their own sensibilities, and concomitantly to forget about the indigenous people altogether. Said, throughout his career, really mainly studied the hegemonic culture of the West. You can see how in Orientalism and The Question of Palestine he’s really at his best when he is studying it. Even in Culture and Imperialism one senses that it is easier for Said to carry a sustained argument on the hegemonic colonial writers than it is to carry a sustained discussion on the anti-colonial writers. There is an interesting tension in which he is aesthetically at ease with the former, but he politically identifies with the latter. In the end, Said never forgets that the point of studying the hegemonic culture is to see what the consequences were for those who were the victims of that culture. So he studies Moses Hess, Herzl and George Eliot, but what he always bears in mind, hence the title of the chapter, is how all this was detrimental to the victims. I’m critically interested in the settlers themselves, in their culture, their narratives, their consciousness. What makes it possible for me to remain critical is to always bear in mind that unless you look at it in the context of the interaction with the colonised, and the consequences for the colonised, then you are colluding with the hegemonic culture of the colonisers. That is something I learnt how to do from Said, precisely because there’s a sense in which my interests are the same as his. In that sense The Question of Palestine , and especially that particular chapter, was eye-opening for me. The rest of the book mainly looks at the idea that the Holy Land belongs to the Jews and that they are returning to it. Said shows the modernity and the colonial Christianness of the notion of the Jews being restored to Palestine and how Zionism is really part of that phenomenon and tradition. He shows the European colonial context within which this all emerged and, in a way, also the limitations of the 19th century and early 20th century European nation state, European enlightenment, European tolerance and inclusiveness. For instance, if you look at his analysis of Daniel Deronda, it’s clear that George Eliot represented the liberal extreme of her society in the second half of the 19th century but precisely perhaps because she was a liberal and in a way pro-Jewish, her eventual solution in that novel is for the Jews to emigrate and establish their own homeland in the promised land, which points not only to the colonial origins of Zionism but also to the limitations of European society’s willingness to be inclusive and to accept the Jews. I like Said’s analysis of George Eliot. I know he liked her literature and you can see from this book that he has a very engaged reading of Daniel Deronda ."