Column: Remembering Edward Said

Edward Said was a man who developed a profound appreciation of irony in the course of his relatively short life. Sixty-seven seems an early age for an academic to die. Said surely would have appreciated the irony of a don of English literature dying younger than Socrates, that provocateur of his native state who incited more controversy through his intellectual endeavors than many academics would if they were given several lifetimes in which to work.

Said, of course, had no native state to stir the ire of at the time of his death. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said was one of more than 700,000 Palestinians for whom the creation of Israel in 1948 meant the end of existence in their native national homeland. Said always maintained that irony was a central aspect of Palestinian identity, so his appreciation of irony became bolstered by his identity as a Palestinian in addition to his work as literary critic, polemicist and political commentator.

One notion that Said maintained was integral to the Palestinian sense of irony was the knowledge that the contemporary West's fierce anti-Arab prejudice was a "strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism." The irony of the complementary nature of anti-Arab and anti-Semitic discourse in the West for the Palestinian, was on the one hand, that in the "liberal" West, Israel's explanations for its existence were not questioned, and its myriad human rights abuses (the chief one being the refugee catastrophe of 1948) were ignored. On the other hand, the same liberal West refused to acknowledge the humanity of Palestinian Arabs, the victims of Zionism and the Zionist state.

The West, with its history of racism and oppression, at a critical moment threw its support behind those who claimed to speak for a minority (Jews) whom the West had oppressed for centuries. In the same moment, the West intensified its prejudice of and disempowering of another people of Semitic origin: Palestinians. The West's support of Israel thus seemed all too ironic to Palestinians. Said's sarcastic sense of humor was doubtless informed by his experience living with the ironies a Palestinian found in the post-1948 world.

If, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Said could have presided over his own funeral (or the reaction to his death), he doubtless would have chuckled at the irony of the treatment given his stance on the "Palestinian question" by the obituary of him published last week in the New York Times, that barometer of institutional opinion in the America-centered West.

At the time of the publication of his book The Question of Palestine in 1979, writing of the Palestinian experience from a Palestinian perspective in America was dangerous enough to be career suicide. However, the Times' obit portrayed Said's criticism of Palestinian sufferings due to American and Israeli policy as eccentric, rather than subversive. The obit noted that "Dr. Said saw matters in terms of Zionist atrocity and Palestinian victimhood" in contrast to "Israel and its supporters," as if Said stood alone in his opposition to Zionism.

How deeply ironic that a man Commentary notoriously dubbed the "professor of terror" was dismissed in the American press at the time of his death not as dangerous, but as novel or eccentric. Of course, there is nothing novel about Said's views about Palestinians. Those views are embraced by many across lines of political affiliation, race and creed, as shown by the outpouring of sympathy from many disparate quarters at the news of Said's death.

In The Question of Palestine, Said speculated as to whether the Palestinians were "still in question" in the West. Today, in the midst of the second intifada and growing acceptance of writings by and about Palestinians such as Said, Palestinian existence is no longer in question. It is accepted that the Palestinians exist and must be dealt with somehow, but there is no consensus as to how to deal with them.