Edward Said: A Tribute

I belong to a very particular and limited group of people in Israel. We are Israeli Jews who have been full-heatedly supporting the Palestinian cause. Some of us had done it from very early on, others only lately. For veterans and novices, alike this position of ours has alienated us from our own society and sometimes even from our own family. In their eyes our stance verges on the border of insanity at best, and treason at worst. We have been there not because we have become Palestinian nationalists, but because we had a painful awakening to the history and essence of Zionism.

We marched on a hazardous and slippery road, undergoing an experience not that different from any liberation process addicts need to endure when getting rid of any spiritual or physical intoxication. What you need most in such a journey is a solid anchor; something or someone you can rely on to understand where you came from and where you are going to. In more concrete terms we needed a clear articulation of an agenda that would suit our preference for universal human rights issues and our rejection of the set of ideals that accompanied us from cradle; ideas that were deeply rooted in colonialism and nationalist fanaticism.

This is where Edward Said appeared in our life like a lighthouse navigating us out of the murkiness and confusion of growing up in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness. His untimely death left us in the darkness without his assured guidance and sense of direction, which we got accustomed to as years went by.

I am sorry I only met Edward in 1988, but I feel fortunate for the time we did spend together. His insights of, and inputs on, the global reality in general and the Palestinian one in particular will linger on, long after his death, and remain as they were at the time they were written, a relevant philosophical, political, and moral compass in the obfuscated world we live in.

But above all, I shall miss Edward's unique ability of articulating in the public sphere the essence of the Palestine question. The Palestine Question was his first ever work to be published in Hebrew and it was the first of his books I ever read. The spirit of the book, no less than its factual basis, accompanied me while I was mining the archives-revisiting the history of 1948. Said's perspective coupled, with the clear historiographical picture that emerged from the documents, introduced me to the evil inflicted upon the Palestinians in the 1948 war. Soon after I became acquainted with his other short and long attempts to analyze and present this past evil in much wider perspective. Said's particular strength was juxtaposing the Nakbah and its horrors against its denial in the West. Said in more than one book and work exposed the Western media's effort of sidelining in, if not altogether eliminating from, the public mind the plight and tragedy of Palestine. There is no one who could easily fill his place on the various public stages in which he so convincingly represented the case of Palestine. It would be very difficult to follow in his footsteps and be able to associate so lucidly the wrongs of the past with the tragedy of the present in the land of Palestine.

Said was not an historian by inclination or profession. But he injected into the historiographical debate his original thoughts about issues such as representation, power relations and the production of knowledge—all very relevant issues to the writing of history. If and when you read Said's general thoughts about these topics, you could immediately connect this critique to the role of historiography in the Palestine conflict. Said held the keys to the riddle for the long and overdue hegemony of the Zionist narrative in the public and academic space. The historical version of a people without land arriving at the end of the nineteenth century in a people-less country, modernizing it and blooming its deserts, while fighting for its life against unexplained barbaric attacks by...