Edward Said Died
ionnek | 27.09.2003 18:13 | Culture
Edward Said, Palestinian/American intellectual, resident in the US, died of leucaemia on September 25th. A prominent Palestinian activist and a literary critic, he worked as a comparative literature professor at Columbia. He was born in Jerusalem, raised in Cairo and Lebanon, educated in the US and is described as Palestinian Christian.
As an indymedia activist and one of the people who read some of his books and articles, I'm sad that he is gone and will miss his voice. Edward Said showed that there is a way to throw radical critique at the Israeli government without going down the road of antisemitism - and being a renowned he was heard.
As an indymedia activist and one of the people who read some of his books and articles, I'm sad that he is gone and will miss his voice. Edward Said showed that there is a way to throw radical critique at the Israeli government without going down the road of antisemitism - and being a renowned he was heard.
Edward Said
His advocacy for the Palestinian cause went beyond intellectual criticism. For academics, Said provided "a model for being engaged in political activities outside the university" (Grant Farred). For example, he helped Yassir Arafat, the PLO leader, to write his 1974 speech before the United Nations. To his fundamental rejection of Zionism, he added the idea of Palestinian-Israeli coexistence. Consequently, he broke with Arafat over the PLO's signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Said advocated a single-state solution whereby Jews and Palestinians would live jointly in a nonsectarian nation (boston.com).
Saids activism was the activism of an intellectual. 2 months after ISM activist Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza, he met her parents and sister and published an article about the meaning of her activism in the US radical intellectual magazine counterpunch.
The only reference to something that bears similarity to „direct action" in a narrow sense was an incident in 2000, when Dr. Said threw a rock (or, as he said, a pebble) at an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border - an action that sparked off controversy. However, Tanweer Akram said that "Professor Said would be proud of the initiatives of the younger generation of Palestinian scholars and activists, and solidarity groups, such as International Solidarity Movement."
In a 1999 Globe interview, Dr. Said was asked whether he ever resented the time he devoted to politics at the expense of his literary work. "I've always felt that if someone was a person of privilege . . . the least you could do was help those who were not as fortunate as you. I've always thought that Palestine was a service . . . not something about political parties or positions or organizations, but rather an individual commitment. Which I don't regret at all."
Reading through the obituaries, I get the impression that maintaining friendships must have been an important part of Said's way of live - or, as Ahdaf Soueif puts it, "Edward and his 3,000 close friends".
One of these close friends was the Israeli/Argentinian conductor Daniel Barenboim. Together they set up the "West-Eastern Divan," an orchestra of musicians from across the Middle East which also performed in London. This year, Barenboim played a concert in Ramallah.
Barenboim about Said: "He was one of those rare people who was permanently aware of the fact that information is only the very first step toward understanding. And he always looked for the "beyond" in the idea, the "unseen" by the eye, the "unheard" by the ear."
Much of Saids writing is about this "beyond", "unseen", and "unheard", the discourses behind the plain facts. His theory of Orientalism said that false and romanticised images of the Middle East and Asia were used to justify Western colonialism and imperialism there. Said's books include Orientalism, A Question Of Palestine and The End Of The Peace Process.
A 1984 article for the London review of books is titled „Permission to Narrate". „These three words described what Said felt was most denied to the Palestinians by the international media, the power to communicate their own history to a world hypnotised by a mythological Zionist narrative of an empty Palestine."
With this phrase in mind, the web-team of the Palestinian Birzeit University set about creating their own realisation of „permission to narrate" by starting their own website in 1995. One of their first media experiments was an online diary about Ramallah. One of the team: „For the first time, I deeply experienced the potential of the Internet to empower those without a voice."
I am part of a different media experiment - indymedia, an open platform for people to raise their own voices, tell their own stories, especially those who are denied „permission to narrate". Sometimes I'm shocked to see how the outrage against the Israeli government turns into antisemitic rants. Indymedia gives a space to disseminate stories - including rants and misinformation. For me, Edward Said's now sadly completed work stands out as one signpost in the whirlwind of the newswires - pointing to the "beyond" in the idea, the "unseen" by the eye, the "unheard" by the ear.
Read an interview with Edward Said, browse the Edward Said Archive, or look at some additional obituaries:
New York Times | Guardian | Albawaba |
Saids activism was the activism of an intellectual. 2 months after ISM activist Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza, he met her parents and sister and published an article about the meaning of her activism in the US radical intellectual magazine counterpunch.
The only reference to something that bears similarity to „direct action" in a narrow sense was an incident in 2000, when Dr. Said threw a rock (or, as he said, a pebble) at an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border - an action that sparked off controversy. However, Tanweer Akram said that "Professor Said would be proud of the initiatives of the younger generation of Palestinian scholars and activists, and solidarity groups, such as International Solidarity Movement."
In a 1999 Globe interview, Dr. Said was asked whether he ever resented the time he devoted to politics at the expense of his literary work. "I've always felt that if someone was a person of privilege . . . the least you could do was help those who were not as fortunate as you. I've always thought that Palestine was a service . . . not something about political parties or positions or organizations, but rather an individual commitment. Which I don't regret at all."
Reading through the obituaries, I get the impression that maintaining friendships must have been an important part of Said's way of live - or, as Ahdaf Soueif puts it, "Edward and his 3,000 close friends".
One of these close friends was the Israeli/Argentinian conductor Daniel Barenboim. Together they set up the "West-Eastern Divan," an orchestra of musicians from across the Middle East which also performed in London. This year, Barenboim played a concert in Ramallah.
Barenboim about Said: "He was one of those rare people who was permanently aware of the fact that information is only the very first step toward understanding. And he always looked for the "beyond" in the idea, the "unseen" by the eye, the "unheard" by the ear."
Much of Saids writing is about this "beyond", "unseen", and "unheard", the discourses behind the plain facts. His theory of Orientalism said that false and romanticised images of the Middle East and Asia were used to justify Western colonialism and imperialism there. Said's books include Orientalism, A Question Of Palestine and The End Of The Peace Process.
A 1984 article for the London review of books is titled „Permission to Narrate". „These three words described what Said felt was most denied to the Palestinians by the international media, the power to communicate their own history to a world hypnotised by a mythological Zionist narrative of an empty Palestine."
With this phrase in mind, the web-team of the Palestinian Birzeit University set about creating their own realisation of „permission to narrate" by starting their own website in 1995. One of their first media experiments was an online diary about Ramallah. One of the team: „For the first time, I deeply experienced the potential of the Internet to empower those without a voice."
I am part of a different media experiment - indymedia, an open platform for people to raise their own voices, tell their own stories, especially those who are denied „permission to narrate". Sometimes I'm shocked to see how the outrage against the Israeli government turns into antisemitic rants. Indymedia gives a space to disseminate stories - including rants and misinformation. For me, Edward Said's now sadly completed work stands out as one signpost in the whirlwind of the newswires - pointing to the "beyond" in the idea, the "unseen" by the eye, the "unheard" by the ear.
Read an interview with Edward Said, browse the Edward Said Archive, or look at some additional obituaries:
New York Times | Guardian | Albawaba |
ionnek
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What Said really Said
28.09.2003 02:23
If enormous influence in the academic world is a reliable indicator of intellectual distinction, then Edward Said is an extremely distinguished man. He has taught a whole generation of English professors to search for racism in writers (like Jane Austen) who did not think as the professors do. He has induced a generation of Middle East scholars not only to believe that "since the time of Homer...every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist" but to ridicule "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies" as "highly exaggerated [racial] stereotyping" (this in a statement of 1997).
By Said the herd of independent thinkers in political science departments have been taught that "Israel's occupation increased in severity and outright cruelty, more than rivalling all other military occupations in modern history." His acolytes also have found meat and drink in Said's pristinely ignorant and intellectually violent pronouncements about Jews. They are not, he claims, really a people at all because Moses was an Egyptian (he wasn't) and because Jewish identity in the Diaspora is entirely a function of external persecution. The Holocaust (which destroyed most of the potential citizens of a Jewish state) was in Said's estimation a great boon to Jews because it served to "protect" Palestinian Jews "with the world's compassion." Prior to 1948, he has asserted, "the historical duration of a Jewish state [in "Palestine"] was a sixty-year period two millennia ago." (In fact, as any normally attentive Sunday-school student knows, Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel lasted a thousand years.)
Said's pronouncements about his fellow Arabs have also been widely influential. While bewailing the racist stereotyping of Arabs by Western "Orientalists" Said has insisted that "there are no divisions in the Palestinian population of four million. We all support the PLO." Said wrote this while he was still a member of the Palestine National Council, the leading spokesman for the PLO in the American news media, and one of the closest advisors of Yasser Arafat, whom he praised for "his microscopic grasp ... of politics, not as grand strategy, in the pompous Kissingerian sense, but as daily, even hourly movement of people and attitudes, in the Gramscian or Foucauldian sense."
But at the same time that Said insisted that "every Palestinian...is up in arms" against Israel, that they all belonged to a monolithic body with one will, acting and thinking in perfect unison, he felt it necessary to urge the murder of Arab "collaborators" with Israel. Indeed, he insisted that "the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol" sanctions such murders. Said eventually withdrew his support from the PLO head not because Arafat had become one of the major war criminals of modern times but because the Oslo Accords showed him becoming "soft" on Israel, willing to sell the world that famous used Buick called "recognition of Israel's right to exist." At the moment Said is incensed by reports that a new Iraqi government may make peace with Israel.
Said's intense hostility to America has also powerfully influenced that sizable contingent of our academics whose motto is "the other country, right or wrong." He has described Operation Iraqi Freedom as the crusade of an "avenging Judeo-Christian god of war," fitting into the pattern of America" reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust." And, as usual, he blames the Jews for what he dislikes: "The Perles and Wolfowitzes of this country" have led America into a war "planned by a docile professionalized staff in...Washington and Tel Aviv" and publicly defended by "Ari Fleischer (who I believe is an Israeli citizen)." (A New York Post journalist who attempted to find the source of Said's phony claim about Fleischer located it in the website of the White Aryan Resistance Movement.)
Said's career has in recent years lurched from scandal to scandal. In the September 1999 issue of Commentary, Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said had "adjusted" the facts of his life to create a personal myth…to fit the myth of Arab dispossession. For decades he had presented himself as an exile, an Arab who grew up in Jerusalem but who, at age twelve, when Israel was established, was (along with his family) driven out of the Talbiyeh neighborhood of Jerusalem. In fact, as Weiner massively documented and irrefutably demonstrated, Said's tragic tale was largely a fabrication. He grew up in a wealthy section of Cairo, son of a Palestinian Arab who emigrated to the U.S. in 1911, became an American citizen, then moved to Egypt. Said was educated in Egypt, not Jerusalem. His family occasionally visited cousins in Jerusalem, and Said was born during one such visit in 1935.
In July of 2000 Said was in the news again. During a visit to Lebanon in July, he was spotted hurling rocks over the border at Israelis. Expressing dismay at the Agence France Presse photograph of his pitching exploits (a peculiar way of realizing his intellectual vocation) Said exclaimed: "I had no idea that media people were there..." Not the action, but its detection, caused him to regret what he had done.
Columbia University, Said's employer, saw nothing wrong with Said's fabrications or his stone-throwing. This is the same Columbia which in 1959 immediately "accepted the resignation" of a young English Department instructor named Charles Van Doren for being involved in a rigged NBC quiz show called "Twenty-One." Columbia's then Dean John Palfrey said that "The issue is the moral one of honesty and integrity," and that "If these principles are to continue to have meaning at Columbia," Van Doren could not remain there. Palfrey's principles have long since been forgotten at Columbia, and the vast majority of international institutions of learning.
buzzbee
further information
29.09.2003 13:50
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Here is how E. Said described the throwing-rocks story on March 16, 2001 in counterpunch:
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More information on Justus Weiner, his attack against Said and some facts that contradict his attack in the Edward Said Archive:
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ionnek
Tribute from Ilan Pappe
29.09.2003 15:23
We, who supported the Palestinian cause, have been orphaned with the untimely death of Edward Said. For Israeli Jews, like myself, he was the lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of growing in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness.
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 Palestine one in particular will guide us all for many years to come.
But above all, we shall miss Edward's unique ability of articulating in the public sphere the evil inflicted upon the Palestinians in the past against the continued effort in the Western media of sidelining, if not altogether eliminating, the plight and tragedy of Palestine. There is no one who could easily fill his place on that stage - no one who could in few sentences associate so clearly the wrongs of the past with the tragedy of the present in the land of Palestine.
The academic and intellectual world would equally be disorientated without his original thoughts and conceptualization on the West's relationship with the world. We should be grateful, nonetheless, that so many of our colleagues went in his footsteps as he so brilliantly deconstructed the power bases and more sinister interests behind the knowledge production in West on the Orient in general and the Middle East in particular.
For those of us who knew him more personally, we have all lost a dear and genuine friend, with whom one could talk about the most abstract philosophical issues and with the same ease move to more mundane problems in life - which usually paled in comparison with his endless and brave struggle against the fate illness.
Something of this mixture and balance was also in his books. He will be remembered, and justly so, for "Orientalism" and the works that followed shaping and contributing to the post-Colonialist and Cultural Studies.
But I will also cherish the 'The Politics of Dispossession" - these short and lucid interventions, quite often immediate reactions to a recent crisis or juncture in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians, but always contextualizing the event and Said's thoughts within the much more broader view on the march of history.
Few weeks ago we had our last meaningful conversation - on the phone - in which he beseeched me, as he did others I am sure, not to give up the struggle for relocating the Palestinians' refugee issue at the heart of the public and global agenda. He stressed the need to continue the effort of changing the American public opinion on Palestine and he was very hopeful and encouraged by he what recognized as significant change in the European public opinion.
Edward probably left more than one spiritual and moral will to us. The one I am taking is the one above. In his memory and out of respect to his intellectual genius as well as to his moral courage, we should regroup our energies and reorganize our efforts to impress on the world that there will be no justice and no peace in Palestine, no stability in the Middle East and no tranquility in the US relationship with the Muslim world, without the return of Palestinian refugees to their home, the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the building of a state in Palestine that would respect human and civil rights, as did Edward all his life.
May his soul rest in peace,
Ilan Pappe
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