Edward Said and the Question of Palestine

21:23This writing was an organized form of writing, like an organized science, you know, what I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up. You know, the sensual woman who's there to be sort of used by the man. The East is a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters. What Edward is trying to say, I think, is that there's a lot of mischief that happens in the act of representation. That you can create a reality that has no correspondence to another reality. What interested Saeed is the way those ideas just keep on replicating themselves.

22:03And then you end up with Aladdin. Then you end up as an Australian. Exactly. Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam. Where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home. Zaid continues, Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, He is entitled either to own or to expend, or both, the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom. Then the book turns to Said's birthplace.

22:53Its inhabitants, inconsequential nomads, possessing no stable claim to the land, and therefore no cultural permanence. Who are the Palestinians? Where are the Palestinians? They don't exist. You know, so many of the people who call themselves Israelis come from Russia and the United States and from Europe. This war between peoples is, I believe, inextricably entangled with the fantasies, dreams and ambitions of the West to rule and possess the East. To some extent, the state of Israel itself has been created and sustained by those fantasies, dreams and ambitions. The book made waves and had plenty of critics.

23:38Some prominent British historians like Bernard Lewis thought his views were reductive, flattening the West while flattering the East. The answer to a stereotype is not, of course, a negative stereotype. Some academics from the East thought his focus on culture and identity overlooked the role of capitalism in all of this. Some said he minimized the complex identities and historical experiences of people within the Islamic Middle East, especially minorities like Christians, Kurds, and Jews. But Saeed also had defenders, including within the American Jewish community. He was a great lover of the book The Non-Jewish Jew by Isaac Deutscher, who made the case that one of the reasons why there's this universalist defense of justice and a kind of an attack on tribalist modes of thinking among so many great Jews in history, Spinoza or Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg or Noam Chomsky in her own day, has to do with their marginal status and the fact that they had known oppression.

24:49Not long after Orientalism came out, Zaid was preparing his next manuscript, this time a book all about Palestine. He said he hoped to make clear, quote, the Palestinian interpretation of Palestinian experience. But when Zaid came back to the publisher with a draft building on his ideas in Orientalism. About Europe and its relationship to the Jews and to Zionism with anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism of Europeans. Yeah. And describing the collision between Zionism and the Palestinians from the Palestinian perspective. The publisher was like, This is not what we wanted you to write. It's a dead end.

25:34And Saeed would be rejected again before he finally found a publisher willing to print it. In 1979, the question of Palestine hit bookshelves. And not only did it feature the Palestinian story, it proposed a vision for a future Palestinian state. We realized that we are being asked to pay the price for what happened to the Jews in Europe under the Holocaust. It was an entirely Christian and European catastrophe. And we are being dispossessed. We've become the victims of the victims. But not all of us say, well, they should be thrown out. So we have another vision, which is a vision of coexistence, in which Jew and Arab can live together, which I think it requires a kind of creativity and invention that is possible.

26:37Throughout the 1980s, Edward Said did everything in his power to convert his vision of a two-state solution into reality, even as violence intensified in the region. Israel launches a major assault into southern Lebanon. I think we are seeing in Lebanon now the development of some fringe groups that have some Iranian influence. Meanwhile, civil unrest is continuing in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Three more Palestinians were shot by Israeli troops. Zaid acted as a liaison between American officials and the PLO, a role he'd reluctantly played ever since the late 1970s, when Egypt's president named him the Palestinian representative to peace talks between Egypt and Israel.

27:19I opened the door one day and I found 300 journalists outside my door. And my whole life was transformed. But for the Palestinian struggle, he didn't believe high-level talks between officials was going to be enough. He writes constantly to friends back here in the United States, complaining about the disorganization of the PLO leadership and how to advance the struggle. He believed the narrative about Palestinians needed to change in the minds of the American public and politicians. And it would be an uphill climb.

27:56I think it's about time we stop those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel and this body for apologizing for our support for Israel. There's no apology to be made. None. That's then-Senator Joe Biden expressing a view it was normal to hear on the floor of Congress and see in the pages of The New York Times. I think that the one group that probably captured his ire more than any other group in the United States was liberals. It was the liberal establishment that vaunted the state of Israel. It is the best$3 billion investment we make. So how would he change the narrative? With a pen and his voice.

28:46I remember the first talk I went with him, there was a lawyer from Haifa, and he was going to debate him. Edward fell apart. When we left, he threw up. But he kept going. He wrote for newspapers and magazines, went on talk shows, hosted documentaries, and agreed to debates. In the mid-80s... I was to supposedly debate the Israeli ambassador. The ambassador to the United Nations named Benjamin Netanyahu. And then I found the most extraordinary thing that not only would he not sit in the same room with me, he wanted to be in a different building so as not to be sort of contaminated. There's no recording of the debate, but according to Edward Said, this is how it went down.

29:35They eventually ended up on a stage together, sitting in silence. And when the presenter said to the audience, Professor Said and Ambassador Netanyahu refused to speak to each other, Said interjected, No, no, I'm perfectly willing to speak to him. The presenter then asked Netanyahu, Mr. Ambassador, why don't you speak to Professor Saeed? Netanyahu responded, Because he wants to kill me. The whole thing was totally absurd.

30:08Saeed is basically acting as the kind of, you know, unofficial spokesperson for the movement. Very much so. Yeah, very much so. This is a professor at Columbia University, you know, one of the most elite universities in the U.S. And he faced a lot of heat for this, right? I mean, he was investigated by the FBI. How did he navigate the political sort of firestorm of being so vocal on the question of Palestine and Palestinian identity at a time when it wasn't very common to do that? His whole life was spent poring over how one needs to speak and how one needs to write in order to cross that unbridgeable chasm between the world of art and aesthetics and the world of political confrontation.

31:11the worst aspect of it is of course the occasional threat of violence i mean my office has been raided and vandalized i've received death threats and and i suppose in general i do feel given the atmosphere surrounding palestine and palestinians in new york in particular i do feel as if i'm a delinquent sort of before anything gets going i am somehow guilty as charged It was very scary sometimes, but we lived with it. I don't know how, but we lived with it. Saeed and Maryam had two children by this point, and the threat of violence hung over all of them. You remember Kahani? He was threatened by the Kahani people.

31:57Mayor Kahani was a far-right American rabbi who founded the Militant Jewish Defense League in the U.S. and then moved to Israel and founded a political party that pushed for the expulsion of Palestinians. There is no Palestine, no Palestinians. There never was, there never will be. There are others, and let them go live in Jordan. During the 80s, you could find him lecturing on college campuses or talking on CNN. There is no co-existent hospital with them. They have to leave. And while he was condemned by many American Jews and Israelis, he was also amassing a loyal following. Edward Said was near the top of their hit list.

32:37Kids broke into his office, Edward's office, at the university and burned the top of the desk. Colombia put bulletproof windows all around the house. My son was always afraid that he was going to be killed as a little kid. I remember once walking into Saeed's office and he was just, you know, in the middle of a conversation with himself about these things I remember him bellowing, saying what they want is my silence and they will never get it

33:29A demonstration in front of the main hospital in Gaza. I saw an army truck stop. Soldiers drag a young man towards the burning tires, kicking him and beating him with the butt of a rifle. In 1987, the first intifada, or uprising, broke out in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. These children are the ugly face of 20 years of frustration over Israeli occupation here. The militant Islamic group Hamas emerged in Gaza as a political opponent to the PLO. Things have gone to such an extent here that the people want a solution no matter through whom this will come.

34:12Meanwhile, the PLO decided to capitalize on the momentum of the First Intifada to begin to lay the groundwork for a future Palestinian state. They wanted the world to see them not only as a liberation movement, but a legitimate, peaceful state-in-waiting. So they called in Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said to write a Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Darwish drafted the version in Arabic, Said translated it into English, and Yasser Arafat read it aloud in Algiers, a city with its own anti-colonial legacy.

34:54It outlined a vision for a Palestinian state that was secular, democratic, and committed to, quote, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a contrast to the region's Arab countries, which were ruled by dictators with shoddy human rights records. And Arafat assumed the title as the president of Palestine. Either the Israelis will ultimately respond positively to this, and essentially the entire conflict will be resolved, or the Israelis will annex and ultimately move in the direction of some form of expulsion.

35:37Coming up, Edward Said clings to a dream of coexistence as reality looks more and more like a nightmare.

35:51This is Kalou and Jaco calling in from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you are listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 3. The Humanist. In 1993, Chairman of the PLO Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin stood alongside U.S. President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn as they signed the first Oslo peace accord. We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears. Enough!

36:46Now, as we stand on the threshold of this new historic era, let me address the people of Israel. Do you remember when Edward found out about Oswald? Did he find out with the rest of the world? Yeah, rest of the world. Arafat recognized Israel's right to exist, and the Israeli government recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, whom it gave limited governing authority in the occupied Palestinian territories. Much of the world celebrated, but Edward Said was furious at Arafat. He committed the Palestinians without ever informing them of what he was committing them to. Even he didn't know it.

37:30One of his closest assistants, who in fact is the architect of Oslo, said that it took Arafat a year to understand that he didn't get a state. He was very upset, extremely upset, because you talk about democracy and you don't tell your people you are doing this. He was at a low ebb in terms of popularity and money, and so I think the agreement was a way of saving himself rather than thinking of his people. And while many in the American media touted it as the first step towards peace, Said was sounding an alarm. Nothing in the agreements that Arafat has signed says anything about the end of occupation.

38:09The Israelis are still there. The armies are still there. The settlements are increasing in size and number. So it's a terrible deal. In my opinion, the future really looks very, very brief. He never talked to Arafat after that. and he came out looking like a prophet. The fact is that more Palestinians have been killed since the thing was signed. The Gaza Strip is a forsaken spot, a mixture of graffiti-filled deprivation and Israeli occupation. The militant Islamic group Hamas says the Israeli incursions have simply created more militants prepared to die for the Palestinian cause. The Hamas faction says one of its members blew himself up yesterday in a seaside hotel north of Tel Aviv, just as a crowd was beginning a traditional Passover meal.

39:01Israeli police say 20 people died... This idea that somehow we should protect ourselves against the infiltrations, the infections of the other, is, I think, the most dangerous idea at the end of the 20th century. The challenge now is coexistence. How do we accept difference without violence and hostility? I'm thinking about this 90s and early 2000s period, the last decade of his life when he's watching the intensification of the occupation. He's watching violence between Israelis and Palestinians amplify. What maintained his belief in coexistence, even in the face of those realities towards the end of his life?

39:49Because it's the only way to go. It's the only option left. The two-state solution, which is still formally maintained as the objective of the Palestinian leadership, is absolutely negated by what's already happened on the ground. Israel's been far too successful at separating all the little pockets of occupied territories from one another, creating a pass card system as the white South Africans did under apartheid. The only option left is a one-state solution. That's, I think, his vision for coexistence. Unless we find ways to do this, you know, there's going to be wholesale violence of the sort represented by the Gulf War, by the killings in Bosnia, the Rwandan massacre.

40:38But Saeed continued to face attacks, questioning the sincerity of that vision. One headline in Commentary magazine read, Professor of Terror. Shortly before Saeed's memoir, Out of Place, was released in 1999, an Israeli-American lawyer who had once worked for Israel's Ministry of Justice published a piece called My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Saeed, questioning Saeed's claims of growing up in Palestine. He never talked to me, never asked me any questions. He said it wasn't necessary. He did it all from the records. Be that as it may, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, All the major newspapers carried either articles by him or about this.

41:22I submitted a rebuttal. None of them would publish it. Acting on a whim, I said, let me send it to Haaretz in Israel. They published it the next day in Hebrew. So I could publish more easily in Israel than I can in the United States. Quite extraordinary. And then there was the rock heard round the world. In 2000, Zaid traveled to the Lebanese-Israeli border, soon after the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended. There's a lot of fencing at the border, and then there's like a no-man's land in between, washed towers that had been abandoned. And so people were picking up rocks and throwing it over the border.

42:04Zaid picks up a rock and throws it. A photographer snaps a photo. And then... then that picture was widely interpreted as, oh, he's an apostle of violence. And the pro-Israel crowd latched onto it, and there were calls for his removal. His removal from Columbia University, where he'd been a professor for nearly four decades by this point. Said issued a statement where he described it as, quote, a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended. The administration stood by him and told him, don't worry about it, we know who you are, we know what you stand for, and we are willing to withstand the pressure.

42:54Time is in only one direction. And in a certain sense, the actual performance of a piece of music and the flow of music, there's something so inevitable about it, right, at the same time that it's not recoverable because once you've played it, it's gone. It is this feeling of having lived through a life.

43:19Edward Said was diagnosed with cancer in 1991. He decided to use the time he had left to begin a new project based in his lifelong love of classical music. And he would do it alongside his close friend, Daniel Berenboim. Mr. Berenboim, can you remember that first meeting? What struck you about Mr. Saeed? I knew, of course, who he was and what he had written. And I found him extremely charming and very pleasant company. Daniel Berenboim is an Israeli Jewish conductor. His family emigrated from Argentina to Israel in 1952 or 1953. And when Edward bumped into him in a hotel lobby in London in the early 90s, Daniel was the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

44:11They hit it off immediately. I think the main thing is the fact that we're both passionate about music.

44:24In 1999, they decided to organize a workshop together, which would bring Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli musicians together in one orchestra to play a concert. And they would do it in a city in Germany called Weimar. Weimar is a very special city in German history. It was in East Germany, of course, but it also was the city of Goethe and Schiller. plus the fact that a few kilometers away was Buchenwald, one of the worst of the death camps. They were worried no musicians would want to be a part of the workshop, given everything happening on the ground. But they got hundreds of applications from Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian musicians.

45:12When the orchestra performed in Weimar at the end of the workshop, there were Germans playing with Israelis and with Arabs. At the moment that they were playing, in a strange sort of way, their personal identities and histories sort of dropped away. They become sort of irrelevant. And what's relevant is what they're doing towards you.

45:43After the workshop, Edward and Daniel decided to create a foundation together to make the orchestra more permanent. They called it the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. It faced some pushback. People who said that this is normalization. Normalization of dangerous realities on the ground through one small example of harmony. But for Edward... Edward said, this was the most important thing I did in my life. When Edward Said died in 2003, Mediam and Daniel teamed up to make sure the orchestra lived on. They've made space for Iranian musicians in the orchestra as well, and created a music conservatory in Berlin, Germany.

46:28In 2016, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was named a UN Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding. I came across this poem that Mahmoud Darwish, the famous Palestinian poet, his friend for many years, wrote to honor him. It's called tibaq, which means counterpoint or contradiction. And there's this moment in the poem where Darwish is imagining a conversation with Edward Said. I say, life only known by its opposite is death. It is not life. Says he, we shall live, even if life leaves us alone. We must be the masters of words that will immortalize readers. If I die before you, I urge you to cling to the impossible.

47:14I asked, is the impossible distant? He replied, a generation away. What was that impossible thing that he clung to? Liberation, I think. Maybe it's two generations away now.

47:39A Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judea and Samaria. And dozens of Israeli settlers steal in, wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks. There's no such thing as an occupation. The weekend attack on Israel by hundreds of Hamas fighters has touched off a war. Videos show militants rounding up men, women and children. More than 50 ,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. An incredible piece of important real estate. Relentless bombardment. So people have been pushed to the very brink. Children are starving. Every hospital is the sound of children screaming.

48:16Very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for these horrible, inhuman animals.

48:35Everybody asks the question, what would he have said? Nobody knows what he would have said. He always had a vision that nobody else, in my opinion, nobody else had it.

48:52And he always said, you have to keep giving the people hope. The words of Edward Said provide some measure of continuity, of struggle, some measure of maybe even desire to look for life in a time of extreme death. He was a man who really represented the possibilities of life. And he represented it not just for himself, but for the Palestinian people. Is it too soon to expect that these histories of blind prejudice and powerful fantasy can be balanced and perhaps resolved by a more enduring history of ordinary lives, of reconciliation and recognition?

49:56That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Adablui. I'm Randa Pirfetaf, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed and mastered by Jimmy Keeley. Thank you to VPRO and Levin and Workin. Thanks also to Amber C., Tony Cabin, James Heider, Nadia Lancey, Johannes Durgey, Jessica Payne, Nicolette Kahn, Katie Doggart, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughlineatnpr.org.

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