Remembering Edward Said:

The Rootless Cosmopolitan
Edward Said

by Tony Judt
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040719&s=judt

When Edward Said died in September 2003, after a decade-long battle against
leukemia, he was probably the best-known intellectual in the world.
Orientalism, his controversial account of the appropriation of the East in
modern European thought and literature, has spawned an academic
subdiscipline in its own right: A quarter of a century after its first
publication, it continues to generate irritation, veneration and imitation.
Even if its author had done nothing else, confining himself to teaching at
Columbia University in New York--where he was employed from 1963 until his
death--he would still have been one of the most influential scholars of the
late twentieth century.

But he did not confine himself. From 1967, and with mounting urgency and
passion as the years passed, Edward Said was also an eloquent, ubiquitous
commentator on the crisis in the Middle East and an advocate for the cause
of the Palestinians. This moral and political engagement was not really a
displacement of Said's intellectual attention--his critique of the West's
failure to understand Palestinian humiliation closely echoes, after all, his
reading of nineteenth-century scholarship and fiction in Orientalism and
subsequent books (notably Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993). But
it transformed the professor of comparative literature at Columbia into a
very public intellectual, adored or execrated with equal intensity by many
millions of readers.


This was an ironic fate for a man who fitted almost none of the molds to
which his admirers and enemies so confidently assigned him. Edward Said
lived all his life at a tangent to the various causes with which he was
associated. The involuntary "spokesman" for the overwhelmingly Muslim
Arabs of Palestine was an Episcopalian Christian, born in 1935 to a Baptist
from Nazareth. The uncompromising critic of imperial condescension was
educated in some of the last of the colonial schools that had trained the
indigenous elite of the European empires; for many years he was more at ease
in English and French than in Arabic and an outstanding exemplar of a
Western education with which he could never fully identify.

Edward Said was the idolized hero of a generation of cultural relativists in
universities from Berkeley to Bombay, for whom "Orientalism" underwrote
everything from career-building exercises in "postcolonial" obscurantism
("writing the other") to denunciations of "Western Culture" in the academic
curriculum. But Said himself had no time for such nonsense. Radical
anti-foundationalism, the notion that everything is just a linguistic
effect, struck him as shallow and "facile": human rights, as he observed on
more than one occasion, are not "cultural or grammatical things, and when
they are violated...they are as real as anything we can encounter."

As for the popular account of his thought that has Edward Said reading
Western writers as mere byproducts of colonial privilege, he was quite
explicit: "I do not believe that authors are mechanistically determined by
ideology, class or economic history." Indeed, when it came to the business
of reading and writing, Said was an unabashedly traditional humanist,
"despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern
critics." If there was anything that depressed him about younger literary
scholars it was their overfamiliarity with "theory" at the expense of the
art of close textual reading. Moreover, he enjoyed intellectual
disagreement, seeing the toleration of dissent and even discord within the
scholarly community as the necessary condition for the latter's survival--my
own expressed doubts about the core thesis of Orientalism were no impediment
to our friendship. This was a stance that many of his admirers from afar,
for whom academic freedom is at best a contingent value, were at a loss to
comprehend.

This same deeply felt humanistic impulse put Said at odds with another
occasional tic of engaged intellectuals, the enthusiastic endorsement of
violence--usually at a safe distance and always at someone else's expense.
The "Professor of Terror," as his enemies were wont to characterize Said,
was in fact a consistent critic of political violence in all its forms.
Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, a comparably influential intellectual for the
previous generation, Said had some firsthand experience of physical
force--his university office was vandalized and sacked, and both he and his
family received death threats. But whereas Sartre did not hesitate to
advocate political murder as both efficacious and cleansing, Said never
identified with terrorism, however much he sympathized with the motives and
sentiments that drove it. The weak, he wrote, should use means that render
their oppressors uncomfortable--something that indiscriminate murder of
civilians can never achieve.

The reason for this was not that Edward Said was placid or a pacifist, much
less someone lacking in strong commitments. Notwithstanding his professional
success, his passion for music (he was an accomplished pianist and a close
friend and sometime collaborator of Daniel Barenboim) and his gift for
friendship, he was in certain ways a deeply angry man--as the essays in this
book frequently suggest. But despite his identification with the Palestinian
cause and his inexhaustible efforts to promote and explain it, Said quite
lacked the sort of uninterrogated affiliation with a country or an idea that
allows the activist or the ideologue to subsume any means to a single end.

Instead he was, as I suggested, always at a slight tangent to his
affinities. In this age of displaced persons he was not even a typical
exile, since most men and women forced to leave their country in our time
have a place to which they can look back (or forward): a remembered--more
often misremembered--homeland that anchors the transported individual or
community in time if not in space. Palestinians don't even have this. There
never was a formally constituted Palestine. Palestinian identity thus lacks
that conventional anterior reference.

In consequence, as Said tellingly observed just a few months before his
death, "I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a
country." That, of course, is the characteristic condition of the rootless
cosmopolitan. It is not very comfortable or safe to be without a country to
love: It can bring down upon your head the anxious hostility of those for
whom such rootlessness suggests a corrosive independence of spirit. But it
is liberating: The world you look out upon may not be as reassuring as the
vista enjoyed by patriots and nationalists, but you see further. As Said
wrote in 1993, "I have no patience with the position that 'we' should only
or mainly be concerned with what is 'ours.'"

This is the authentic voice of the independent critic, speaking the truth to
power...and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority: As
Said wrote in the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram in May 2001, "whether Israeli
intellectuals have failed or not in their mission is not for us to decide.
What concerns us is the shabby state of discourse and analysis in the Arab
world." It is also the voice of the free-standing "New York intellectual," a
species now fast approaching extinction--thanks in large measure to the same
Middle Eastern conflict in which so many have opted to take up sides and
identify with "us" and "ours." (To its lasting credit, Columbia University
withstood considerable internal and public pressure to censure or even
remove Said because of his public interventions on the Palestinians'
behalf.) Edward Said, as the reader of these essays will discover, was by no
means a conventional "spokesman" for one party in that conflict.  The Munich
daily Süddeutsche Zeitung headed its obituary of Said Der
Unbequeme--"The Uncomfortable Man." But if anything, his lasting achievement
was to make others uncomfortable. For the Palestinians Edward Said was an
underappreciated and frequently irritating Cassandra, berating their leaders
for incompetence--and worse. To his critics Said was a lightning rod,
attracting fear and vituperation. Implausibly, this witty and cultivated man
was cast as the very devil: the corporeal incarnation of every threat--real
or imagined--to Israel and Jews alike. To an American Jewish community
suffused with symbols of victimhood he was a provocatively articulate
remembrancer of Israel's very own victims. And by his mere presence here in
New York, Edward Said was an ironic, cosmopolitan, Arab reminder of the
parochialism of his critics.

The essays in this book cover the period December 2000 through March 2003.
They thus take us from the end of the Oslo decade, the onset of the second
intifada and the final breakdown of the "peace process," through the Israeli
reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the massacres of September 11, 2001,
the American retaliation in Afghanistan and the long run-up to the US attack
on Iraq--a distinctly turbulent and murderous twenty-eight months. During
this time Said wrote copiously and urgently about the alarming state of
affairs in the Middle East, contributing at least one article a month, often
more, despite his worsening medical condition (to which there is no
reference in these writings until August 2002, and then only a casual,
passing allusion). All but one of the pieces collected here were contributed
to Al-Ahram. These writings are thus an opportunity for Said's Western
readers to see what he had to say to an Arab audience. What they show is
that Said in his final years was consistently pursuing three themes: the
urgent need to tell the world (above all, Americans) the truth about
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; the parallel urgency of getting
Palestinians and other Arabs to recognize and accept the reality of Israel
and engage with Israelis, especially the Israeli opposition; and the duty to
speak openly about the failings of Arab leadership.

Indeed, Said was above all concerned with addressing and excoriating his
fellow Arabs. It is the ruling Arab regimes, especially that of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, that come in for the strongest criticism
here: for their cupidity, their corruption, their malevolence and
incredulity. This may seem almost unfair--it is, after all, the United
States that has effective power, and Israel that was and is wreaking havoc
among Said's fellow Palestinians--but he seems to have felt it important to
tell the truth to and about his own people, rather than risk indulging the
"fawning elasticity with regard to one's own side that has disfigured the
history of intellectuals since time immemorial."

In the course of these essays Said recounts checklists of Israeli abuses, a
grim, depressing reminder of how Ariel Sharon's government is squeezing the
lifeblood from the quarantined Palestinian communities: Abuses against
civilians that were once regarded as criminal acts even in wartime are now
accepted behavior by a government ostensibly at peace. In Said's account
these abuses are not the accidental, unfortunate byproduct of the return to
power of a belligerent, irredentist general, but rather the
predictable--and, in Said's case, predicted--consequence of the
Palestinians' engagement in the late, unlamented "peace process" itself. For
those of us who welcomed the Oslo process and watched hopefully as it
developed over the course of the 1990s, Said's disenchanted critique is
depressing. But in retrospect it is difficult to deny that he got it right
and we were wrong. As imagined by the Israeli peace party and welcomed by
many others--Palestinians included--the Oslo process was supposed to build
confidence and trust between the two sides. Contentious issues--the
governance of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the
problem of the Jewish settlements--would be dealt with "later," in
"final-status negotiations." Meanwhile, the PLO would gain experience and
credibility in the administration of autonomous Palestinian territory, and
Israelis would live in peace. Eventually, two states--one Jewish, one
Palestinian--would live in stable proximity, their security underwritten by
the international community.

This was the premise behind the Declaration of Principles signed on the
White House lawn in September 1993. But the whole thing was deeply flawed.
As Said reminds us, there were not two "sides" to these negotiations. There
was Israel, an established modern state with an awesome military apparatus
(by some estimates the fourth-strongest in the world today), occupying land
and people seized twenty-six years earlier in war. And there were the
Palestinians, a dispersed, displaced, disinherited community with neither an
army nor a territory of their own. There was an occupier and there were the
occupied. In Said's view, the only leverage that the Palestinians had was
their annoying facticity: They were there, they wouldn't go away and they
wouldn't let the Israelis forget what they had done to them. Having nothing
to give up, the Palestinians had nothing to negotiate. To "deal" with the
occupier, after all, is to surrender--or collaborate. That is why Said
described the 1993 declaration as "a Palestinian Versailles" and why he
resigned in anticipation from the Palestine National Council. If the
Israelis needed something from the Palestinians, Said reasoned, then the
things the Palestinians wanted--full sovereignty, a return to the 1967
frontiers, the right of return, a share of Jerusalem--should be on the table
at the outset, not at some undetermined final stage. And then there was the
question of Israel's "good faith."

When the initial declaration was signed in 1993 there were just 32,750
Jewish housing units in settlements on the West Bank and Gaza. By October
2001 there were 53,121--a 62 percent increase, with more to come. From 1992
to 1996, under the Labor governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the
settler population of the West Bank grew by 48 percent, that of Gaza by 61
percent. To put it no more strongly, this steady Israeli takeover of
Palestinian land and resources hardly conformed to the spirit of Oslo.
(Article 31 of the Oslo II agreement, signed in 1995, explicitly states that
"neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status
negotiations.")

Meanwhile, even as the PLO was authorized to administer the remaining
Palestinian districts, Israel was constructing a network of "Jewish" roads
crisscrossing those same regions and giving settlers and other Israelis
exclusive access to far-flung housing units (and scarce aquifers) protected
by permanent military installations. (This had the paradoxical consequence
of segregating Jews and Arabs even as they became more economically
interdependent: Israelis relying on cheap Palestinian labor, Palestinians
dependent on Israel for jobs and access to markets.) The whole exercise was
driven forward partly by an anachronistic Israeli conflation of land with
security; partly by a post-'67 irredentist eschatology (with the Old
Testament invoked as a sort of real estate contract with a partisan God);
and partly by longstanding Zionist enthusiasm for territorial enlargement as
an end in itself. From the Palestinian point of view the effect was to make
the "Oslo process" an agonizing exercise in slow strangulation, with Gaza in
particular transformed into a virtual prison under Palestinian warders, the
Israeli army standing guard just outside the perimeter fence.

And then, in the year 2000, came the long-postponed "permanent status
negotiations" themselves: first at Camp David and then, desperately, at Taba
in the Sinai. Said, of course, had no time for the conventional American
view that President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak virtually gave
away the farm and that even then the ungrateful PLO and its leader, Yasir
Arafat, refused the gift. This is not because Said had any sympathy for
Arafat but because the original Camp David offer was--as Tanya Reinhart
described it in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot on July 8, 2001--so
palpably a fraud. The Palestinians were to get 50 percent of their own land,
chopped into separate and often non-contiguous cantons; Israel was to annex
10 percent of the land; and the remaining 40 percent was to be left
"undecided"--but under indefinite Israeli rule.
Six months later, at Taba, the Palestinians were offered an improved
territorial deal, certainly the best they could ever have hoped for from an
Israeli government. But the resulting Palestinian state would still have
been utterly dependent on Israel and vulnerable to its whims; the grievances
of Palestinian refugees were never fully addressed; and the contentious
issues of sovereignty over Jerusalem remained unresolved. Indeed, even the
last-minute Israeli concessions were still encumbered with what Said nicely
terms "conditions and qualifications and entailments (like one of the
endlessly deferred and physically unobtainable estates in a Jane Austen
novel)."

Meanwhile Barak had continued to expand the population of the very
settlements that his own negotiators recognized as a major impediment to
agreement. Even if the PLO leaders had wanted to sell the Taba discussions
to their constituents, they might have had difficulty doing so. The second
intifada, which burst out following Sharon's meticulously timed visit to the
Temple Mount, has been a disaster for the Palestinians, but it was born out
of years--the Oslo years--of frustration and humiliation. Taba, and
especially Camp David, were the bitter fruits of Oslo, and in
Edward Said's view the PLO's error in engaging the process in the first
place was well illustrated by its inevitable rejection of the outcome,
retroactively discrediting the whole strategy of negotiations. In an
Al-Ahram article of June 2002, Said is scathingly unforgiving of the PLO
apparatchiks and their leader, who for a while did rather well out of the
power they exercised as the "Vichyite" governors of occupied Palestine under
Israel's benign oversight. They were and are "a byword for brutality,
autocracy and unimaginable corruption."
In other contributions to the same newspaper, Said writes that Arafat and
his circle "have made our general situation worse, much worse."
"Palestinians (and, by extension, the other Arabs) have been traduced and
hopelessly misled by their leaders," who have neither high principles nor
practical, pragmatic strategies. "It has been years since Arafat represented
his people, their sufferings and cause, and like his other Arab
counterparts, he hangs on like a much-too-ripe fruit without real purpose or
position."

What, then, is to be done? If the Palestinian leadership is corrupt and
incompetent; if Israeli governments won't even keep faith with their own
stated commitments, much less the desires of their interlocutors; if there
is so much fear and loathing on all sides, how should the two-state solution
be implemented, now that Israelis, Palestinians and the international
community--even the Americans--all at last accept it in principle? Here,
once again, Said was at odds with almost everyone. In 1980, when he first
publicly pressed for a two-state solution, Said was attacked and abused from
all sides, not least by Arafat's own Fatah movement. Then, in 1988, the
Palestine National Council belatedly conceded that the best possible outcome
was indeed the division of Palestine into two states--one Israeli, one
Palestinian--echoing Said's insistence that there
was no alternative to reciprocal territorial self-determination for Jews and
Arabs alike. But as the years went by, with half of the occupied territories
expropriated; with the Palestinian community a shambles and the putative
Palestinian territory a blighted landscape of isolated enclaves, flattened
olive groves and ruined houses, where humiliated adults were fast losing the
initiative to angry, alienated adolescents, Said drew the increasingly
irresistible conclusion. Israel was never going to quit the West Bank, at
least not in any way that would leave it in a coherent, governable
condition. What kind of a state could the West Bank and Gaza ever
constitute? Who but a criminal mafia would ever want to take on the task of
"governing" it? The "Palestine" of PLO imaginings was a fantasy--and a
rather unappealing one at that. For good or ill, there was only going to be
one real state in the lands of historic Palestine: Israel. This was not
utopia; it was merely hard-headed pragmatism shorn of illusion. The
genuinely realistic approach lay in accepting this fact and thinking
seriously about how to make the best of it: "Much more important than having
a state is the kind of state it is." For the last decade of his life Edward
Said was an unbending advocate of a single, secular state for Israelis and
Palestinians.

That grounds did Edward Said have for his faith in a single-state solution,
a nonexclusive, secular, democratic alternative to the present impasse? In
the first place, the status quo is awful and getting worse: two peoples,
each sustained by its exclusive victim narrative, competing indefinitely
across the dead bodies of their children for the same tiny piece of land.
One of them is an armed state, the other a stateless people, but otherwise
they are depressingly similar: What, after all, is the Palestinian national
story if not a reproachful mirror to Zionism, a tale of expulsion, diaspora,
resurrection and return? There is no way to divide the disputed "homeland"
to mutual satisfaction and benefit. Little good can come of two such
statelets, mutually resentful, each with an influential domestic
constituency committed to the destruction and absorption of its neighbor.

In the second place, something fundamental has changed in the Palestinian
condition. For four decades millions of Palestinian Arabs--in Israel, in the
occupied territories, in refugee camps across the Arab world and in exile
everywhere--had been all but invisible. Their very existence was long denied
by Israeli politicians; their memory of expulsion had been removed from the
official record and passed unmentioned in history books; the record of their
 homes, their villages and their land was expunged from the very soil
itself. That, as Said noted, was why he kept on telling the same story:
"There seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story; unless you
go on telling it, it will just drop and disappear." And yet "it is very hard
to espouse for five decades, a continually losing cause." It was as though
Palestinians had no existence except when someone committed a terrorist
atrocity--at which point that is all they were, their provenance uncertain,
their violence inexplicable.

That is why the "right of return" had so central a place in all Palestinian
demands--not because any serious person supposed that Israel could take
"back" millions of refugees and their descendants, but from the deeply felt
need for acknowledgment: a recognition that the initial expulsion took
place, that a primordial wrong was committed. That is what so annoyed Said
about Oslo: It seemed to excuse or forgive the Israelis for the occupation
and everything else. But, as he wrote in Al-Ahram in March 2002, "Israel
cannot be excused and allowed to walk away from the table with not even a
rhetorical demand [my emphasis] that it needs to atone for what it did."
Attention must be paid.

But attention, of course, is now being paid. An overwhelming majority of
world opinion outside the United States sees the Palestinian tragedy today
much as the Palestinians themselves see it. They are the natives of Israel,
an indigenous community excluded from nationhood in its own homeland:
dispossessed and expelled, illegally expropriated, confined to "bantustans,"
denied many fundamental rights and exposed on a daily basis to injustice and
violence. Today there is no longer the slightest pretense by well-informed
Israelis that the Arabs left in 1948 of their own free will or at the behest
of foreign despots, as we were once taught. Benny Morris, one of the leading
Israeli scholars on the subject, recently reminded readers of the Israeli
daily newspaper Ha'aretz that Israeli soldiers did not merely expel
Palestinians in 1948-49, in an early, incomplete attempt at ethnic
cleansing; they committed war crimes along the way, including the rape and
murder of women and children.

Of course, Morris notoriously sees nothing wrong in this record--he treats
it as the collateral damage that accompanies state-building. ("I don't think
that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes," he told Ha'aretz. "You can't
make an omelet without breaking eggs.") But this brings us to the third
ground for thinking Said may be right about the chances for a single state.
Just as the Palestinian cause has begun to find favor in public opinion, and
is gaining the moral upper hand, so Israel's international standing has
precipitately collapsed. For many years the insuperable problem for
Palestinians was that they were being expelled, colonized, occupied and
generally mistreated not by French colons or Dutch Afrikaners but, in Said's
words, by the Jewish citizens of Israel, "remnants of the Nazi Holocaust
with a tragic history of genocide and persecution."

The victim of victims is in an impossible situation--not made any better, as
Said pointed out, by the Arab propensity to squeeze out from under the
shadow of the Holocaust by minimizing or even denying it. But when it comes
to mistreating others, even victims don't get a free pass forever. The
charge that Poles often persecuted Jews before, during and after World War
II can no longer be satisfactorily deflected by invoking Hitler's 3 million
Polish victims. Mutatis mutandis, the same now applies to Israel. Until the
military victory of 1967, and even for some years afterward, the dominant
international image of Israel was the one presented by its left Zionist
founders and their many admirers in Europe and elsewhere: a courageous
little country surrounded by enemies, where the desert had been made to
bloom and the indigenous population airbrushed from the picture.
Following the invasion of Lebanon, and with gathering intensity since the
first intifada of the late 1980s, the public impression of Israel has
steadily darkened. Today it presents a ghastly image: a place where sneering
18-year-olds with M-16s taunt helpless old men ("security measures"); where
bulldozers regularly flatten whole apartment blocks ("rooting out
terrorists"); where helicopters fire rockets into residential streets
("targeted killings"); where subsidized settlers frolic in grass-fringed
swimming pools, oblivious of Arab children a few meters away who fester and
rot in the worst slums on the planet; and where retired generals and Cabinet
ministers speak openly of bottling up the Palestinians "like drugged roaches
in a bottle" (former Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan) and cleansing the
land of its Arab cancer (former Housing Minister Effi Eitam).
Israel is utterly dependent on the United States for money, arms and
diplomatic support. One or two states share common enemies with Israel; a
handful of countries buy its weapons; a few others are its de facto
accomplices in ignoring international treaties and secretly manufacturing
nuclear weapons. But outside Washington, Israel has no friends--at the
United Nations it cannot even count on the support of America's staunchest
allies. Despite the political and diplomatic incompetence of the PLO (well
documented in Said's writings); despite the manifest shortcomings of the
Arab world at large ("lingering outside the main march of humanity");
despite Israel's own sophisticated efforts to publicize its case, the Jewish
state today is widely regarded as a--the--leading threat to world peace.

After thirty-seven years of military occupation, Israel has gained nothing
in security. It has lost everything in domestic civility and international
respectability, and it has forfeited the moral high ground forever.   The
newfound acknowledgment of the Palestinians' claims and the steady
discrediting of the Zionist project (not least among many profoundly
troubled Israelis) might seem to make it harder rather than easier to
envisage Jews and Arabs living harmoniously in a single state. And just as a
minority of Palestinians may always resent their Jewish neighbors, there is
a risk that some Israelis will never, as it were, forgive the Palestinians
for what the Israelis have done to them. But as Said understood, the
Palestinians' aggrieved sense of neglect and the Israelis' insistence on the
moral rectitude of their case were twin impediments to a resolution of their
common dilemma. Neither side could "see" the other. As Orwell observed in
his "Notes on Nationalism," "If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a
nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to
be true, are inadmissible."
Today, in spite of everything, there is actually a better appreciation by
some people on both sides of where--quite literally--the other is coming
from. This, I think, arises from a growing awareness that Jews and Arabs
occupy the same space and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Their fates are hopelessly entangled. Fence or no fence, the territory now
ruled by Israel can only be "cleansed" of its Arab (or its Jewish) residents
by an act of force that the international community could not countenance.
As Said notes, "historic Palestine" is now a lost cause--but so, for the
same reasons, is "historic Israel." Somehow or other, a single institutional
entity capable of accommodating and respecting both communities will have to
emerge, though when and in what form is still obscure. The real impediment
to new thinking in the Middle East, in Edward Said's
view, was not Arafat, or Sharon, or even the suicide bombers or the ultras
of the settlements. It was the United States. The one place where official
Israeli propaganda has succeeded beyond measure, and where Palestinian
propaganda has utterly failed, is in America. As Said observed in a May 2002
column for Al-Ahram, American Jews (rather like Arab politicians) live in
"extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth." Many Israelis are
terribly aware of what occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has done to
their own society (if somewhat less sensitive to its effect on others). In
the words of Haim Guri, an Israeli poet who served in the 1948 war, "Rule
over another nation corrupts and distorts Israel's qualities, tears the
nation apart, and shatters society." But most Americans, including virtually
every American politician, have no sense of any of this.

That is why Said insists in these essays upon the need for Palestinians to
bring their case to the American public rather than just, as he puts it,
imploring the American President to "give" them a state. American public
opinion matters, and Said despaired of the uninformed anti-Americanism of
Arab intellectuals and students: "It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or
Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist
colonialism for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are
complex societies not always truly represented by their governments' stupid
or cruel policies." But as an American he was frustrated above all at his
own country's political myopia: Only America can break the murderous
deadlock in the Middle East, but "what the U.S. refuses to see clearly it
can hardly hope to remedy."

Whether the United States will awaken to its responsibilities and
opportunities remains unclear. It will certainly not do so unless we engage
a debate about Israel and the Palestinians that many people would prefer to
avoid, even at the cost of isolating America--with Israel--from the rest of
the world. In order to be effective, this debate has to happen in America
itself, and it must be conducted by Americans. That is why Edward Said was
so singularly important. Over three decades, virtually single-handedly, he
wedged open a conversation in America about Israel, Palestine and the
Palestinians. In so doing he performed an inestimable public service at
considerable personal risk. His death opens a yawning void in American
public life. He is irreplaceable.