The Question of Palestine was first published in 1979, the same year the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Shah of Iran was deposed and Islamist militants seized and held Mecca’ Grand Mosque for two weeks. In Robert Lacey’s Inside the Kingdom he identifies these three events as sowing the seeds of the bitter harvest now being reaped in the Middle East. The Question of Palestine was written too close to 1979 to grasp the significance of these events, but it remains prescient and compelling albeit inevitably partisan.
Said was more exercised by the Camp David accords by which Egypt got back the Sinai.
At the heart of the book is anger, distilled by Said’s phenomenal intelligence, at the double standard applied by the West to various crimes committed by the various sides in the never-ending violence which characterises the Middle East. Said is of course the author of the renowned Orientalism which clinically surveyed Western cultures determined othering of non-Christian civilisation and a dreaded post-modernist to boot so various western sacred cows are up for slaughter.
What Said does show is that the legal and moral foundation of the Zionist project which led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 were predicated on a systemic denial of agency or legitimacy to the indigenous Arab population. But as Said also makes clear, this had been the modus operandi of European colonialism for centuries.
What Said does not do is try to assess whether the fact of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s attempt to destroy European Jewry operated to change this moral calculus. He is of course perfectly aware of the problem: ‘… in trying to deal with what Zionism has suppressed about the Palestinian people one also abuts the whole disastrous problem of anti Semitism …’.
Within this new edition is a foreword by Saree Makdisi, nephew of Edward Said. The Question of Palestine remains a sophisticated and compelling argument against colonialism – and as the bombs keep dropping in Gaza it’s clear this issue is not going away.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935. In 1951 he attended a private preparatory high school in Massachusetts, America and he went on to study at Princeton University for his BA and at Yale for his MA and PhD. He became University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Said was bestowed with numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice received Columbia’s Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association.
He is best known for describing and critiquing ‘Orientalism’ and his book on the subject was published in 1978. He died in 2003.
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