EDWARD Said was a master of provocation. Five years after his death in September 2003, the issues that he raised about the relationship between Islam and the West and about the question of Palestine continue to generate furious controversy all over the world. Endlessly re-printed, his most famous book, “Orientalism” (1978), in which he arraigned Western scholars and artists for popularizing patronizing fantasy versions of Arab culture, has been translated into more than 30 languages.
While Said was alive, there were those who would have liked to silence him, believing that the work of this Americanized Palestinian afforded an intellectual rationale for hostility to the West and helped sow the seeds of terrorism. Now that he is dead, his enemies are busy trying to eradicate what they consider to be the malign influence of his legacy; they would if they could, you feel, expunge his name from the cultural record altogether. One of his most implacable opponents, Ibn Warraq, writing in the new British magazine, Standpoint, claims that Said exploited fashionable Third-Worldism and the post-modernist repudiation of objective truth in order to perpetrate a gigantic fraud which has “bound American academics and Middle Eastern tyrants in unstated bonds of anti-American conspiracy.”
For the pseudonymous Warraq, a Westernized critic of Pakistani background, the most pernicious aspect of Said’s legacy is the contribution he made to the cult of Muslim victimhood. Author of “Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism” (2007), Warraq agrees with Nadim Al-Bitar, who maintains that for Said “all the ills of the Arab world emanate from Orientalism and have nothing to do with the socioeconomic, political and ideological makeup of the Arab lands or with the cultural and historical backwardness which stands behind it.”
FOR many of his detractors, nowhere is the cult of victimhood Said is alleged to have encouraged more prevalent than among the Palestinians, with their insistence that Israel has increasingly sought to deny their very right to exist, never mind enjoy a state of their own. What is striking, however, about most attempts to discredit Said for portraying the Palestinians as victims of Zionism is their stridency, the sense of desperation that they convey.
The truth is that the battle to focus Western public attention on the degree to which the Palestinians are being systematically oppressed by Israel, in which Said’s writings have played no small part, has in great degree been won. Except in the United States, it is now a dwindling minority that sees the Israelis as a traumatized people fighting for survival against menacing Arab neighbors. Rather, growing numbers of Westerners recognize that the “Naqba”, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948, was a monstrous injustice and that the Palestine-Israel conflict will never be resolved until it is properly addressed.
If recent attacks on Said have smacked of greater desperation than usual, it is because the “narrative” that he championed — in which the “Naqba” figures large — threatens to upstage the Zionist version of history, with its exclusive emphasis on the Nazi Holocaust and the primacy of Jewish suffering. For Zionist commentators, in a year when Israel has been celebrating its 60th birthday, it has been a source of special outrage that the Palestinian point of view has acquired such saliency. They find it intolerable that far from joining in the celebrations many, including not a few Jews, have been much more mindful of the devastating cost that the Palestinians have paid for Israel’s existence.
Nevertheless, public sympathy for the Palestinian cause has yet to come anywhere near to finding equivalent political expression; the gap in Britain, for example, between public opinion on the Middle East conflict and British foreign policy remains vast. What evidently alarms many Zionists is the possibility that the gap may begin to close. Certainly, a furious Zionist rearguard propaganda campaign is now under way to the effect that Israel and Jews in general face renewed threat of annihilation.
Standpoint is emerging as the spearhead of this effort. In addition to Ibn Warraq’s vilification of Said, the current issue includes an article by the British neoconservative Douglas Murray scoffing at the notion that British Muslims suffer more persecution than British Jews. It includes, too, a chauvinist polemic by the British rabbi, Sidney Brichto, which endorses the view of the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, that Israel’s enemies have hijacked mainstream debate about the Middle East conflict.
It is a pity that Said is not here to respond to this latest Zionist backlash. It is true that his work is being manfully carried forward by writers like the US-born Israeli, Jeff Halper, and his own nephew, Saree Makdisi, an American literary academic, like Said. Halper’s book, “An Israeli in Palestine” and Makdisi’s, “Palestine Inside Out”, both published this year, detail the sadistic intricacies of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and echo Said’s belief that the inexorable expansion of Israeli settlements has made a “one-state solution” the only viable answer to the conflict. Yet it seems unlikely that any single figure will ever occupy the role Said carved out as a supremely articulate champion of the Palestinian cause who was also an international media star. That Said’s celebrity status made his detractors livid can scarcely be doubted; here was a Palestinian who was a one-man intellectual army and who all by himself constituted a formidable counterblast to Zionist propaganda. None of this means that the criticisms his detractors level at his work are entirely without foundation. Said’s credentials as a scholar were open to question; he wrote in haste and often got things wrong. His true status was that of a literary humanist whose books, with their intellectual zest and large perspectives, powerfully challenged old orthodoxies and made people think. The charge that his work shut down debate is a slur that reflects the smallness of spirit of those who cast it.
When it comes to his position on the Palestine/Israel conflict, his critics and admirers choose to ignore that Said was far from wishing to see the destruction of the Jewish state. Indeed, it was his passionate conviction that Israelis and Palestinians could not continue to exist as “two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering”. Without a shared recognition of pain, there would never be lasting peace in the Middle East. It is this Said, the cosmopolitan intellectual anxious to discover common ground between Islam and the West, Arab and Jew, who, during a time of rampant ideological polarization, is in danger of being forgotten.
