◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Question of Palestine I am Edward Said. I was born in Jerusalem in 1935, when Jerusalem was still Palestine. My family fled to Cairo in 1948 during the Nakba, when three-quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from their homes. I never went home. There was no home to go to. I came to America. I attended Princeton and Harvard then taught at Columbia until my death from leukemia in 2003. I wrote the book Orientalism, 1978. It argued that when the West studied the East, it did not study a place. It studied a mirror — what the West needed the East to be in order to dominate it. The East was portrayed as sensual and cruel and irrational and childlike and violent — this was not a description. It was a permission. Every colonizing project needs a story about the people it colonizes. Orientalism was not mere prejudice. Prejudice is careless. This was careful — a library, a discipline, a science, built over centuries by scholars and poets and generals, and its authority was that it called itself knowledge. I wrote The Question of Palestine in 1979. Before my book, the American discussion of Palestine mostly did not include Palestinians. We were a demographic problem, a security concern. We were not people who had houses and gardens and lemon trees. I wrote so that the Palestinian could appear in your language as a human being. For this I received death threats. My office at Columbia was firebombed. I was called the professor of terror. I kept teaching. I kept writing. I have watched from where I am now what has happened to my people since I died. I have watched Gaza destroyed. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps bombed. Starvation of children as an instrument of policy. Entire families erased by a single strike. Your president and congress sending the weapons and writing the checks. Your universities silencing students who protested and firing professors who named it. You will not hear me sanction the violence of October 7, 2023. I was against the killing of Israeli civilians for the same reason I was against the killing of Palestinian civilians — because the killing of civilians is the killing of civilians, and no political framework justifies it. I criticized Arafat and Hamas and every party that pretended murder was resistance. My position was consistent, and it was inconvenient to everyone. What has happened in Gaza since is not a response to October 7. It is what October 7 was used to permit. And Orientalism made it permissible. Someone had to first believe that Palestinian lives are worth less than other lives — worth less counting, worth less naming, worth less mourning. I could see all this because I was an exile. To lose your home is a wound that never closes. But exile is also a way of seeing. Belonging fully to no country, the exile cannot mistake any country for the natural order of the world. He lives in two histories at once and lets neither silence the other. I learned to think in counterpoint — the history of the dispossessed held beside the history of the powerful, both audible, neither erased. That is what the intellectual is for. The intellectual's task is to speak truth to power. Not to explain power. Not to advise power. Not to be admired by power. Most intellectuals serve the empire. A few refuse. The intellectual is an amateur, not an expert. Amateur means one who loves. The professional says what she is paid to say. The amateur says what she believes to be true. I loved music. In 1999 with Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim I founded a youth orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan. Young Israeli and Arab musicians playing the European repertoire together. They rehearse together. They eat together. They fight. They play. Every day the orchestra plays, the two peoples are shown to be capable of what their politicians insist is impossible. At the end I wrote about late style — what artists discover when they know they are dying. It does not console. It stays with the contradictions. My late style was to keep telling the truth about my people while I was dying, without softening it, without pretending it would end well. Do the work of the intellectual. Speak truth to power. Play music with the person your rulers have told you to hate. Say Palestinian and mean a person. I was Palestinian. I was American. I was both my whole life. Do not forget.