Twenty years after his death in 2003, Edward Said – a man variously known for his groundbreaking scholarship, dogged political advocacy, fine-tuned musical abilities, and serious sense of fashion – continues to inspire. This time around, Said’s words and presence appear to answer a specific need prompted by Israel’s assault on Gaza, a campaign so calculated and unrelenting that it has been ruled plausibly genocidal by the international court of justice. It’s not easy to know how one should respond to such evil, and many appear to be turning to Said as their guide.
Finding old clips of Edward Said on social media was never very difficult, but since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, Said’s ideas, quotes and archival clips have been widely disseminated across a range of books, journals and platforms.
After Columbia University suspended its campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace last November, the satirical website the Pigeon Post ridiculed Columbia, Said’s stomping ground for nearly 40 years, with Said’s very words. “Edward Said once wrote: ‘Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.’ Therefore, Columbia University is suspending Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace,” the website read, pigeon tongue planted firmly in pigeon cheek.
Gerrie Lim, the twentysomething creator of the Pigeon Post, followed it up with a TikTok explainer video about Said highlighting Columbia’s hypocrisy of once supporting Said’s right to free speech on Palestine but now curtailing students’ speech on the same topic.
In January, the academic journal Social Text published a lapidary text by Stephen Sheehi on the time when Said threw a stone at an empty Israeli watchtower from the Lebanese side of the border.
The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1996-2006, a book of Said’s key writings that I co-edited with Andrew Rubin, both of us former students of Edward’s, has seen an elevenfold increase in sales since 7 October.
On X, a 1986 conversation between Salman Rushdie and Edward Said at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts has resurfaced in various posts. In the clip, Said describes an encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States. “I was invited to a television debate with the Israeli ambassador,” Said explains, but not only would Netanyahu “not sit in the same room with me; he wanted to be in a different building, so as not to be contaminated by my presence.” Netanyahu demanded this bizarre separation, claiming that Said, as a Palestinian, wanted to kill him. “It was,” as Said notes, “really a totally absurd situation.”
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Edward Said was born to a wealthy Episcopalian Palestinian family in Jerusalem in 1935 and attended Victoria College in Cairo before enrolling in an elite prep school in Massachusetts. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Universities and a concert-level classical pianist, Said was a recognized literary scholar before the publication of Orientalism (1978), the book that changed the landscape of cultural criticism, launched new fields of study (eg postcolonial studies), and challenged western representations of non-western peoples.
Said also became the most recognizable Palestinian American in the United States, writing and appearing regularly in the media to advocate for Palestinian rights and statehood. In 1977, he was elected as an independent member to the Palestine National Council, the Palestinian parliament in exile. He resigned from the council in 1993 in protest of the secret negotiations and damaging substance of Oslo accords, which he believed would never lead to Palestinian self-determination and would instead turn the Palestinian leadership simply into “Israel’s enforcer” of the occupation. Back then, Said was often alone in his analysis, and he became a fierce critic of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, Yasser Arafat. History has since vindicated Said’s analysis.
Said’s work has been translated into dozens of languages, and his books include such classic titles as The Question of Palestine, Culture and Imperialism and his memoir Out of Place. Posthumous books also continue to be published, including a new book of poetry, Songs of an Eastern Humanist, and a forthcoming book, Said on Opera, to be published this month. After battling a rare form of leukemia for a dozen years, Said died on 25 September 2003.
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Even before 7 October, Said’s legacy held firm among Palestinians. In 2022, San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore published Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, a book of poetry by Mosab Abu Toha, the young Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said Libraries in Gaza. In it is a poem titled Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Theodor Adorno in Gaza, which reads, in part:
Dust tiptoes in a standing ovation
after the explosion.
…
Edward Said is out of place,
again:
His books fall from my shelves
Onto the broken window glass.
Palestine is also out of place:
Its map
falls off my wall.
The poem clearly references a previous attack, but since the latest assault on Gaza began, Israel has destroyed or damaged at least 13 libraries and killed at least six librarians, forcing millions more out of their homes. Abu Toha himself was recently displaced to Cairo, from where he wrote to me: “Edward paved the path for more intellectuals and writers to speak truth to power, which is all the more important now in light of the ongoing dehumanizing and racist Zionist rhetoric towards the Palestinians.”
Such dehumanizing rhetoric is unfortunately not new. It also won’t seem to go away. “Practically the only ethnic group about whom in the west racial slurs are tolerated, even encouraged, is the Arabs,” Said wrote in 1979. The claim sounds possibly hyperbolic until one recalls how the Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed vilifying the Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, as populated with unrepentant terrorists, and Thomas Friedman penned a column in the New York Times, on the same day, comparing Arabs and Iranians to insects. While unfortunately not impossible, it’s certainly difficult to imagine this level of overt bigotry for any other group in major American media outlets. Neither paper has retracted its content.
Bigoted speech is one thing Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians are dealing with today. Curtailment of their speech is another. “Reading Edward Said after October 7 is filled with a certain kind of frustration,” said Timothy Brennan, the author of Places of Mind, a recent biography of Edward Said. “Frustration that he’s not actually here to respond to the very obvious censorship that is afoot in all of the major dailies in the United States. Said could have broken through and found a hearing, at a moment when so many more people around the world are seeing for the first time what the Zionist project really is in practice.”
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One reason people have always turned to Said is his ability to articulate a moral position with a sophisticated historical sensibility. Said described the Palestinian people as “the victims of the victims”, showing how Palestinians have become inexorably part of Europe’s Jewish history, even if Palestinian “life, culture, and politics have their own dynamic and ultimately their own authenticity”. Such a move was typical of his thinking, where connection was ultimately more important than division. Said had a way of forging alliances through his political magnetism and intimate charm, a force that pulled many in (the novelist Ahdaf Soueif once described herself as “one of Edward’s 3,000 close friends”).
People listened to Said not only for his experience but also because he, unlike Netanyahu, was willing to speak to everyone, including Israeli Jews. As Najla Said, the playwright, actor and daughter of Edward Said, explained: “My father always acknowledged Jewish suffering and advocated for a way [for Palestinians and Israelis] to live together with equal rights while still being firm in his criticism of Israel.”
Said did more than acknowledge Jewish suffering, however. He also understood the damage its misuse could bring. “I do … understand as profoundly as I can, the fear felt by most Jews that Israel’s security is a genuine protection against future genocidal attempts on the Jewish people,” Said explains in The Question of Palestine, published in 1979. “But … there can be no way of satisfactorily conducting a life whose main concern is to prevent the past from recurring. For Zionism, the Palestinians have now become the equivalent of a past experience reincarnated in the form of a present threat. The result is that the Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to that fear, which is a disaster for them and for Jews.”
It all makes him sound very contemporary, as does the way that Said connected the Palestinian national movement to other anticolonial struggles across the world. “Every single state or movement in the formerly colonized territories of Africa and Asia today identifies with, fully supports, and understands the Palestinian struggle,” he wrote in The Question of Palestine. “In many instances, there is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experiences of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists.”
Younger readers especially continue to gravitate to this global, antiracist message. “Said’s analysis of the west, particularly its approach to the east as an exercise of power and control, is alive in a lot of the content I see on my FYP [For You Page on TikTok] these days,” Lim, of the Pigeon Post, explained. “More and more young people are questioning America, the west and our assumptions,” they said. “Younger generations are critical of western media bias, such as that of the New York Times. There’s a hunger for narratives that come directly from Palestinians themselves, such as Said.”
Lim joked that Said “probably would have been popular on TikTok – just imagine a page that’s half analysis, half piano content. Or maybe talking while he played piano. People would eat that up.” Brennan too believed Said would be “tickled by the attention” he’s now receiving on social media and that Said was always interested in multimedia storytelling, citing Said’s book-length photo essay After the Last Sky as an example.
But what if the reason for Said’s seemingly timeless appeal has less to do with his own talents and moral courage and more to do with the persistent denial of the Palestinian quest for freedom? What Said wrote 35 years ago can sound like it was written yesterday, such as this excerpt from An Open Letter to American-Jewish Intellectuals, composed in 1989: “I cannot understand how raw, naked evidence can be overridden by American intellectuals just because the ‘security’ of Israel demands it,” Said wrote.
“But it is overridden or hidden no matter how overpoweringly cruel, no matter how inhuman and barbaric, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims what it is doing. To bomb a hospital; to use napalm against civilians; to require Palestinian men and boys to crawl, or bark, or scream ‘Arafat is a whore’s son’; to break the arms and legs of children; to confine people in desert detention camps without adequate space, sanitation, water or legal charge; to use teargas in schools: All these are horrific acts, whether they are part of a war against ‘terrorism’ or the requirements of security. Not to note them, not to remember them, not to say, ‘Wait a moment: Can such acts be necessary for the sake of the Jewish people?’ is inexplicable, but it is also to be complicit in these acts. The self-imposed silence of intellectuals who possess, in other cases and for other countries, supremely fine critical faculties is stunning.”
Reading these lines, you might believe Said is a prophet. How else could his decades-old words sound like they’ve been ripped from this morning’s headlines? In truth, it’s not that Said was prescient – it’s that Palestinian dispossession continues, that the Israeli occupation remains, that justice for Palestinians is as elusive as ever. If anything has changed, it’s the scale of the violence, but not the violence itself.
Reading Said reminds us of the necessity of standing against oppression everywhere, of discovering an ethical position that translates into action, and of adopting skepticism before partisanship. “Never solidarity before criticism,” as Said was fond of saying, just as he often talked about Palestine being the “touchstone” for human rights globally today.
If new generations are discovering Edward Said, in the process, they’re finding out how the question of Palestine can guide their larger principles. And they’re also witnessing the unconscionable. Large-scale death from the air, starvation as a weapon of war, western complicity with a plausible genocide, and a people abused beyond what any reasonable person could bear. It’s a lot to digest, and it leads to the one lesson about Palestine that no one, not even Edward Said, can ever really prepare you for. Palestine will save your soul, but it will also break your heart.
