The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

     The Question of Palestine felt like an important read after October 7 and the ensuing Israeli action in Gaza. Looking back on all the books I've read there are obviously quite a few about Israel-Palestine, but I wanted to read something by Edward Said since I never had. This book was an interesting read at the current time. One aspect of it is classic, that "Two things are certain: the Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will also remain." But because of the date of its publication (originally 1979, my edition 1992) there are aspects that feel very dated. For example, the first edition of the book came out before Hamas or Hezbollah existed, and before the First Intifada. My edition was released before Oslo, Rabin's Assassination, and the Second Intifada. All of this, of course, before October 7. I think that since Said's writing, the conflict has become much more religious and fundamentalist in nature, and it feels like things were much more resolvable when the book was written since it was a more secular conflict.

    Said is also a more or less fair writer. He acknowledges the Jewish claim to Palestine, something that seems unlikely to hear today from those on the Palestinian side. But he is still a fervent pro-Palestinian. He also conspicuously starts his history of the region with, "Palestine became a predominantly Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century." It goes without saying that it is more than a little dishonest to ignore the two thousand years of Jewish history on the land that preceded it, let alone the centuries of Christian history.

    A critical argument of Said's, which later became accepted, was that the PLO should be treated as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. I can see why this was so important at the time. It is important to the development of national identity to have a national government, and until 1967, the Arabs of Palestine were divided between Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. It would help to have one government. And for exactly that reason, Israel was very reluctant to treat with anyone claiming to be the representative of "Palestine," since that might concede that "Palestinians" exist.

    The central point of the book is a true one. It is that

Much of the despair and pessimism that one feels at the whole Palestinian-Zionist conflict is each side's failure in a sense to reckon with the existential power and presence of another people with its land, its emotional and political investment in that land, and worse, to pretend that the Other is a temporary nuisance that given time and effort (and punitive violence from time to time), will finally go away.

He goes on to say that, "even so, one must be able to discriminate between an invading, dispossessing, and displacing political presence and the presence it invades, displaces, and dispossesses." There I would say Said strays from truth and enters polemic. And he even contradicts himself, as he has moments of much clearer thought in which he acknowledges that it is not so simple, and that there is a big difference between the conflict in Palestine and the "uncomplicated" conflict in South Africa. It is unavoidable that the Jews returned to Israel as refugees, just as it is unavoidable that plenty of people were already living there. He even understands that Palestinians may feel antiracist, but struggle since their opponents are the "greatest victims of racism in history."

    Said proposes that the better way to analyze the situation is from a "human rights view of their common situation, as opposed to a strictly national perspective on it." While I agree that a strictly national perspective is not ideal, I find myself more convinced that rights are better protected by nations, in the vein of the Hannah Arendt I've read recently. And in Israel and Palestine, I see very little desire from anyone to protect another's rights as a human, but instead to protect them as a matter of their membership in the larger group.

    I also sense a contradiction in Said's Palestinian nationalism and sympathies towards Pan-Arabism. It feels sometimes that Said would rather have a perfect world in which all Arabs were united in a Nasserist vision. Maybe that is not actually his position, but I detect some excitement about that in his brief allusions to it. Yet in the present, he was an active Palestinian nationalist, which would further fracture the Arab world. Israel, of course, faces a similar dilemma. It is in the Israeli interest that Palestinians consider themselves Arabs, so that they would more easily resign themselves to leaving Israel and Palestine to go to other Arab countries. Yet, Israel had to cut off the Palestinians from the rest of the Arab world to keep the Arab countries out of Israel. By the end of the twentieth century, Israel was successful in the latter but not the former. Israel made peace with Jordan and Egypt and found a livable arrangement with others, but the cost was the development of a true Palestinian identity that will probably be impossible for Israel to eliminate.