Search

The author pays tribute to Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University and a contributor to "The Nation" who died on September 25, 2003. Born in Jerusalem to a well-off Palestinian family, educated at the best schools in Cairo and the United States, Said could have been content with his distinguished career as a professor of literature at Columbia. But as author of seminal books that factored colonialism into the Western literary canon -- including "Orientalism," one of the most influential works of intellectual history of the past three decades, and "Culture and lmperialism" -- he had a larger vision of his place in the world and his responsibilities as an Arab in the West. So he created another life, as a critic of Western imperialism and a champion of Palestinian liberation. His association with "The Nation" emblemized both his lives. He wrote articles on the Middle East and also served as music critic. He turned his lucid, elegantly erudite prose to interpreting the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. He was as passionate about his music criticism--a post serendipitously assigned him by the literary editor, who knew him as a concert-level pianist. Said considered the true role Of the artist and the intellectual in our times to be "speaking the truth to power, being a witness to persecution and suffering, and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority." A great and distinctive voice is stilled, too soon.

This article presents information regarding rights of Palestinians. The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation, none were ever turned away. The author has met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him not just for his consistent stand against discrimination but also because-he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Yasser Arafat entourage.

Just as United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan was leaving town, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was once again donning the skullcap and visiting fortified settlements and celebrating another triumph over U.S. Netanyahu does not depend on the clerical and nationalist extremists just for votes. He depends on them as allies against the Israeli left and as shock troops for the West Bank. Moreover, they are his ideological forebears. The U.S. government persists in talking as if the only difference concerned percentages of territory, and the pace at which these would be turned over to self-rule.