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The article discusses why the Palestinian Authority (PA) is facing its most serious internal challenge since it was established in 1994. A violent showdown in the Gaza Strip between competing nationalist factions has threatened to destroy the PA and domestic security after four years of uprising against Israel. The turmoil represents a critical danger, not just for Palestinian society and its dreams of a unified state, but also for Israel's plan to disengage unilaterally from Gaza. If Israel implements Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Palestinian society will fragment even more, lose the benefit of unified representation, and possibly lapse into bloody infighting. But it is not too late to change course: holding Palestinian national elections before Israel's withdrawal could prevent chaos and help establish the foundations for a democratic Palestinian state committed to peaceful relations with Israel. For all the hope that elections offer, conditions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not now conducive to holding them: the ongoing violence would make it difficult for voters to reach the ballot box. Palestinian factions must reach an understanding on a complete cease-fire during the election period. The U.S. and other international actors must ensure that the Palestinians and Israel implement their election-related commitments.

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.

The author offers opinions on Judaism and politics in Israel. It is argued that Jews of all sects in Israel should promote a sense of Jewish identity and the haredim ultra-Orthodox Jews should be more assimilated into Israeli society if the country is to develop a form of Jewish nationalism which can allow a means of settling the Arab-Israeli conflict while maintaining Israel as both a Jewish state and a democracy.