Edward Said and the Question of Palestine

Edward Said brought the question of Palestine into the American mainstream. He taught at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, and today, more than two decades after his death, pro-Palestine student protesters on that campus and others have invoked his name. Meanwhile, his interviews circulate on social media and his books are taught at universities around the world. On this episode: the story of the man who pushed for recognition of the Palestinian perspective, the pushback he faced, and the dangers he foresaw. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline http://plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Imagine it's the year 1982. You've just turned on the TV. You're flipping through channels. And then this generic Arabian melody catches your ear.

• 0:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  So you linger. A grainy, black and white video shows a man flying across the screen on a floating carpet. Suddenly, it cuts to a belly dancer bedazzled in red and yellow sequins, spinning around as a sheer orange scarf envelops her. Cut again. A forlorn face, hunched over in a dark, black shroud, only one eye peering out. Cut. A man in a white turban with furrowed brows stares intensely, angrily, back at you. And then, as this visual collage continues, you hear a voice.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  The Orient. The mysterious East. A place of fantasy, imagination, desire.

• 1:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  The voice belongs to a man named Edward Said, and he's narrating this documentary on PBS called "The Shadow of the West."

• 1:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said was himself from the so-called Orient, the Middle East.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I was born in Jerusalem, when it was part of a country called Palestine. By 1948, when Palestine became Israel, all my family had left. My birthplace is now inaccessible to me. For many hundreds of thousands of my fellow Palestinians, their native towns, villages, farms are inaccessible to them.

• 1:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  For a lot of people tuning in, this might have been the first time they're hearing someone called a Palestinian talk about a place called Palestine in English on their TV. It wasn't a common thing to see in the 80s, and Edward Said might not have been what they expected.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  He had like a pocket watch that he would use to check the time, wrote with a fountain pen, very well dressed.

• 2:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Think tweed jacket, no turban or kaffiyah in sight.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  He exuded a kind of old European charm.

• 2:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  He had two pianos and loved playing from the time he was a kid. Classical music was the soundtrack of his life: Beethoven, Mozart, Bach.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Music has curative powers. You're taken outside of yourself. I mean, there's a state of almost ecstasy.

• 2:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it was this person who, in the second half of the 20th century, took it on as his mission to explain Palestine to the West. For nearly 30 years, you could find him narrating documentaries on TV, lecturing on college campuses, writing for The New York Times, engaging politicians. And in the US, he became...

• 3:11Speaker 04

  The most distinguished and certainly the best-known representative of the Palestine struggle for national independence, for liberation.

• 3:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today...

• 3:23Speaker 05

  I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians.

• 3:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  The conversation around Palestinians remains fraught.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians.

• 3:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  The situation on the ground is worse than ever.

• 3:45Speaker 06

  Hunger, hunger, hunger. There is hunger in Gaza. There is humiliation. You bring me aid to kill me.

• 3:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Columbia University, where Edward Said taught from 1963 until his death in 2003, has been the epicenter of the student protest movement.

• 4:05Speaker 07

  Tense and dramatic standoff here at Columbia University.

• 4:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  And its crackdown.

• 4:09Speaker 07

  The school gave permission to the NYPD to remove pro-Palestine demonstrators.

• 4:14Speaker 08

  Columbia University is caving to the Trump administration. A former Columbia grad student, Mahmoud Khalil, was at a federal immigration court.

• 4:21Speaker 09

  Among the scattered belongings that were left behind on the lawn were a few rumble Palestinian flags, some sleeping bags, and a copy of "Culture and Imperialism" by Edward Said.

• 4:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Though he passed more than 20 years ago, Said is still present in that conversation. Student protesters invoked his name with signs like this.

• 4:45Speaker 10

  Columbia, why require me to read Professor Edward Said if you don't want me to use it?

• 4:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  His books are still taught in university classrooms across the world.

• 4:54Speaker 11

  When it comes to understanding the Middle East as a Westerner, there is perhaps no concept more important than Edward Said's Orientalism. I mean, it was literally the first thing I was taught in a university lecture.

• 5:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  His interviews have been circulating on social media, sparking conversations there.

• 5:12Speaker 12

  Think about Edward Said today because we're living in an era where politicians are being asked to step down for speaking up against genocide and being concerned.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  The period we're living in is not the clash of civilizations, but the clash of definitions.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  He was very adamant about understanding the human in all of the complexity.

• 5:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the life of Edward Said, the man who brought the question of Palestine into the mainstream, the pushback he got for doing that, and the dangers he foresaw that laid a path towards the current moment.

• 6:03Speaker 13

  Hello, this is Lisa Malloy from Charlestown, New Hampshire. You're listening to The Reel Line from NPR.

• 6:08Speaker 00

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• 7:13Speaker 14

  Part One.

• 7:15Speaker 14

  The Professor.

• 7:20Speaker 14

  The first time I met him was in 1967. This is Medhiam Saeed. I am the widow of the late Edward Saeed. I knew one of his sisters from the American University of Beirut. She was a classmate. She'd had a horseback riding accident. So I went to visit her in the hospital. And he was there drinking Coke and eating popcorn. Or chips, I don't recall. And I walked in and he said, oh, good. Here's your friend. Now I can leave. And he walked out.

• 8:03Speaker 14

  Two years later, I happened to meet him in Beirut.

• 8:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  What was different about that time that made you connect with him?

• 8:10Speaker 14

  I don't know, but I noticed that he was looking at me.

• 8:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  They started to talk. She knew Edward Said was a tweed jacketed professor of literature at Columbia University. But she learned that he'd been born in Jerusalem, while Medium had been born and raised not so far away, in Beirut, Lebanon. Both of their childhoods were shaped by the founding of Israel in 1948. Both of them had been star students in school. And the more they talked, the more connected they felt.

• 8:41Speaker 14

  We talked mostly about politics.

• 8:51Speaker 15

  On June 5th, 1967, the Israelis decided to strike first.

• 8:57Speaker 14

  The 1967 War.

• 9:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Also known as the Six-Day War. After Egypt mobilized its military, Israel launched a surprise attack against all of Egypt's air force bases.

• 9:09Speaker 16

  At the frontier of the Gaza Strip, just a mere kilometer away.

• 9:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Egypt, Jordan, and Syria responded with force.

• 9:17Speaker 16

  They've been here all day, and they began this war this morning at around 6 o'clock.

• 9:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  But with the shock of the surprise attack and help from American weapons, Israel had the upper hand. And six days later...

• 9:30Speaker 14

  The whole war was lost.

• 9:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Arab states accepted a ceasefire. Israel seized control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Although by international recognition, there are Palestinian territories that are supposedly sovereign, Israeli troops arrogate to themselves the right to militarily occupy it with no intention of leaving.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  The world I knew was shattered.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  There was a need for an Arab voice. I mean, all we heard was the triumphalism of Israel, the triumph of the West.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  The chorus was deafening.

• 10:21Speaker 17

  Israeli Prime Minister Levi Ashkow must be the proudest man in the world.

• 10:27Speaker 17

  Sixty fantastic hours in which the Israeli forces have routed the armed might of their Arab neighbours.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  I think that the general consensus is that, you know, he was an apolitical man who was politicized by the setback of 1967.

• 10:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Timothy Brennan.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  The book that I wrote is called Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.

• 10:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  The first comprehensive biography of Edward Said.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Most of his students back before 1967 say that we all knew he was Palestinian, we all knew that he had his commitments to the Palestinian independence movement, but he just hadn't really kind of expressed it. Suddenly, he's moved to activism. But he doesn't know how.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Your history is a result of a huge jumble of traces left inside you.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Then I think what you have to do is to convert these traces into a narrative.

• 11:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said spent his early years in the late 1930s and 40s, going back and forth between what was then called Palestine and Cairo. And then, suddenly,

• 11:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  he was cut off from his family home in Jerusalem. He watched as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including some of his family members, were forced to flee their homes after the State of Israel was created in 1948.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  His aunt played a very active role in receiving and caring for the huge number of Palestinians who were forced out.

• 12:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  But on the other hand, he was living a life of privilege in Cairo.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Opera, lush parks and tropical gardens and horse riding and polo and tennis courts and so on.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  He lived with this deep contradiction at the core of his experience.

• 12:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  There were actually several contradictions at play in his life. The Saeeds were a Christian family, part of a small religious minority in a majority Muslim country. Saeed was baptized in the Church of England, but lived in Egypt, a country that the British had colonized. Saeed spoke English at home, not Arabic.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  He literally dreamt in more than one language.

• 12:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  And those contradictions all came with him when he moved to the US for school as a teenager.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  This is the world that he grew up in.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  We can break out of the confinement, to use a phrase from Foucault, and enter a community where we are as the others are. The important thing is to overcome separation.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Philosophically, I think separation is an instrument of power designed to keep the inferior inferior. And so I want to overcome that, through music, through literature, through thought.

• 13:45Speaker 15

  The legacy of the Six Day War is a bitter occupation. Two people with the same claim on the same homeland.

• 13:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the wake of the 1967 war, Saeed traveled to the Middle East, trying to understand what it meant.

• 14:03Speaker 14

  How it is seen from a Jordanian perspective, how it is seen from a Lebanese perspective. He had read a lot of stuff that Israelis had put up.

• 14:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  And when he came back to his apartment in New York, he found the American perspective was shifting too.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  The post-67 cultural moment in the United States is also the moment when the United States becomes much more pro-Israel.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  And in that regard, it became much more dismissive of anything Palestinian.

• 14:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Mustafa Beyyumi, a professor at Brooklyn College, who's also a former student of Said and co-editor of the Edward Said Reader.

• 14:48Speaker 18

  Every so often, the Middle East rushes out into attention with a clutch of headlines. Whenever some Arab potentate puts the squeeze on America for higher oil prices.

• 14:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  The US was becoming more dependent on Middle Eastern oil at the same time that it was ramping up its military and financial support to Israel.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  The stereotype of the Arabs loomed larger and larger by the hour in the United States.

• 15:16Speaker 18

  Word spreads quickly, an Arab has attacked a Jew with a knife. Armed Jewish vigilantes rush up, offering unwanted help.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  And there's no space in between for who the people really were, and especially what the situation was for Palestinians.

• 15:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Palestinians in the occupied territories were living under Israeli military rule. Some Israelis began to build settlements there, which the UN would eventually deem illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. And throughout the Middle East, Palestinian refugees felt the Arab nations had failed them, treating them as second-class citizens.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  It was an existential question, really, to claim one's Palestinian-ness in the post-67 moment.

• 16:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  A Palestinian national movement began to gain momentum.

• 16:04Speaker 19

  Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country.

• 16:18Speaker 20

  This was the scene at the Zarqa airstrip in Jordan recently, when the massive pall of smoke from three blazing airliners told a world which needed no reminding that the Palestinian guerrillas meant business.

• 16:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then, beginning in 1968.

• 16:34Speaker 14

  The idea of kidnapping planes happened.

• 16:39Speaker 20

  The planes had all been hijacked by the guerrillas a week earlier.

• 16:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  When he heard about the hijackings, Said told Meriem.

• 16:47Speaker 14

  It is a mistake. In the long run, it's a mistake.

• 16:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  The hijacking of the planes, sort of armed resistance wing of the movement, arguably gave a lot of fodder to people in the US government who could cast the entire movement in that light as being a terrorist movement, right? So he saw that, even in that moment.

• 17:12Speaker 14

  Yeah, he always saw things others did not see.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  He tries to make the argument that the way forward is political, not military.

• 17:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a man named Yasser Arafat, was emerging as the movement's leader. But he mostly spoke Arabic. And in public appearances, he wore a kaffiyah and army fatigues. He wasn't exactly relatable to the average American. And Said, who was living in the US and wasn't part of the PLO, thought he could help the movement by trying...

• 17:47Speaker 04

  To humanize Arafat for the American public.

• 17:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1974, Arafat was scheduled to give a talk at the UN on behalf of the Palestinian liberation movement. This was a huge deal. It was the first time Arafat would be before the world advocating for Palestinians.

• 18:07Speaker 14

  It was mostly written, apparently, by Mahmoud Darwish in Arabic.

• 18:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Mahmoud Darwish, known as Palestine's national poet. But they needed an English version of the speech to give to the people in the room and to broadcast on TV and radio. There was already a rough translation, but they needed someone to really bring it to life.

• 18:29Speaker 14

  And they had 48 hours before he was supposed to deliver it.

• 18:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said's travels around the Middle East had connected him with people on the front lines of the movement. And his reputation as a man who had a way with words had spread. So they called him.

• 18:46Speaker 14

  And said, "You have to translate it for us."

• 18:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said holed up in a room with an editor and got to work.

• 18:54Speaker 14

  I had the privilege of typing because nobody knew how to type except me. And...

• 19:02Speaker 14

  Finally, it was finished around 3:00 in the morning.

• 19:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  They sent a car to deliver the translation just in time for Arafat to take the podium in front of the UN.

• 19:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said's translation let the world understand Arafat's message.

• 19:23Speaker 21

  Mr. President, those who call us terrorists wish to prevent world public opinion from discovering the truth about us and from seeing the justice on our faces.

• 19:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  At the end of the speech, Arafat says, "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a Freedom Fighters gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

• 19:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  I repeat, do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

• 20:07Speaker 14

  The olive branch. People say that it was Edmond's idea.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And I was, I think, one of the first to realize that a good part of our war against Israeli occupation would have to be in the West, in the Western mind.

• 20:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  My troubles began then, in the early '70s.

• 20:43Speaker 13

  Hi, this is Maria Montalvo from Chicago, Illinois. You are listening to Throughline at AMPira.

• 20:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

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• 21:58Speaker 10

  Part Two: The Spokesman.

• 22:03Speaker 14

  He never, ever thought that it will shake the world.

• 22:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1978, Edward Said published a new book called Orientalism. And at the time, a lot was happening in the Middle East.

• 22:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  The West Bank and Gaza remained under Israeli occupation. Civil war was raging in Lebanon, where the PLO was based. Egypt would soon sign a treaty with Israel, normalizing relations between the two countries. Iran was on the brink of an Islamic revolution. And in the US, the shadow of Vietnam loomed large.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Everybody who has been dominated by a colonial system in some way, shape, or form sees themselves in that book.

• 22:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Said's former graduate student, Mustafa Beyyumi.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  In Europe, the Orient is the so-called East, Muslim Middle East.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  What's important about that Orient, among other things, of course, is it's right there. It's right next to Europe.

• 23:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  And this is Said's biographer, Timothy Brennan.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Its proximity is precisely why there's an attempt, Edward is complaining, to try to create a wall, a cultural wall.

• 23:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said writes, "For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the 17th century, the Ottoman peril lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger."

• 23:40Speaker 04

  The Orientalists that he's referring to in the title of the book are these French and English 19th century scholars who studied the Orient.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  This writing was an organized form of writing, like an organized science, you know, what I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up, you know, the sensual woman who's there to be sort of used by the man. The East is a kind of mysterious place, full of secrets and monsters.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  What Edward is trying to say, I think, is that there's a lot of mischief that happens in the act of representation, that you can create a reality that has no correspondence to another reality.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  What interested Said is the way those ideas just keep on replicating themselves.

• 24:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then you end up with Aladdin.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Then you end up...

• 24:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  A century later.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 24:33Speaker 23

  Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam. Where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home.

• 24:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said continues, "Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend, or both, the majority of the world's resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being."

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom.

• 25:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Then the book turns to Said's birthplace.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Its inhabitants, inconsequential nomads, possessing no stable claim to the land, and therefore, no cultural permanence.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Who are the Palestinians? Where are the Palestinians? They don't exist.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  You know, so many of the people who call themselves Israelis come from Russia, and the United States, and from Europe.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  This war between peoples is, I believe, inextricably entangled with the fantasies, dreams, and ambitions of the West to rule and possess the East.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  To some extent, the state of Israel itself has been created and sustained by those fantasies, dreams, and ambitions.

• 26:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  The book made waves, and had plenty of critics. Some prominent British historians, like Bernard Lewis, thought his views were reductive, flattening the West while flattering the East.

• 26:12Speaker 24

  The answer to a stereotype is not, of course, a negative stereotype.

• 26:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Some academics from the East thought his focus on culture and identity overlooked the role of capitalism in all of this. Some said he minimized the complex identities and historical experiences of people within the Islamic Middle East, especially minorities like Christians, Kurds, and Jews. But Said also had defenders, including within the American Jewish community.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  He was a great lover of the book, "The Non-Jewish Jew", by Isaac Deutcher, who made the case that one of the reasons why there's this universalist defense of justice, and a kind of an attack on tribalist modes of thinking among so many great Jews in history, Spinoza, or Trotsky, or Rosa Luxemburg, or...

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Noam Chomsky in our own day has to do with their marginal status and the fact that they had known oppression.

• 27:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Not long after Orientalism came out, Said was preparing his next manuscript, this time a book all about Palestine. He said he hoped to make clear, quote, "the Palestinian interpretation of Palestinian experience." But when Said came back to the publisher with a draft building on his ideas in Orientalism.

• 27:35Speaker 14

  About Europe and its relationship to the Jews and to Zionism with antisemitism.

• 27:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  The antisemitism of Europeans.

• 27:45Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 27:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  And describing the collision between Zionism and the Palestinians from the Palestinian perspective. The publisher was like.

• 27:54Speaker 14

  This is not what we wanted you to write.

• 27:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's a dead end. And Said would be rejected again before he finally found a publisher willing to print it. In 1979, The Question of Palestine hit bookshelves. And not only did it feature the Palestinian story, it proposed a vision for a future Palestinian state.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  We realize that we are being asked to pay the price for what happened to the Jews in Europe under the Holocaust. It was an entirely Christian and European catastrophe. And we are being dispossessed. We've become the victims of the victims. But not all of us say, well, they should be thrown out. So we have another vision, which is a vision of coexistence in which Jew and Arab can live together, which I think it requires a kind of creativity and invention that is possible.

• 29:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Throughout the 1980s, Edward Said did everything in his power to convert his vision of a two-state solution into reality.

• 29:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Even as violence intensified in the region.

• 29:14Speaker 25

  Israel launches a major assault into southern Lebanon. I think we are seeing in Lebanon now the development of some fringe groups that have some Iranian influence.

• 29:23Speaker 26

  Meanwhile, civil unrest is continuing in the Israeli occupied Gaza Strip. Three more Palestinians were shot by Israeli troops.

• 29:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Zaid acted as a liaison between American officials and the PLO, a role he'd reluctantly played ever since the late 1970s, when Egypt's president named him the Palestinian representative to peace talks between Egypt and Israel.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  I opened the door one day and I found 300 journalists outside my door, and my whole life was transformed.

• 29:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  But for the Palestinian struggle, he didn't believe high-level talks between officials was going to be enough.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  He writes constantly to friends back here in the United States complaining about the disorganization of the PLO leadership and how to advance the struggle.

• 30:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  He believed the narrative about Palestinians needed to change in the minds of the American public and politicians, and it would be an uphill climb.

• 30:22Speaker 27

  I think it's about time we stop those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There's no apology to be made, none.

• 30:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's then-Senator Joe Biden, expressing a view it was normal to hear on the floor of Congress and see in the pages of the New York Times.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  I think that the one group that probably captured his ire more than any other group in the United States was liberals. It was the liberal establishment that vaunted the state of Israel.

• 31:02Speaker 27

  It is the best $3 billion investment we make.

• 31:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  So how would he change the narrative? With a pen and his voice.

• 31:12Speaker 14

  I remember the first talk I went with him, there was a lawyer from Haifa, and he was going to debate him.

• 31:23Speaker 14

  Edward fell apart. When we left, he threw up.

• 31:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  But he kept going. He wrote for newspapers and magazines, went on talk shows, hosted documentaries, and agreed to debates. In the mid-eighties.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  I was to supposedly debate the Israeli ambassador.

• 31:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  The ambassador to the United Nations, named Benjamin Netanyahu.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And then I found the most extraordinary thing, that not only would he not sit in the same room with me, he wanted to be in a different building, so as not to be contaminated.

• 31:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  There is no recording of the debate, but according to Edward Said, this is how it went down. They eventually ended up on a stage together, sitting in silence. And when the presenter said to the audience.

• 32:07Speaker 25

  Professor Said and Ambassador Netanyahu refused to speak to each other.

• 32:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said interjected.

• 32:13Speaker 25

  No, no, I'm perfectly willing to speak to him.

• 32:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  The presenter then asked Netanyahu.

• 32:18Speaker 25

  Mr. Ambassador, why don't you speak to Professor Said?

• 32:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Netanyahu responded.

• 32:24Speaker 25

  Because he wants to kill me.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  The whole thing was totally absurd.

• 32:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said is basically acting as the kind of unofficial spokesperson for the movement.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Very much so, yeah, very much so.

• 32:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is a professor at Columbia University, one of the most elite universities in the US, and he faced a lot of heat for this, right? I mean, he was investigated by the FBI. How did he navigate the political firestorm of being so vocal on the question of Palestine and Palestinian identity at a time when it wasn't very common to do that?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  His whole life was spent poring over how one needs to speak and how one needs to write in order to cross that unbridgeable chasm between the world of art and aesthetics and the world of political confrontation.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  The worst aspect of it is, of course, the occasional threat of violence. I mean, my office has been raided and vandalized. I've received death threats. And I suppose, in general, I do feel, given the atmosphere surrounding Palestine and Palestinians in New York in particular, I do feel as if I'm a delinquent. Sort of before anything gets going, I am somehow guilty as charged.

• 34:02Speaker 14

  It was very scary sometimes. But we lived with it. I don't know how, but we lived with it.

• 34:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said and Mediam had two children by this point, and the threat of violence hung over all of them.

• 34:16Speaker 14

  You remember Kahane? He was threatened by the Kahane people.

• 34:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Mayor Kahane was a far-right American rabbi who founded the militant Jewish Defense League in the U.S. and then moved to Israel and founded a political party that pushed for the expulsion of Palestinians.

• 34:34Speaker 11

  There is no Palestine, no Palestinians. There never was, there never will be. They're Arabs, and let them go live in Jordan.

• 34:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  During the '80s, you could find him lecturing on college campuses or talking on CNN.

• 34:48Speaker 11

  There is no coexistence possible with them. They have to leave.

• 34:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  And while he was condemned by many American Jews and Israelis, he was also amassing a loyal following. Edward Said was near the top of their hit list.

• 35:02Speaker 14

  Kids broke into his office, Edward's office at the university, and burnt the top of the desk. Columbia put bulletproof windows

• 35:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow.

• 35:15Speaker 14

  all around the house. My son was always afraid that he was going to be killed as a little kid.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  I remember once walking into Said's office, and he was just, you know, in the middle of a conversation with himself about these things. I remember him bellowing, saying, "What they want is my silence.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  And they will never get it."

• 35:54Speaker 08

  A demonstration in front of the main hospital in Gaza. I saw an army truck stop. Soldiers dragged a young man towards the burning tires, kicking him and beating him with the butt of a rifle.

• 36:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1987, the First Intifada, or uprising, broke out in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

• 36:11Speaker 08

  These children are the ugly face of 20 years of frustration over Israeli occupation here.

• 36:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  The militant Islamic group Hamas emerged in Gaza as a political opponent to the PLO.

• 36:23Speaker 28

  Things have gone to such an extent here that the people want a solution, no matter through whom this will come.

• 36:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meanwhile, the PLO decided to capitalize on the momentum of the First Intifada to begin to lay the groundwork for a future Palestinian state. They wanted the world to see them not only as a liberation movement, but a legitimate, peaceful state in waiting. So they called in Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said to write a Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Darwish drafted the version in Arabic. Said translated it into English. And Yasser Arafat read it aloud in Algiers, a city with its own anti-colonial legacy.

• 37:13Speaker 29

  Qiyam! Qiyam, a dawlat of Palestine!

• 37:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  It outlined a vision for a Palestinian state that was secular, democratic, and committed to, quote, "the universal declaration of human rights", a contrast to the region's Arab countries, which were ruled by dictators with shoddy human rights records. And Arafat assumed the title as the president of Palestine.

• 37:42Speaker 30

  Either the Israelis will ultimately respond positively to this and essentially the entire conflict will be resolved, or the Israelis will annex and ultimately move in the direction of some form of expulsion.

• 38:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Edward Said clings to a dream of coexistence as reality looks more and more like a nightmare.

• 38:16Speaker 31

  This is Kalu and Jaco calling in from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you are listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 38:23Speaker 00

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• 39:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part three.

• 39:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  The humanist.

• 39:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1993, Chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, and Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, stood alongside US President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn as they signed the first Oslo Peace Accord.

• 39:59Speaker 32

  We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears. Enough.

• 40:26Speaker 06

  Now, as we stand on the threshold of this new historic era, let me address the people of Israel.

• 40:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Do you remember when Edward found out about Oslo? Did he find out with the rest of the world?

• 40:40Speaker 14

  Yeah, the rest of the world.

• 40:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Arafat recognized Israel's right to exist, and the Israeli government recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, whom it gave limited governing authority in the occupied Palestinian territories. Much of the world celebrated, but Edward Said was furious at Arafat.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  He committed the Palestinians without ever informing them of what he was committing them to. Even he didn't know. One of his closest assistants, who in fact is the architect of Oslo, said that it took Arafat a year to understand that he didn't get a state.

• 41:19Speaker 14

  He was very upset, extremely upset, because you talk about democracy and you don't tell your people you are doing this.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  He was at a low ebb in terms of popularity and money. And so I think the agreement was a way of saving himself rather than thinking of his people.

• 41:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  And while many in the American media touted it as the first step towards peace, Said was sounding an alarm.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Nothing in the agreements that Arafat has signed says anything about the end of occupation. The Israelis are still there. The armies are still there. The settlements are increasing in size and number. So it's a terrible deal. In my opinion, the future really looks very, very bleak.

• 42:01Speaker 14

  He never talked to Arafat after that.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  And he came out looking like a prophet. The fact is that more Palestinians have been killed since the thing was signed.

• 42:15Speaker 33

  The Gaza Strip is a forsaken spot, a mixture of graffiti-filled deprivation and Israeli occupation. The militant Islamic group Hamas says the Israeli incursions have simply created more militants prepared to die for the Palestinian cause.

• 42:31Speaker 34

  The Hamas faction says one of its members blew himself up yesterday in a seaside hotel north of Tel Aviv, just as a crowd was beginning a traditional Passover meal. Israeli police say 20 people died.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  This idea that somehow we should protect ourselves against the infiltrations, the infections of the other, is, I think, the most dangerous idea at the end of 20th century. The challenge now is coexistence. How do we accept difference without violence and hostility?

• 43:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm thinking about this 90s and early 2000s period, the last decade of his life, when he's watching the intensification of the occupation, and he's watching violence between Israelis and Palestinians amplify. What maintained his belief in coexistence, even in the face of those realities, towards the end of his life?

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Because it's the only way to go. It's the only option left. The two-state solution, which is still formally maintained as the objective of the Palestinian leadership, is absolutely negated by what's already happened on the ground. Israel's been far too successful at separating all the little pockets of occupied territories from one another, creating a pass card system, as the white South Africans did under apartheid. The only option left is a one-state solution. That's, I think, his vision for coexistence.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Unless we find ways to do this, you know, there's going to be wholesale violence of the sort represented by the Gulf War, by the killings in Bosnia, the Rwanda massacre.

• 44:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Said continued to face attacks questioning the sincerity of that vision. One headline in Commentary magazine read "Professor of Terror." Shortly before Said's memoir, Out of Place, was released in 1999, an Israeli-American lawyer who had once worked for Israel's Ministry of Justice published a piece called "My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said", questioning Said's claims of growing up in Palestine.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  He never talked to me, he never asked me any questions. He said it wasn't necessary. He did it all from the records. Be that as it may, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, all the major newspapers carried either articles by him or about this. I submitted a rebuttal, none of them would publish it. Acting on a whim, I said, "Let me send it to Haaretz in Israel." They published it the next day, in Hebrew. So I could publish more easily in Israel than I can in the United States. Quite extraordinary.

• 45:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then there was the rock, heard around the world.

• 45:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2000, Said traveled to the Lebanese-Israeli border, soon after the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  There's a lot of fencing at the border, and then there's like a no man's land in between, washed towers that had been abandoned. And so, people were picking up rocks and throwing it over the border.

• 45:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Said picks up a rock and throws it. A photographer snaps a photo. And then...

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Then that picture was widely interpreted as, "Oh, he's an apostle of violence." And the pro-Israel crowd latched onto it. And there were calls for his removal.

• 46:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  His removal from Columbia University, where he'd been a professor for nearly four decades by this point. Said issued a statement where he described it as, "A symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended."

• 46:18Speaker 03

  The administration stood by him and told him, "Don't worry about it. We know who you are, we know what you stand for, and we are willing to withstand the pressure."

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Time is in only one direction. And in a certain sense, the actual performance of a piece of music and the flow of music, there's something so inevitable about it, right? At the same time, that it's not recoverable because once you've played it, it's gone.

• 46:50Speaker 35

  It is this feeling of having lived through a life.

• 47:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Edward Said was diagnosed with cancer in 1991. He decided to use the time he had left to begin a new project based in his lifelong love of classical music. And he would do it alongside his close friend, Daniel Berenboim.

• 47:16Speaker 36

  Mr. Berenboim, can you remember that first meeting? What struck you about Mr. Said?

• 47:20Speaker 35

  I knew, of course, who he was and, you know, and what he had written. And I found him extremely charming and very pleasant company.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Daniel Berenboim is an Israeli-Jewish conductor.

• 47:35Speaker 14

  His family immigrated from Argentina to Israel in 1952 or 53.

• 47:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  And when Edward bumped into him in a hotel lobby in London in the early 90s, Daniel was the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They hit it off immediately.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  I think the main thing is the fact that we're both passionate about music.

• 48:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1999, they decided to organize a workshop together, which would bring Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli musicians together in one orchestra to play a concert. And they would do it in a city in Germany called Weimar.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Weimar is a very special city in German history. It was in East Germany, of course, but it also was the city of Goethe and Schiller. Plus the fact that a few kilometers away was Buchenwald, one of the worst of the death camps.

• 48:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  They were worried no musicians would want to be a part of the workshop, given everything happening on the ground. But they got hundreds of applications from Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian musicians.

• 48:53Speaker 14

  When the orchestra performed in Weimar at the end of the workshop, there were Germans playing with Israelis and with Arabs.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  At the moment that they were playing, in a strange sort of way, their personal identities and histories sort of dropped away. They become sort of irrelevant. And what's relevant is what they're doing towards you.

• 49:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  After the workshop, Edward and Daniel decided to create a foundation together to make the orchestra more permanent. They called it the West Eastern Devon Orchestra. It faced some pushback. People who said

• 49:39Speaker 14

  that this is normalization.

• 49:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Normalization of dangerous realities on the ground through one small example of harmony. But for Edward,

• 49:48Speaker 14

  Edward said this was the most important thing I did in my life.

• 49:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Edward Said died in 2003, Medea and Daniel teamed up to make sure the orchestra lived on. They've made space for Iranian musicians in the orchestra as well and created a music conservatory in Berlin, Germany. In 2016, the West Eastern Devon Orchestra was named a UN Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding.

• 50:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  I came across this poem that Mahmoud Darwish, the famous Palestinian poet, his friend for many years, wrote to honor him. It's called "Deback", which means "counterpoint or contradiction". And there's this moment in the poem where Darwish is imagining a conversation with Edward Said. I say, "Life only known by its opposite is death. It is not life." Says he, "We shall live even if life leaves us alone. We must be the masters of words that will immortalize readers. If I die before you, I urge you to cling to the impossible." I asked, "Is the impossible distant?" He replied, "A generation away."

• 51:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  What was that impossible thing that he clung to?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Liberation, I think. Maybe it's two generations away now.

• 51:15Speaker 37

  A Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank.

• 51:23Speaker 38

  There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judea and Samaria.

• 51:25Speaker 37

  And dozens of Israeli settlers steal in, wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks.

• 51:30Speaker 38

  There's no such thing as an occupation.

• 51:33Speaker 39

  The weekend attack on Israel by hundreds of Hamas fighters has touched off a war.

• 51:37Speaker 40

  Videos show militants rounding up men, women, and children. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

• 51:44Speaker 41

  An incredible piece of important real estate. Relentless bombardment. So people have been pushed to the very brink.

• 51:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Children are starving.

• 51:52Speaker 41

  Every hospital is the sound of children screaming.

• 51:57Speaker 42

  Very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for these horrible, inhuman animals.

• 52:16Speaker 14

  Everybody asks the question, what would he have said? Nobody knows what he would have said. He always had a vision that nobody else, in my opinion, nobody else had it.

• 52:33Speaker 14

  And he always said, you have to keep giving the people hope.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  The words of Edward Said provide some measure of continuity of struggle, some measure of maybe even desire to look for life in a time of extreme death.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  He was a man who really represented the possibilities of life. And he represented it not just for himself, but for the Palestinian people.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Is it too soon to expect that these histories of blind prejudice and powerful fantasy can be balanced and perhaps resolved by a more enduring history of ordinary lives, of reconciliation and recognition?

• 53:36Speaker 43

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 53:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Pethadah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 53:44Speaker 43

  This episode was produced by me.

• 53:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  And me, and.

• 53:48Speaker 43

  Lawrence Wu.

• 53:49Speaker 25

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 53:53Speaker 19

  Devin Kadyama.

• 53:55Speaker 25

  Irene Noguchi.

• 53:58Speaker 43

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vokel.

• 54:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was mixed and mastered by Jimmy Keely. Thank you to VPRO and Levin and Workin. Thanks also to Amber T, Tony Cavan, James Hyder, Nadia Lancy, Johannes Sturgie, Jessica Payne, Nicolette Khan, Katie Doggett, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 54:21Speaker 43

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

• 54:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 54:39Speaker 22

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.