A tribute to Edward W. Said

By Dr Ilan Pappe*

We who support the Palestinian cause have been orphaned with the untimely death of Edward Said. For Israeli Jews, like myself, he was the lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of growing in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness.

I am sorry I only met Edward in 1988, but I feel fortunate for the time we did spend together. His insights of, and inputs on, the global reality in general and the Palestine one in particular will guide us all for many years to come. But above all, we shall miss Edward's unique ability of articulating in the public sphere the evil inflicted upon the Palestinians in the past against the continued effort in the Western media of sidelining, if not altogether eliminating, the plight and tragedy of Palestine. There is no one who could easily fill his place on that stage, no one who could, in few sentences, associate so clearly the wrongs of the past with the tragedy of the present in the land of Palestine.

The academic and intellectual world would equally be disorientated without his original thoughts and conceptualization on the West's relationship with the world. We should be grateful, nonetheless, that so many of our colleagues went in his footsteps as he so brilliantly deconstructed the power bases and more sinister interests behind the knowledge production in West on the Orient in general and the Middle East in particular.

For those of us who knew him more personally, we have all lost a dear and genuine friend, with whom one could talk about the most abstract philosophical issues and with the same ease move to more mundane problems in life, which usually paled in comparison with his endless and brave struggle against the fatal illness.

Something of this mixture and balance was also in his books. He will be remembered, and justly so, for Orientalism and the works that followed, shaping and contributing to the post-colonialist and cultural studies. But I will also cherish The Politics of Dispossession, these short and lucid interventions, quite often immediate reactions to a recent crisis or juncture in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians, but always contextualizing the event and Said's thoughts within the much more broader view on the march of history.

A few weeks ago we had our last meaningful conversation - on the phone - in which he beseeched me, as he did others I am sure, not to give up the struggle for relocating the Palestinians, the refugee issue at the heart of the public and global agenda. He stressed the need to continue the effort to change American public opinion on Palestine and he was very hopeful and encouraged by what he recognized as significant change in European public opinion.

Edward probably left more than one spiritual and moral will to us. The one I am taking is the one above. In his memory and out of respect to his intellectual genius as well as to his moral courage, we should regroup our energies and reorganize our efforts to impress on the world that there will be no justice and no peace in Palestine, no stability in the Middle East and no tranquility in the US's relationship with the Muslim world, without the return of Palestinian refugees to their home, the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the building of a state in Palestine that would respect human and civil rights, as did Edward all his life.

May his soul rest in peace.

*Dr Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University and the academic director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva.

The Free Palestine Alliance (USA) mourns the loss of Edward Said

The Free Palestine Alliance in the United States mourns the passing of one of Palestine's beloved own, Professor Edward W. Said, and extends its deepest condolences to the entire Palestinian and Arab people, the international community, and to the Said family and friends for this monumental loss.

As a native son, Professor Said has narrated and championed our collective struggle as a people with a unique integrity and a deep passion. The legacy of this Palestinian Arab fighter for justice transcends scholarly and intellectual work, as he had positioned himself within the overall movement for liberation that repeatedly challenges imperial and colonial domination.

Emerging from the discourse of internationalism, Edward Said leveraged, challenged and further developed works of such greats like Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon and Ghassan Kanafani, and has exchanged discourse with modern Arab political and intellectual leaders such as Mahdi Amel and Sadek Jalal al-Athem. Said was a probing thinker who introduced a systematic critique of "Orientalism", and a qualitative deconstruction of empire and cultural imperialism. Said challenged the obsessive dehumanization by orientalists and, recently, neo-orientalists of a fantasy "East" and a fabricated world of exotic make-belief. He belonged to a school of thinker-activists who realized that the struggle for justice is also a battle of narratives, where culture and resistance are inseparable.

For the Palestinian Intifadah, he was a son belonging to non-other; never losing sight that liberation is an imperative must. He stood clear on our return to our homes, recognized the structural and fundamental fallacies of the Oslo discourse and never wavered in the struggle against Zionism and bigotry. In belonging to our people's movement, Edward Said threw a stone at the Israeli forces from the once-occupied southern Lebanon and supported divestment as a means to ending Israeli apartheid.

Edward Said engaged opinions and strategies which differed from his own with grace and political maturity, and as he navigated the difficult path of the Palestinian liberation movement over several decades, he held criticism and self-evaluation as paramount - all while recognizing and respecting the moral weight of the "children of the stones" and the yearning of the dispossessed who remain exiled in camps 55 years later.

Having soared After the Last Sky, it is the likes of Palestine's Edward Said that give hope to the future.

With gratitude to an undying champion, we stand in respect and pledge to carry on.

A great Palestinian scholar passes away

By Paul J. Balles*

The news of Edward Said's death saddens me deeply. He was the most articulate and enduring Arab spokesman for Palestine and my earliest source of information about the plight of the Palestinians. His lucid writing, in both his books and articles, not only made his ideas easy to comprehend, but it distinguished him as one of the great political commentators of our time.
 
For me, his writings never received enough praise from those he defended and cared about, and they brought undeserved scorn, and worse, from those he criticized. Some of the Zionist thugs "honoured" him with death threats, vituperative personal attacks and the torching of his office. In their rabid hatred of any serious critic of Israel, they must now be celebrating the rest of the world's loss. 
 
Throughout, Professor Said persevered courageously and published the facts and comments that had failed to come from other pens. His death is a loss that I personally mourn; and what he accomplished represents a remarkably outstanding body of work, a tribute to Arabs generally, and the finest defence of Palestinians available to the English speaking world.

Also see: "World-renowned scholar Edward Said dies" (Guardian, 25 September 2003)

*Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 34 years. For more information, see
http://www.writerfreelance.com and http://www.pballes.com.