Scholars' Blog

Book Review: Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (1979, reprinted 2024)

In 1979, Edward Said published The Question of Palestine, a seminal, provocative text which was the first to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate in the West. Forty-five years on, it is astonishing and unfortunate just how many of Said’s words still ring true. Even though time has proven him wrong on a number of key issues — he erroneously wrote that ‘neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a military option against the other’, a statement which has been roundly disproven by the current war in Gaza — this does not affect his core arguments, and Palestine still remains very much ‘a nation in exile’. The conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the implicit racism underpinning the refusal to recognise Palestinian suffering as legitimate, and the sweeping scapegoating of Palestinians as ‘terrorists’ have all endured, half a century on.

Rejecting the dichotomous pitting of Jewish against Palestinian suffering, Said, who identified as a ‘Jewish-Palestinian’ and experienced first-hand the displacement caused by the Zionist project, lays out his hopes for open borders, ‘compromise, settlement and finally peace’. Boldly framing Israel as the ‘Last Colonial Project’ of the dying imperial West, Said’s vision for a secular, democratic state is particularly critical in the current situation in Gaza — it is precisely this lack of respect for Palestinian borders which has legitimised Israel’s invasion and occupation.

Said first traces the roots of the Zionist movement, a movement for the re-establishment, development, and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel, arguing it emerged from a period of ‘classical imperialism’. Following the central thesis of his book Orientalism (1978), Said contends that the ‘Orient’ for Europe, was associated ‘not only with difference and otherness, but with the vast spaces, the undifferentiated masses of mostly coloured people’, and ‘mystery of “the marvels of the East”’. For Said, the Zionist project thus appealed to those for whom classifying overseas territories and natives into different classes was ‘natural’. Therefore, Zionism framed Palestine as ‘an empty territory paradoxically “filled” with ignoble or perhaps even dispensable natives’. To the West, the Arabs and Islam represented ‘viciousness, veniality, degenerate vice, lechery, and stupidity’. As a corollary of this, Arabs were seen as incapable of tending to their interests, much less those of the region, conveniently justifying the necessity of the white man’s civilising mission. Such an ugly and unarticulated assumption still lingers in much of Western consciousness. Since Said wrote Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, the events of 9/11, the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, although not remotely related to Palestinians, have further exacerbated damaging stereotypes of Arab and Muslim peoples. The stereotype of Arabs as backward and barbaric permeates the current conflict, illustrated by the assumption that Hamas treats its hostages cruelly, and is inherently unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Even though Hamas has recently accepted ceasefire proposals with minimal amendments, the international community continue blaming Hamas as saboteurs of the negotiations.

As an extension of this, the framing of the project of Palestinian liberation as ‘terrorism’, and hence illegitimate, is still commonplace. Said argues that, stripped of its context, an act of Palestinian desperation looks like ‘wanton murder’. He explicitly acknowledges that many individual acts such as hijacking and kidnapping were acts of ‘unbalanced’, ‘immoral’ and ‘useless destruction’ — indeed, this is precisely the framing used for the October 7th attacks by Hamas. But Said provides us with an important response: that in sheer numerical terms, in ‘brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed’, there is ‘absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists’. He reasons that ‘no national movement has been so unfairly penalised, defamed, and subjected to disproportionate retaliation for its sins’ as the Palestinians. This is evidenced by the horrific Israeli policy of punitive counterattacks that attempt to kill 50 to 100 Arabs for every Jewish fatality. The record of ‘Zionist terror’, including their oppression of Palestinians, state-sanctioned torture, and international lawlessness, makes this statistic possible. Moreover, Said argues that such emphasis on terrorism was often a strategic ‘diversion’ from the dilemma and true issue of Palestinian sovereignty, a mere scapegoat to justify a prolonged refusal to engage.

Indeed, Said charts how Palestinian demands have continuously fallen on deaf ears for decades. ‘On occasion after occasion’, the country’s leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), has ‘stated its willingness to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza’, but these signals to the world community and United States were ‘deliberately tossed aside’. Placed in such a context, could Palestinian acts of violence be interpreted as an act of self-defence? Said stops just short of this justification; however, he does argue however that the violence must be understood in the context of ‘day-to-day coercion’ and the brutality of a ‘long military occupation’. This serves as a crucial lesson for us today. As Hamas has gained military control and committed atrocities, we must place such actions in the context of decades of deliberate sidelining and wilful ignorance towards Palestinian suffering, such as the border checkpoints and constant dehumanisation. Said thus provides a sober caution against the one-sided condemnation of violence seen ritually in Western media in recent months.

The flip side of this demonisation of Palestinians is the reluctance to criticise Zionism, which Said expounds with remarkable clarity. He notes how the myth of the founding of Israel became ‘all the more acceptable when counterposed to the Holocaust’, with the sight of Jewish refugees ‘building a new nation’ holding unique moral value, mitigating some of the guilt faced by Western allies. Said links this to a familiar accusation — that to criticise Zionism in the West is to ‘immediately align oneself with antisemitism’. This is seen even now — in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, claiming that ‘the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’ is deemed to be ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’. This ignores the fact that ‘Jewish national liberation took place upon the ruins of another national existence, not in the abstract’. For him, Zionism was not simply a Jewish liberation movement; it was a ‘Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient’. Said quotes Hannah Arendt, who wrote that Zionism ‘solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless’; instead, it produced ‘a new category of refugees, the Arabs.’ He argues that in order for Zionist territorial acquisition to work, it depended on the elimination of any signs of Palestinian national consciousness, and a ‘gratuitous epistemological willfulness’ to on the one hand, pretend that the Palestinians’ sheer physical presence is negligible. And on the other, see the Palestinian as a ‘terrorist,’ ‘an essentially nonpolitical item’, or a ‘useful, docile subject’. Currently, Palestinians are seen as even less than a non-political item — Israeli journalist Gideon Levy makes the point that if the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had killed ‘36,000 dogs in Gaza’ the people of Israel would have been outraged. It is easy to see how a counterfactual settler land instead of Palestine would have been far more problematised — Said quotes Maxime Rodinson in arguing that ‘displacing German, French, or English inhabitants’ and ‘introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland’ would have been the chief concern of all Zionists. This ties back neatly to Said’s previous argument: that the Zionist project is dependent on a fundamental dehumanisation of Palestinians and Arabs.

Said never loses his humanism towards the Jewish people who have suffered tremendously throughout history. He sympathises with the belief that ‘Israel’s security is a genuine protection against future genocidal attempts on the Jewish people’, even though this ‘genuine protection’ may not exist now. However, he also asserts that Jewish individuals deserve freedom ‘from the blindness of programmatic Zionism in its practice against the non-Jew’. Noting that it is a situation imbued with ‘complex irony’, Said explains how ‘the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and Holocaust have in their new nation became the victimizers of another people, who have become therefore the victims of the victims’. It is indeed tragic and cruel how Palestinians have been the ones unfairly bearing the brunt of Jewish trauma.

In The Question of Palestine, Said’s prose has a most remarkable ability to cut through the noise and diffuse the distorted misinformation surrounding the Palestinian movement. Said’s optimism was also evident, writing, ‘In 1988 we Palestinians as a people took a giant step towards reconciliation and peace. We now await a corresponding gesture from the Israeli people and its government’. But at the time of writing in 1977-8, he was perhaps buoyed by a series of wins: President Carter’s statement on Palestinian rights in early 1977, the joint US-USSR statement acknowledging the importance of the Palestinian question in late 1977, and the PLO’s positive interactions with the United States. 45 years since then, such optimism has dissipated. Since October 7th, and Israel’s subsequent declaration of war on 9th October, the world has been shocked by the horrific and barbaric images emerging from the Gaza region, and the death toll which surpassed 40,000 by August 2024. The vast majority of these people were civilians killed by the Israel Defence Forces.

As we look to the future of this conflict, Said’s proposal for a secular democratic state, which includes a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza coexisting alongside an exclusively Jewish state, seems an impossibility. On the one hand, Israeli settlers have encroached so significantly into Palestinian territory that they will be impossible to remove. On the other, a one-state solution is a long lost ideal, for it would no longer be a ‘Jewish state’ which is an unimaginable outcome for many in the Israeli government. With the IDF’s indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians continuing without an end in sight, propped up interminably by Western governments, change can only come after a collective humanisation of the Palestinian people. Otherwise, there looks to be little hope for Said’s vision of reconciliation

About the author
Sharon Chau, 2020 Kwok Scholar, is pursuing the Master of Public Policy at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.