There are a lot of great points here. I'm gonna add two more:
1. I tried to read his "The Question of Palestine." I really tried. I honestly couldn't get past the intro.
Because it was an anniversary edition, with a new added intro where he brings the reader up to date on every significant Palestinian event since the book was published.
Every significant Palestinian event, except one:
Palestine declaring independence in 1988.
The book was published in 1992.
He even mentions the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference.
He just chooses not to mention that from 1991 on, Israel and Palestine were specifically negotiating how Palestine would become an independent country at peace with Israel.
Or that Jordan had held claim to the West Bank until 1988, something I think is pretty fucking important and relevant here. (Not to mention that it had specifically renounced that claim in 1988 because Palestine declared independence.)
Like. If you don't know that the entire reason Palestine is "the West Bank and the Gaza Strip" is that those are the areas Egypt and Jordan claimed, after they and every other Arab League country invaded in 1948 to retake the land for the Arab world...
Then you're not going to have the context for anything that's happened since then.
Which is the precise trick that most academic information about Palestine uses. It plays a game of careful omission that gives you about a quarter of the story.
Anyway, as a historian, this omission threw me so hard that I spent the next half-hour trying to think of any legitimate reason to avoid mentioning the fact that Palestine had declared independence and - unlike any other country I can think of that has ever declared independence - skipped over the whole "oh no you don't" violent invasion stage, in favor of the "peace talks" stage.
To this day, the only reason I can think of is that it contradicts his position and his narrative.
He was already insisting in 1993, and presumably much earlier, that Israel had outright expelled 800,000 Palestinians and conquered their lands and property.
No Arab League invasion. No 350,000 people leaving its "soft invasion" of volunteer armies before the war even started. No Egypt and Jordan snatching up land with another 300,000ish internally displaced people on it, who then automatically became "refugees" in those foreign countries.
He made that statement in the context of criticizing the preliminary version of the Oslo Accords that the two countries had signed at that point. So he definitely knew all this was happening. It's not like he was just uninformed.
He built his entire career out of the big, broad, easy falsehoods that "everybody knows" today.
Which brings me to my other point:
2. Edward Said is a fucking liar.
He was Egyptian-American. Born to Egyptian-American parents. Given a rich kid childhood in Egypt, until he went to rich kid boarding school in America.
He was born in Jerusalem. That's the entire part of his story that's true.
He was not a citizen of Palestine. He didn't grow up there. His parents didn't live there when he was born; they were visiting relatives. They didn't own the home he claimed to have grown up in.
Every sad story he's ever told about being dispossessed was an outright lie.
In a way, he even admitted this: his 1999 autobiography contradicts tons of the claims he'd made about his life. He just glosses over that, acting as though it doesn't.
An Israeli lawyer who specializes in Palestinian rights discovered this in 1999.
Among spokesmen for the Palestinian cause in our day, surely none is so articulate, or so well-known, as Edward W. Said. The holder of an en
Here's the de-paywalled version.
Ironically, the guy specifically specializes in helping Palestinians through the legal process of reclaiming, or getting compensation for, property they lost in 1948 or 1967.
This article is how I found out there was even a process for that. Much less an entire industry of lawyers and NGOs to help people do it.
Talk about things that are deliberately never mentioned.
I'm just going to quote a few things. This is a long-form essay, and it's gripping.
As a living embodiment of the Palestinian cause, [Edward Said] has made much in print and on film of his birth, childhood, and schooling in Palestine, telling a story of idyllic beginnings and violent disruption—of a paradise lost—that resonates with personal pain while also serving as a powerfully compelling metaphor for the larger Palestinian condition.
Said's father Wadie did grow up in Jerusalem, under the Ottoman Empire, before moving to America in 1911, and later, to Egypt. He married a Lebanese woman named Hilda, in Egypt, in 1932.
Wadie's brother Boulos still lived in Jerusalem, with his own wife and kids.
To this branch of the family, as to other destinations, the affluent Cairo-based Saids made periodic visits. In November 1935, during one of those visits, Edward Said was born.
On his birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address.
Similarly blank is the entry for a local address in the church record of Edward Said’s baptism, an event that likewise took place in Jerusalem two years later.
Of the 29 telephone and commercial directories for Jerusalem and Palestine from 1931 through 1948 that I was able to locate, more than half carry business and/or residential listings for Boulos Said and his wife. There are no listings for Edward Said’s parents in any of the directories, whether in English, Hebrew, or Arabic.
As for the house in Talbieh (Talbiya), that is a story unto itself.
In his article in Harper’s, as in the much longer version of the same piece that he published in the (London) Observer, and as in other iterations of this theme elsewhere, Said has wrenchingly recounted the nostalgic visit he paid in early 1992 to his childhood roots in Jerusalem and in particular to this house at 10 Brenner Street....
In the ledgers kept at the Land Registry Office in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period, the earliest entry for the house in question is dated February 14, 1941. It records a transfer of fractional interests in the property from its registered owner, Yusef Said (Edward Said’s grandfather), to Mrs. Boulos Yusef Said (Edward Said’s aunt) and her five children.
And that is all. There is no record of Edward Said’s parents owning either the house or any interest in it.
If his nuclear family had no ownership interest in the house at 10 Brenner Street, neither did he or they ever permanently reside in it. (Nor, apparently, did his aunt and cousins until 1942.)
OMFG. I'd forgotten that part. He couldn't even have been born in that specific house, or had childhood memories in it! Because his relatives didn't live there yet! The building was a duplex until 1942:
From 1938 to 1946 (that is, from the time Edward Said was roughly three to the time he was eleven), the upstairs level was rented out to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as its consulate general, and then from 1946 to 1952 to the successor government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
...As for the downstairs, main-entrance level of the house, it was rented from about 1936 to 1938 by the Iranian consulate.
Then, after 1938, this and the basement level were leased to the illustrious German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, his wife, and his two teenage granddaughters, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany.
The Buber family was forced out of the house in early 1942 (when Edward Said would have been about seven) in a dispute with the owners—that is, Nabiha (Mrs. Boulos Yusef) Said—who broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for their personal use, winning a judge’s ruling in favor of eviction.
Buber’s granddaughters, from whom I heard this account, also accurately remember the names of Nabiha Said and two of her boys, Yusef and Robert. Another tenant of the house during the latter Mandate period remembers George, still another son of the family. None remembers Edward or any of his four sisters.
In fact, Edward Said has actively claimed something I've repeatedly been told: that Martin Buber lived there after 1948, and "didn’t mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."
There's so much more in that article. I'm gonna go reread it.
But first, one little thing I learned today:
In 1966, before hitting on the gold mine of selling outrage porn to would-be white saviors, Edward Said published his very first book.
It was called, "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography."
You have to hand it to the guy. He sure was consistent.
