On the Enduring Importance of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine

In his seminal book, The Question of Palestine, Edward Said writes that the word “Palestine” has “become a symbol for struggle against social injustice… If we think of Palestine as having the function of both a place to be returned to and of an entirely new place… we will understand the word’s meaning better.” These are words that could have easily been written today, yet Said did so almost 50 years ago, at a time when Palestinians in western media were mostly alluded to as “terrorists.”

The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, one year after Said’s pivotal book Orientalism and two before Covering Islam—a trilogy that helped found post-colonial theory and develop a framework to critique the West’s stereotypical and often racist lens of the Arab and Muslim world. The Question of Palestine was particularly noteworthy for being the first English-language book to narrate the Palestinian experience and deconstruct Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

It remains an essential read from arguably the most influential Palestinian-American scholar to have lived. Reading it today brings reflections on how everything and nothing has changed, as Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, its bombing of Lebanon, and annexation of the West Bank continue. That is why a new re-issue of this book is so timely. In the UK, Fitzcarraldo Editions’ re-issue will be published on November 21, with a new preface by literary critic (and Said’s nephew) Saree Makdisi, plus an added chapter titled “The One-State Solution”, which Said wrote for The New York Times in 1999. For American audiences, Said’s seminal trilogy will be re-printed in new editions by Vintage Books and available imminently.

Edward Said died at 67 in September 2003 after a long battle with leukaemia. He had two children: law professor Wadie Said, and actor, writer, and activist Najla Said. Both were children when The Question of Palestine was published, but they recounted what it was like to grow up in New York with the Palestinian-American Columbia professor, and how his book holds up 45 years later.

“After a year plus of what’s been happening in Gaza and now Lebanon, I think people are going to need more critical knowledge and more of a deeper understanding of what has happened before”, Najla told me. She cited how westerners who start getting interested in Palestine tend to first go for the works publishers tend to promote—books by Ilan Pappé or Noam Chomsky, or Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Although these are all important works, she said that her father was really the first writer to speak out about all this in English, and readers ought to go to the source material.

“A lot has been exposed about how difficult it is in the West, or particularly in America, to be Palestinian and speak out. And I think it’s important to see that people have been doing it for a long time,” she said. Meanwhile, her brother noted how it was often Israeli and Jewish historians who were commissioned to write about Palestine—“because Palestinian historians, of course, don’t count, right? It has to be an Israeli historian who tells the truth”—and this trend has only started to change recently.

The Question of Palestine was written at the height of Yasser Arafat’s popularity at the helm of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was then in battle against Israeli forces in the West Bank and Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. At the time, western media outlets only saw Palestinians through this lens—as PLO fighters, or “terrorists.” Said’s goal was to narrate their history in this land, their subsequent exile and their fight for dignity and the right of return following the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”), which Said first-hand experienced as a child.

“If there is no country called Palestine it is not because there are no Palestinians. There are, and this essay is an attempt to put their reality before the reader,” Said wrote at the time. His son Wadie told me that “the book is playing a role in developing a case for Palestinian independence and liberation, but reactive to the realities of the time, which were much more about insisting on representation for the Palestinians in the western world, and nowadays, that’s not questioned.”

The book came out in the US during the Jimmy Carter administration, around the same time as the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. Wadie said that Carter “was clearly intending for some level of Palestinian self-government that could lead to a state, despite the tremendous hostility to that… The next thing, Reagan wins the election [in 1981], and it hasn’t been the same since, in terms of an American administration willing to consider the discussion.” This echoes views shared by many major Palestinian voices today, notably Mustafa Barghouti, that Jimmy Carter was arguably the only US President to continuously advocate for Palestinian self-determination.

Reflecting on The Question of Palestine today, Najla Said told me that “if you take out or replace the names of the players [the PLO and Arafat], then not much has changed at all… except the weapons are much worse now.” But drawing from her father’s lessons, she insists that people must be “inspired by what’s going on rather than despondent,” and take note of how much the movement for Palestine solidarity has expanded.

Najla remembers her father as a “very fair, empathetic, kind, human”, a “very much larger-than-life person” with a sense of style that made people—even those who disagreed with him—want to be in his presence. “I was the kid who got a lesson about Christopher Columbus 40 years before anyone said Indigenous People’s Day”, she said about her father, who taught English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.

Speaking of Columbia, Wadie Said told me that “if my dad had been around, it wouldn’t have unfolded that way,” referring to the violent backlash against pro-Palestine students at the university earlier this year. “He was the quintessential figure in Columbia University in the last half of the 20th century… He was also very adept at maintaining relationships with individuals who basically ran the place.” But both he and Najla realize that it’s “a completely different administration now,” and the one before was much more supportive of Said and his politics.

Jacques Testard, the founder of Fitzcarraldo Editions, said that the decision to re-issue The Question of Palestine now is because of “how relevant and contemporary it still feels 45 years later… for anyone seeking to understand Zionism and its impact on the Palestinian people.” Including Said’s 1999 essay “The One-State Solution” is also significant, as western politicians still argue for a two-state solution, yet Said was one of the first voices to tell a mainstream western audience that “real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.” In this one-state proposal, which is still contested today, Said imagined Palestinians and Israelis living in the same state as equal citizens with democratic rights. “Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation,” he wrote.

If Said were alive to witness the scale of violence today, it would be hard to imagine that he would have much hope of such a “reconciliation” happening, but Wadieh recalls that his dad “tried to imagine a better future.” Both him and Najla continue their father’s legacy in many ways in fighting for a free Palestine. Najla, who’s still based in New York, said that carrying his last name carries a responsibility, “but not a bad one.”

“I’ve been outspoken for a while, but particularly this past year, I think it’s meant a lot to people in a way that I didn’t quite understand. Not to compare my dad to Martin Luther King Jr., but it sort of feels like that, to be the child of someone like that. It means a lot to people that you show up to things… especially for Palestinian-Americans.

I am also remembering what my dad taught me, which is that we’re part of a people who are trying to make life better for themselves and others, so there’s no reason to ever stop that… Whenever a Palestinian would reach out to my dad, no matter how famous or how busy he was, he would always respond, so I try to do the same thing.”