Where I'm coming from

I had been talking with Edward about doing an interview with him for over a year. His mortal illness, which he bore with dignity and without shame, made me want to do it properly. But, as is the way with start-ups like openDemocracy, I was distracted. On 4 December last year BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves programme broadcast an interview with him which he had told me he disliked. But given its range I thought we might use it as a basis for an email exchange that would not be too tiring for him. He agreed and the BBC let us make a transcript. But, as we were both so busy, it was not to be.

What follows, then, is an unauthorized edit just of his answers, without the questions (or the interviews with others that intersected the programme). It does not touch upon the issues I planned to raise with him: his disgust for American policy, his disdain for those he saw as Arab quislings, and his wider views about Iraq and President Bush.

You can see why he hated the kind of interview it became. When Israeli writers who oppose their nation’s leaders are interviewed in the West, there is usually a welcome for the critical space they open up: the democracy of their opposition is enhanced and shared. But when Palestinian writers like Edward are interviewed, they are pushed into either defending, or denouncing their nation’s leadership. In the process Palestinian society is reduced to single entity and the democratic spirit of its people denied.

If there is one quality above all others that I would like to salute in Edward, it is that he related to Palestine as a free Palestinian.

Anthony Barnett Editor, openDemocracy

Where I am coming from

My name? The two parts contradict each other in a way which I have never really come to terms with, except that’s the way it is.

Edward is from the Prince of Wales, whom my mother admired at the time I was born in 1935. I think he either was about to, or had already given up his throne for, the woman he loved, I guess she thought that was very dashing and elegant.

The Arab name, I felt when I was growing up going to various English schools in the Middle East, was a kind of intrusion. Although I was in the Arab world I didn’t really know this terribly well. I did know that I was not in England. But plainly I was meant to be because of the way the schools operated. England was the centre of the world and the rest didn’t matter. So I grew up knowing a lot about English history, geography and literature, and practically nothing about the part of the world that I was born and grew up in. At school the phrase was “little Arab children”. There were English children in some of the early schools I went to who were obviously superior in some way. For example when the word “home” was used everybody understood what it meant – except somebody like me, because I never went to England.

Both at school, and also something about our family, set us at odds with our surroundings. The songs I learnt as a child were almost all in English. My family was Arabic-speaking, so there was some Arab music. But it is Western music that means the most to me.

My Mother, My Self

My mother was really my closest companion, more so than my sisters, Nadia and Houda. They were very close friends, but my mother was the intimate presence in my life. She taught me how to read, she taught me how to listen to music, to sing, later to get interested in the piano.

Obviously her expectations were most important. Also, of course, I felt in many ways that she had to be resisted. Because she sort of invaded my world, and it was very difficult for me not to have her around in a way. But I realised that at some point I would have to be free of her, because she was so crucial to me. I remember one of the most difficult moments for me was when she expressed her disappointment in all her children. I’d just turned ten, maybe twelve. I felt that in a mysterious way I disappointed her without quite knowing why. She refused to give a reason, I realised how much I owed her, and felt that it was unfair. Therefore I had to find my own standard, if at all possible.

My mother was deeply manipulative. She was an extremely intelligent, I would even say brilliant woman, who really didn’t do much with her life. She was expected to be a mother and a wife. Once her children had grown up… she saw the inevitable coming. I left when I was fifteen and my two older sisters left as well shortly after that. Her life was suddenly emptied.

I think she felt it terribly important to be able to maintain a relationship. There was I think early planning, perhaps partly instinctive on her part. She lived most of her married life in Egypt. Palestine after 1948 was not a recourse for her, obviously. She never really got an alternative identity the way we did. We were all Americans and my mother was not American. She always had to live with a laissser passer or some other kind of document for a passport. So travel was very difficult for her because of her status. I mean even as she was dying in Washington, there was a deportation notice served to her by the Department of Immigration in the United States as her visa had expired and my sister spent the last couple of weeks of my mother’s life in the immigration court trying to get a stay of execution.

I have written about my family. But there’s very little of that in Arabic literature. The traditional autobiography of being frank about one’s self and one’s family hardly exists. I was much more influenced by say Rousseau or Samuel Butler than I am by autobiographers in the Arabic tradition.

The one thing that I never felt is a religious identity. I never felt myself to be a Christian particularly, even though of course I am. I was relentlessly driven to church and went to Sunday school all the time – and I hated it! All through my public and political life I’ve never felt any different from anyone else on the basis of religion, I didn’t think it mattered that much to me or to others.

Books, friends

Probably the most important early non-musical influence on my ears, was the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, which I know by heart and have felt terribly disappointed that they have been replaced by what I call the kind of Reader’s Digest version of modern. But prophetic witness, I don’t feel myself to be prophetic at all. I certainly feel myself to be secular and an intellectual. The biblical idea of preaching is very alien to me. I never wanted disciples, for example, I wasn’t eager to convert people. I want my readers to see in an analytical and rational way.

As a child I was much more influenced by reading than I was by listening to people. Most of the time I found that boring. For me the people I had to listen to, preachers in church or teachers, were alien – they were the enemy. And I was far more interested in what books could give me. I felt very much put upon and pushed around by a remorseless timetable of chores and homework and obligations until I was in my early twenties. That was the style of my life. The only place of autonomy for me was in the world of the imagination and music, where there was no hectoring, no sermons, no preaching.

Then I discovered the discipline of literature, I very early became aware of, say, somebody like Dickens, or Doctor Johnson, these powerful authoritative voices. I was quite early able to distinguish between them, what they signified and what they were trying to tell me in so many different ways. A novel like Great Expectations has always meant a great deal to me. Much more, say, than the Pickwick Papers because you could see the workings of not just the mind but of a society. This was always deeply interesting to me, perhaps because the society around me when I grew up was closed to me.

Then Conrad was a fantastic discovery, which I made at the age of about eighteen. I read Heart of Darkness. I think quite by chance, it must have been a part of another book. I was riveted by the kind of haunting, clearly non-English style and of a very polished English, at the same time. The more I discovered about Conrad the more I realised that he was the great companion of my own life, and I just pressed on with Conrad and found in him an unending series of levels, which took one in many different directions, all returning back to the question of exile and displacement.

Orientalism

At the time that I was writing Orientalism which came out in 1978 I was conscious only of doing what I thought was a rather limited study of the image of the Arab. But I must have been influenced by a more general history, which included the history of colonialism, and more important than colonialism, the history of liberation. By then I was very deeply involved in Palestinian politics, and also in politics involving Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, other parts of Asia. That must have borne on the writing of the book, giving it the kind of resonance that I didn’t expect.

It’s a central point I think that matters of identity are never individual efforts and never take place in a vacuum. They’re always done with reference to an other, whether it was an inferior other or superior other. There is always a kind of dialectic, which is absolutely crucial, without which identities can never form. And that’s what I guess I hit upon in Orientalism, which gave it range for, say, a feminist analysis of its use, or African-Americans or Indians. The act of so looking and analysing was an empowering act, it wasn’t just academic. There was something involving liberation, in trying to see how you were formed in a clearer and more informed way.

1967 was the dividing line. Before then, when I left the Middle East for America I had just been a student going from one level of education to another on a course of education for ten years that had very little to do with the Middle East. I got a PhD at Harvard in English and Comparative Literature. It was the shock of 1967, the discovery of many new friends, Arabs, all of them in America, for whom the world had also suddenly changed, which brought back this other part of my life. We could no longer ignore what was happening in the part of the world from which we came, that some of us thought we had left behind. It suddenly intervened on the American stage.

The fact that the Arab world now questioned how to interpret and look at the Arab world was no longer an academic issue, it was also a political issue. This involved the workings of the society in which one lived as well as the workings of the society which one had left behind – and which is now a shambles.

This was the period of the post-October war 1973. For the first time the Arabs found themselves in a position of initiating a war against Israel to reclaim the Occupied Territories. Then, against my will, I was drawn into the complexity of the politics of the Middle East.

The burden of representation

I had no idea that, for example, Anwar al-Sadat and Yasser Arafat in 1977 decided that I was to represent the Palestinians at an international conference. I opened the door of my apartment in New York one day and I found journalists and photographers standing outside. I didn’t know what it was about. I couldn’t deal with it.

In time you get used to it, along with the threats and the verbal and physical attacks, which made it really hard for my family. But I never allowed myself to be more than committed to the larger cause. I never joined any parties, I never was a fully paid up card-carrying member of any political organisation, and that was especially true of the Palestinian ones. I always allowed myself to say what I wanted. Even though others didn’t, I felt it was important to challenge figures like Yasser Arafat. And that was the reason for my falling out with him at the end of the eighties just before the Gulf war.

I felt that questions were not being asked. I was always transparent in what I said. People knew my address. I never hid behind a pseudonym, I never made a secret of my commitments and my loyalties, and I feel I tried to be fair to my friends and to people with whom I disagreed.

It is not a distinction between idealism and pragmatism. That’s too easy. What I think is correct is that there’s a difference between looking at the situation dispassionately and rationally, and looking at part of the situation.

The Oslo Watershed

This is what the disagreements over the Oslo peace accords are about from the Palestinian point of view. My critique was based on two principles. There was an occupation yet not a word was mentioned about it in the documents that Oslo produced. I found that a caricature. How could you negotiate with a state that was in occupation of your territory without once mentioning the end of the occupation as the goal? I think I was right to draw attention to this.

Second, the balance of power. If you’re going to negotiate with an enemy that is fifty times, a hundred times more powerful than you are, you have to be much more careful than somebody who is negotiating from a position, roughly speaking, of equality. I think there was a kind of vanity on the part of the Palestinian negotiators, who felt they were negotiating in the cockpit of power whereas in fact they were, in my opinion, really doing the dictates of the Israelis.

And third, and perhaps as important as the other two, was the matter of Arafat himself. He was the one who personalised it, he alone decided what Palestinians could do and what they couldn’t do. He never once said to the Palestinians: “This is the best we can do now. You tell me whether this is acceptable to you or not, and if it is, I will continue, if not, I’ll resign.” He simply did it as a fait accompli, let his people accept the dirt, and then sort of walked away and said: “This is the reality, the Israelis are a naughty people.” He should have taken responsibility, as it was his responsibility.

I felt that it was important for somebody to say to him, “Enough! You can’t keep doing this in the name of Palestine and in the name of solidarity”. Well, you’ve heard the chorus, that I have violated the loyalty of the faithful. Of course it’s important to do that. Otherwise we go from one catastrophe to the other.

The whole framework of Palestinian rule within our movement is long overdue for a change. I don’t think we can have anything without establishing a constitutional basis within our society for the continuation of the struggle against occupation. In other words we need a constituent assembly that represents the will of the people. The people who are in fact struggling against occupation – and I don’t just mean the military struggle involving suicide bombers and all the rest, with which I completely disagree.

It’s a really a matter of saying that we have to do it – not some great figure from above. We have to stop relying on patrons, great white fathers, and all the rest of it. We’ve never thought it important to enlist and mobilise people on behalf of ideals that remains unchanged: equality, coexistence. We have had opportunities in the past that were turned down. Instead of reminding us, the leaders obliterate the past and say, “this is all there is”. That’s not pragmatism. That’s irresponsibility.

As I see it

As I see it, the idea that there are two claims each with equal justice is unhistorical. The fact is, if there were just two people wondering around who decided on the same land, that would be one thing. In fact what happened was that one people was displaced by another. That’s the reality of the situation. So the Palestinians will always have the real memory of having their society destroyed and their people dispossessed by another people.

We’ve had 54 years since the Palestinians were dispossessed and continue to be dispossessed on a daily basis, even while negotiating the principle of partition. But the partition hasn’t happened. What’s happened is that the Israelis have extended their hold not just on pre-1948 Palestine, but on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, where they have implanted 400,000 new people since 1967.

Throughout this period, the Palestinians have not come any closer to the realisation of their national aspirations, because the Israelis have in effect treated all the land as theirs. They’ve never acknowledged the existence of another people, in a way which allows that other people to have an equal coexistence.

Security Council resolution 242 doesn’t mention the Palestinians. It just says that no lands can be acquired by force – you have to give it back. But the idea of a Palestinian state and Palestinian existence as an ontological fact simply has never taken place. Since the beginning of Oslo, which is the closest they came to doing this, Israelis have been taking more and more Palestinian land.

So I say, if the process is as it is, then let us think not about division but about the fact that the people are mixed up with each other. There are a million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, but second and third-class citizens. There are two and a half million people on the West Bank and the million and a half in Gaza, that’s another four million people who are inferiors to the Israelis.

What you have is a developing apartheid. So rather than talk about partition we should move to a bi-national solution where people have equal rights in the land in which they both live together. Why should one people have all the rights and the other not? That’s what I’m saying.

It’s not as if Israel’s is an abstract claim, one could live with. It’s a claim that’s based upon the destruction of Palestinian society. I’m simply saying the most important first step is for Israelis to recognise that their history contains this absolutely essential fact, that another society was wrecked and the people dispossessed. The Germans have had to recognise such things in their own history, the Italians, the Poles. Americans understand that their existence started with the obliteration of another society.

It doesn’t follow that the answer therefore is to destroy Israel. I’ve never argued for that. I’ve always said you have to find a modality for living together.

If Jews want their own state, they should try to empty it of the million Palestinians who are there. They don’t want to do this. They talk about democracy. Yet democracy is only for Jews, in a state which is not Jewish only. What do you do about this? They have no answer. They just say let us divide. But they can’t divide, because they keep taking more and more land. It’s a dead end unless people talk in terms of equal rights.

Free, thinking

In everything I’ve written or said in Arabic or in English or in any other language I’ve been absolutely consistent. I’m not interested in destroying what is there, I’m simply saying: Let us take it all into account.

We should not start from descriptions of what Palestinians have done to resist Israeli occupation. Look at what Israel has done to Palestinians for the last 54 years? There are no Palestinian F-16s and helicopters. There is no threat to Tel Aviv today. There is a threat to every single Palestinian installation on the West Bank and Gaza by virtue of the settlements, of the army, of the tanks, the air force…

I’ve been perfectly clear in my opinion. I don’t approve of suicide bombing. I approve of coexistence and recognition. I’m not responsible for everything that is done in the name of Palestine by every Palestinian. All I can do is to be responsible for what I think and what I believe in.

This is an edited extract of an interview with Edward Said by Richard Coles, broadcast 4 December 2002 on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves Programme, reproduced with permission. Special thanks to Nightwaves. Transcription by Julian Kramer.