Edward Said Mourned

News Reports and Tributes Online

NEW YORK (AP) -- Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor and leading spokesman in the United States for the Palestinian cause, has died at 67.

Eulogy, The Electronic Intifada, 25 September:

We mourn with greatest sadness the death today of Professor Edward W. Said. We extend our deepest sympathy and condolences to Edward Said's family, and we share our profound sense of loss with the many and diverse communities that loved and respected him.

Professor Said maintained his relentless engagement with people, culture, and politics all over the world, even in the last weeks of his decade-long struggle against illness.

Said is known throughout the world as a public intellectual, and there are few fields of intellectual endeavor that have been untouched by his contributions. A prolific and path-breaking scholar whose contributions helped transform both the humanities and the social sciences, Said's impact and engagement went far beyond the academy. Said was also an activist who worked courageously for justice, and fearlessly spoke truth to power.

When images and narratives of the Palestinian struggle were dominated by misrepresentations, caricatures and hateful stereotypes, Said was for years often the sole and most effective advocate for bringing truth and light to the Palestinian cause in the United States. Despite being the target of relentless and vicious personal attacks, Said never abandoned a vision of peace between Israelis and Palestinians based on deep mutual recognition of the other's histories and narratives, and a reconciliation leading to complete equality. He taught and inspired a new generation of activists to speak with clarity and always search for truth no matter who it might offend.

Throughout the 1990s, Said's newspaper columns provided a constant critique of the depradations, falsehoods and failures of the Oslo "peace process" that led only to the further alienation of Palestinians from their land and a betrayal of the vision of reconciliation and justice for which he strived. Said was among the first to understand and articulate how this process, premised on preserving the vast power imbalances and injustices between Israelis and Palestinians, would lead to the present disaster, and he never shirked from criticizing the Palestinian leaders who contributed to this state of affairs.

Said's journey back to his birthplace in Palestine in the early 1990s, after decades of exile, helped many Palestinians to come to terms with their own experience of exile and dispossession and encouraged many Palestinians to embark on their own journeys home. Said's books, among them "The Question of Palestine," "After the Last Sky," "The Politics of Dispossession," and the memoir of his youth, "Out of Place," remain seminal works which both personalize and humanize the Palestinian predicament and place it in political context. In his memoir, he revealed the depth of his courage and honesty by facing himself, his past, and his society with a critical eye.

Despite the worsening situation in Palestine, Said never succumbed to despair. Until the very end of his life, he was actively engaged in the Palestinian National Initiative, a movement to mobilize the energy of the entire population towards a non-violent struggle for peace and liberation.

Yet the greatest significance of Said's contribution is not only that he was an outstanding advocate for justice and peace in Palestine, but also that he consistently located this cause within a much greater struggle for a truly universal and humanist vision, entailing a firm rejection of ethno-nationalism and religious fanaticism. He taught by eloquent example that being faithful to a cause did not require blind loyalty to leaders or symbols, but rather necessitated self-criticism and debate. This fact meant that his engagement with the Arab world, and his fierce criticism of its status quo, was as important as his work communicating with people in the West.

Edward Said was a fountain of humanity, compassion, intellectual restlessness and creativity. At a time when the crude calculus of raw power and fanaticism threatens to swamp global discourse, his irreplaceable voice never needed to be heard more.

The most fitting tribute to Professor Said's life and work is to struggle with increased commitment for the vision of justice and humanity that inspired all of his efforts.

Ali Abunimah
Arjan El Fassed
Laurie King-Irani
Nigel Parry
for The Electronic Intifada

PALESTINIAN INTELLECTUAL AND FIGHTER, EDWARD SAID, RAILS AGAINST ARAFAT AND SHARON TO HIS DYING BREATH

"I have received from kind friends eulogies for Dr. Edward Said from as many as ten different sources. But the one below, by Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent for the Independent newspaper, spoke most powerfully to me about who and what the man really was." -Fred Bush

The Independent
September 26, 2003
-Robert Fisk Middle East Correspondent

THE LAST time I saw Edward Said, I asked him to go on living. I knew about his leukaemia. He had often pointed out that he was receiving "state-of-the-art" treatment from a Jewish doctor and - despite all the trash that his enemies threw at him - he always acknowledged the kindness and honour of his Jewish friends, of whom Daniel Barenboim was among the finest.

Edward was dining at a buffet among his family in Beirut, frail but angry at Arafat's latest surrender in Palestine/Israel. And he answered my question like a soldier. "I'm not going to die," he said. "Because so any people want me dead."

On Wednesday night he died in a New York hospital, aged 67.

I first met him in the early years of the Lebanese civil war. I'd heard f this man, this intellectual fighter and linguist and academic and musicologist and - God spare me for my ignorance in the 1970s - didn't now much about him. I was told to go to an apartment near Hamra street in Beirut.

There was shooting in the streets - how easily we all came to accept the normality of war - but when I climbed the steps to the apartment, I heard a Beethoven piano sonata. No, it wasn't the "Moonlight"- nothing so popular for Edward - but I waited outside the brown-painted door for 10 minutes until he had finished.

"You've read my books, Robert - but I bet you haven't read my work on music," he once scolded me. And of course, I scuttled off to Librarie Internationale in the Gefinor Building in Beirut to buy his definitive book to add to my collection; his wonderful essays on the Palestinians, his excoriation of the corruption and viciousness of Yasser Arafat, his outraged condemnation of the criminality of Ariel Sharon.

He was not a flawless man. He could be arrogant, he could be ruthless in his criticism. He could be repetitive. He could be angry to the point of irradiation. But he had much to be angry about. One afternoon, I went to see him at the Beirut home of his sister Jean - a fine lady whose own account of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Beirut Fragments, is worthy of her brother's integrity - and he was half-lying on a sofa.

"I'm just a bit tired because of the leukaemia treatment," he said. "I keep on going. I'll not stop."

He was a tough guy, the most eloquent defender of an occupied people and the most irascible attacker of its corrupt leadership. Arafat banned his books in the occupied territories - proving the immensity of Said and the intellectual impoverishment of Arafat.

At that first meeting in Beirut in the late Seventies, I had asked him about Arafat. "I went to a meeting he held in Beirut the other day," he said. "And Arafat stood there and was questioned about a future Palestinian state, and all he could say was that You must ask every Palestinian child this question.' Everyone clapped. But what did he mean? What on earth was he talking about? It was rhetoric. But it meant nothing."

After Arafat went along with the Oslo accords, Said was the first - rightly - to attack him. Arafat had never seen a Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, he said. There wasn't a single Palestinian lawyer present during the Oslo negotiations. Said was immediately condemned - all of us who said that Oslo would be a catastrophic failure were - as "anti- peace" and, by vicious extension, "pro-terrorist".

Said would weary of the need to repeat the Palestinian story, the importance of denouncing the old lies - one of them, which especially enraged him, was the myth that Arab radio stations had called upon the Palestinian Arabs of 1948 to abandon their homes in the new Israeli state - but he would repeat, over and over again, the importance of re-telling the tale of Palestinian tragedy.

He was abused by anonymous callers, his office was visited by a fire- bomber, and he was libelled many times by Jewish Americans who hated that he, a professor of literature at Columbia University, could so eloquently and vigorously defend his occupied people.

An attempt was made, in his dying days, to deprive him of his academic job by some cruel supporters of Israel who claimed - the same old, mendacious slur - that he was an anti-Semite. Columbia, in a long but slightly ambivalent statement, defended him. When the Jewish head of Harvard expressed his concern about the rise of "anti-Semitism" in the United States - by those who dared to criticise Israel - Said wrote scathingly that a Jewish academic who was head of Harvard "complains about anti-Semitism!"

As his health declined, he was invited to give a lecture in northern England. I can still hear the lady who organised it complaining that he insisted on flying business class. But why not? Was a critically ill man, fighting for his life and his people, not allowed some comfort across the Atlantic? His friendship with the brilliant Barenboim ? and their joint support for an Arab-Israeli orchestra that only last month played in Morocco - was proof of his human decency. When Barenboim was refused permission to play in Ramallah, Said rearranged his concert - much to the fury of the Sharon government, for which Said had only contempt.

The last time I saw him, he was exalted with happiness at the marriage of his son to a beautiful young woman. The time I saw him before, he had been moved to infuriation by the failure of Palestinians in Boston to arrange his slides to a lecture on the "right of return" of Palestinians to Palestine in the right order. Like all serious academics, he wanted accuracy. All the greater was his fury when one of his enemies claimed that he was never a true refugee from Palestine because he was in Cairo at the time of the Palestinian dispossession.

He had no truck with sloppy journalism - take a look at Covering Islam, on the reporting of the Iranian revolution - and he had even less patience with American television anchors. "When I went on air," he told me once, "the Israeli consul in New York said I was a terrorist and wanted to kill him. And what did the anchorwoman say to me? 'Mr Said, why do you want to kill the Israeli consul?' How do you reply to such garbage?"

Edward was a rare bird. He was both an icon and an iconoclast.

Edited extract from 'Has the peace rhetoric been a gigantic fraud?' article by Edward Said, first printed in the 'London Review of Books' on 14 December 2000:

WHAT OF this vaunted peace process? What has it achieved and why, if indeed it was a peace process, has the miserable condition of the Palestinians and the loss of life become so much worse than before the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993? And what does it mean to speak of peace if Israeli troops and settlements are still present in such large numbers? Again, according to the Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 110,000 Jews lived in illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank before Oslo; the number has since increased to 195,000, a figure that doesn't include those Jews who have taken up residence in Arab East Jerusalem. Has the world been deluded or has the rhetoric of "peace" been in essence a gigantic fraud?

Some of the answers to these questions lie buried in reams of documents signed by the two parties, unread except by the small handful of people who negotiated them. Others are simply ignored by the media and the governments whose job, it now appears, was to press on with disastrous information, investment and enforcement policies, regardless of the horrors taking place on the ground. A few people, myself included, have tried to chronicle what has been going on, from the initial Palestinian surrender at Oslo until the present, but in comparison with the mainstream media and governments, not to mention the status reports and recommendations circulated by huge funding agencies like the World Bank, the European Union and many private foundations - notably the Ford Foundation - who have played along with the deception, our voices have had a negligible effect except, sadly, as prophecy.