Thursday, September 25, 2003
Edward Said: RIP
Here's the NYTimes obit, written, interestingly, by Richard Bernstein, not merely because Bernstein is Jewish, but also because he's spent signifigant time and energy riding the anti-multicultural bandwagon. Bernstein does all right by Said; the obit is worth reading.
Professor Said died of leukemia, which he apparently found out about in 1991. He must have considered it a private struggle; no one I know knew of his illness before today. He was only 67.
Edward Said was a public intellectual in the best sense of both of those words. He was unrelenting in his concern for and outrage on behalf of the Palestinian people. It could be immensely upsetting to read Mr. Said, especially if you were Jewish liberal, like myself. It was always vital to do so.
He endured so much abuse at the hands of the gangs at Commentary and TNR, the worst being the accusation that he himself was a supporter of terrorism, to which Said's response was so unrelenting, so unbowed, it was sometimes too easy for those of us who wanted to believe in Oslo, in that picture of Rabin and Arafat, in Clinton's sheltering embrace, shaking hands, not to credit the profound strain of decency to be found even in Said's most angry and skeptical writings.
So let me credit it now; Edward Said was first, last and always, a humanist. His own rendering of the only viable solution for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict may seem impossibly idealistic, or, as some Israelis would no doubt view it, a clever ruse to destroy the essentially Jewish nature of the Israeli state, but in view of the horrors of the last three years, its fundamental humanism cannot be denied.
Imagine the despair such a man must have felt over the years, to which he never gave in.
Nor should we.
Professor Said died of leukemia, which he apparently found out about in 1991. He must have considered it a private struggle; no one I know knew of his illness before today. He was only 67.
Edward Said was a public intellectual in the best sense of both of those words. He was unrelenting in his concern for and outrage on behalf of the Palestinian people. It could be immensely upsetting to read Mr. Said, especially if you were Jewish liberal, like myself. It was always vital to do so.
He endured so much abuse at the hands of the gangs at Commentary and TNR, the worst being the accusation that he himself was a supporter of terrorism, to which Said's response was so unrelenting, so unbowed, it was sometimes too easy for those of us who wanted to believe in Oslo, in that picture of Rabin and Arafat, in Clinton's sheltering embrace, shaking hands, not to credit the profound strain of decency to be found even in Said's most angry and skeptical writings.
So let me credit it now; Edward Said was first, last and always, a humanist. His own rendering of the only viable solution for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict may seem impossibly idealistic, or, as some Israelis would no doubt view it, a clever ruse to destroy the essentially Jewish nature of the Israeli state, but in view of the horrors of the last three years, its fundamental humanism cannot be denied.
In the years after Oslo, he argued that separate Palestinian and Jewish states would always be unworkable and, while he recognized that emotions on both sides were against it, he advocated a single binational state as the best ultimate solution.
"I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New York Times. "There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such."
Imagine the despair such a man must have felt over the years, to which he never gave in.
Nor should we.
