Reviewing Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (November 2023)

Published in 1979 with an updated preface in 1992, The Question of Palestine is two generations out of date, so why a review after all these years?

While it is true that a substantial portion of Said's views have long been in the public space, they may not be familiar to everyone around the world, especially in North America. The political and military struggles for nationhood since the fall of empires at the end of World War I and the expansion of newly-independent nation-states after the Second World War—the number of UN member states tripled between 1945 and 1979—brought issues of self-determination and statelessness to the world's attention. No locus on the planet has commanded the attention and polarized the global community more than that of Israel and Palestine. For these reasons, The Question of Palestine is still relevant.

This review will look at four themes presented in Edward Said's book: imperialism, colonialism and self-determination; statelessness; the search for moral equivalencies; and peaceful coexistence. In addition to Said's views, those of Hannah Arendt, 20th century political theorist and historian, will be referenced where appropriate.

Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, and he figured prominently in the development of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline. For Said, the question of Palestine is a clear case where the context of European imperialism and colonialism must be considered. Referring to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain (or the British Empire) articulated its support for "a national home for the Jewish people" at a time when the region was still under Ottoman jurisdiction, Said writes

[T]he declaration was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, (c) in a flat disregard of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority resident in that territory, and (d) it took the form of a promise about this same territory to another foreign group, so that this foreign group might, quite literally, make this territory a national home for the Jewish people.

At the conclusion of World War I, Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire was achieved with assistance from Britain and France who established their respective domains of influence in the Middle East. The British mandate for Palestine was established in 1920 under the authority of the League of Nations and lasted until Israel's independence in 1948.

The enormous self-governance challenges faced by nation-states spun off from empire resulted in much hardship for their respective citizens, and Israel was no different. For one thing, Israel was an outlier in the Middle East, surrounded by Arab and Muslim nations, which was problematic on account of historic grievances steeped in politics, economics and religion, not necessarily in that order. Israel's position required a guarantor, as its war of independence in 1948 demonstrated. Hannah Arendt put it this way in her 1944 essay, 'Zionism Reconsidered:'

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. . . . Even a Jewish minority in Palestine—nay even a transfer of all Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists—would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or come to a working agreement with their neighbors.

When the British pulled out of Palestine, the U.S.—by then not just one of many great powers but one of the world's two new superpowers—took on the responsibility of underwriting Israel's national security. Meanwhile, the possibility of a working agreement among Jewish and Arab neighbours, independent of U.S. mediation, has remained elusive to this day.

Though the U.S. became actively involved in Middle East politics after the Second World War, its official foreign policy was perhaps most clearly articulated by President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address.

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

The Carter Doctrine made explicit America's fundamental economic interests in the region, and many of its detractors argued that America's role of leader of the free world, particularly in terms of human rights issues, was again shown to be compromised. American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has demonstrated that the U.S. is not immune to the temptations of realpolitik. Said asks rhetorically,

Is the American leadership’s opposition to anything that smacks of popular nationalism so blind, so uncritically accepted after Vietnam and Iran, that it cannot respond except by further efforts to sell more arms and finance more schemes like the Egyptian-Israeli treaty?

Nevertheless, President Carter pursued the most ambitious attempt yet by an American president to bring the Jews and Arabs to the peace table. However, Said argues that these efforts were mostly for the sake of appearances. He highlights the fact that the Camp David Accords and the Israel-Egypt peace process, like the Balfour Declaration 60 years earlier, excluded the Palestinians. Said writes

[T]he highest priority was reserved for setting up military convergences favorable to the United States and optimally unfavorable to the radicals, the nationalists, the popular movements, that saw things differently. The net result is that for their compliance, Egypt and Israel have become completely dependent clients of the U.S. arms industry.

While for Jews, 1948 was the year of independence and the culmination of the Jewish diaspora's dream to return to the homeland in Palestine, for Said, speaking on behalf of Palestinians writes of the Naqba ('the catastrophe' i.e., the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians),

According to the most precise calculation yet made, approximately 780,000 Arab Palestinians were dispossessed and displaced in 1948 in order to facilitate the “reconstruction and rebuilding” of Palestine. These are the Palestinian refugees, who now number well over two million. And finally we should add that the quantity of Arabs held since 1967 inside the Occupied Territories (which Menachem Begin claims to have “liberated”) is 1.7 million; of them half a million are part of pre-1967 Israel. The transformation of Palestine which resulted in Israel has been an extraordinarily expensive project—especially for the Arab Palestinians.

And so self-determination for one group resulted in the statelessness of another. Here Arendt as one who experienced the life of a displaced person in Nazi Germany and subsequently Vichy France speaks to the issue critically in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem was a pretext used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized [sic] minority in Germany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless [sic] by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

Incidentally, for Arendt the 'statelessness' was a global problem of the age of world wars and was by no means confined to the Middle East. Though Arendt is long gone from the living stage, her advocacy on behalf of stateless peoples remains apposite near the end of the first quarter of the 21st century—the Kurds, the Romani, and the Rohingya being among the more familiar stateless peoples.

Politics by definition implies conflict arising from the different interests and values of different communities. Whether political conflict can be resolved peacefully or violently is crucial for the present and for the future. The outcomes of peaceful politics in the Middle East have not been encouraging, and many parties, both inside and outside the region, share responsibility.

The search for 'moral equivalence' also termed 'whatboutism' conceals some truths but frequently does so at the expense of advancing peaceful conflict resolution. For example, claiming that Israel has done to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews certainly demands some reflection, but a rhetorical victory by Israel or the Palestinians is counterproductive for achieving lasting peace in the region. Said engages thusly,

[It is a] complex irony: how the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become, therefore, the victims of the victims. . . . [I]f no one can come forth and say, frankly, Yes, the Palestinians actually do deserve to expiate for the historical crimes committed against the Jews in Europe, it must also be true that not to say, No, the Palestinians must not be allowed to go through these ordeals any longer, is an act of complicity and moral cowardice of singular dimension.

Here the debate quickly gets entangled in the messy history of the human species that for thousands of years (according to our records) has struggled to survive on the thin skin of this planet often at the expense of other species and others within the same species. What we have here is intergenerational violence that has been repeated and whose legacy perpetuates the memories of unavenged wrongs. One may rightly refer to the cycle of violence in the Middle East ... and there are other places in the world where the analogy seems to apply as well. For example, one may justly note that the legacy of imperialism and colonialism persist in the Global North in communities whose ancestors were slaves or driven out of their native lands.

Terrorism, Said refuses to take on directly in his book, explaining that the use of terror has no place in his vision of the Palestinian quest for nationhood and that a focus on terrorism would detract from the fundamental Palestinian issues. Said makes an exception when he instances Menachem Begin's terrorist connections as part of Irgun, a paramilitary organization that first set about forcing British troops to leave Palestine and then turned to the Palestinian Arabs. Depending on time, place and identity, one man's terrorist has been said to be another's freedom fighter, despite the fact that the nation-state is presumed to have a monopoly on the legal use of violence. Absent an internationally-sanctioned and universally-observed agreement on the legal prosecution and punishment of crimes against humanity and war crimes, there continues to exist a gap between what is 'legal' and what is 'just.' The 1998 Rome Statue empowering the International Criminal Court has not been acknowledged as international law by three of the permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, Russia and the U.S.) and a host of other countries who are also arguably not keen on international 'interference' in their internal and sovereign affairs. The moral equivalence argument surfaces again as those seeking immunity from international censure appeal to historical violations of international humanitarian law to justify their own definition of what is just and proportionate retribution.

To his credit, Said is not satisfied with the alternatives of permanently nursing grievances and encouraging violent resistance to 'even the score.' Having traversed a long and bloody history of conflict in his homeland, he nevertheless offers some possibility of a way out.

"Nothing that I have said in this book must be understood except as an acknowledgment of Palestinian and of Jewish history—in fierce conflict with each other for periods of time, but fundamentally reconcilable if both peoples make the attempt to see each other within a common historical perspective. Better fully acknowledged conflict than hidden and unstated fears, rigidly theologized fantasies about the Other."

In his 1992 Preface to The Question of Palestine, he writes that only a nonviolent political solution will end the cycle of violence.

[N]either Israelis nor Palestinians have a military option against the other; this fact is as striking now as it was when I wrote The Question of Palestine thirteen years ago. The task for the Palestinian people is still to assure its presence on the land, and, by a variety of means, to persuade the Israelis that only a political settlement can relieve the mutual siege, the anguish and insecurity of both peoples. There is no other acceptable secular—that is, real—alternative.

Of course for Said, it is not entirely up to the Israelis and the Palestinians. There are other parties involved for a variety of different reasons, and their cooperation or at least non-interference is necessary for the question of Palestine to be answered peacefully.