Description:

Still a basic and indespensible account of the Palestinian question, updated to include the most recent developments in the Middle East- from the intifada to the Gulf war to the historic peace conference in Madrid.

Review

Edward Said's The Question of Palestine opens with a paradox so stark it functions as the book's moral engine: "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." That sentence, from the Preface to the 1992 edition, announces the book's fundamental wager — that the Palestinian experience can be made legible to Western readers precisely through the moral categories those readers already claim to hold. What follows is not a work of diplomatic history or dispassionate political science. It is a polemic, a close reading of power, and an act of historical recovery conducted by a writer who understands that the Palestinians' most durable enemy has never been military force alone but the interpretive apparatus that declares them not to exist.

The book's argument, laid out across four chapters, an introduction, and two framing pieces added for the 1992 edition, is that "the question of Palestine" names a specific contest between affirmation and denial. On one side stands the continuing existence of a Palestinian Arab people — dispersed, occupied, internally colonized, but demonstrably present and politically organized. On the other stands a fusion of Zionist settler-colonialism and Western liberal discourse that has, for more than a century, treated that presence as an inconvenience to be managed, a demographic problem to be solved, or a fiction to be unmasked. Said's innovation is to show that these two projects are not merely allied but intellectually fused — that the liberal Western intellectual tradition, from George Eliot to Reinhold Niebuhr to Edmund Wilson, provided the moral vocabulary that made dispossession thinkable before it was practical.

The architecture of the book reflects this layered argument. Chapter 1, "Palestine and the Palestinians," is an exercise in what Said, drawing on his own prior work in Orientalism, would call discursive analysis. The chapter demonstrates that the very phrase "the question of Palestine" encodes an erasure: it was framed as a problem about Jews and their national aspirations, never as a question about the Arabs who constituted the overwhelming majority of mandate Palestine's population. Said assembles a devastating dossier. Balfour's 1919 memorandum — "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land" — is quoted not as an outlier but as the purest expression of a colonial epistemology that simply could not credit native wishes as politically relevant. Niebuhr's 1947 New York Times letter, describing Jewish Palestine and Christian Lebanon as "islands of Western civilization" in a "hopeless" Muslim sea, shows how American liberal Protestantism naturalized the same logic. And George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, that monument of Victorian sympathy, is read against the grain as a Gentile articulation of the Zionist project that treats Palestine as spiritually vacant — a place awaiting redemption by Europeans who never once glance at the people already living there.

Said's method here is characteristic and bears stating plainly. He is not arguing that these writers are bigots in any simple sense. He is arguing something more uncomfortable: that the categories of nineteenth-century European racial thought — the typologies of Renan and Knox, the legal doctrines of Vattel and Westlake that declared inhabited non-European territories effectively empty, the "doxology about land" that measured civilization by settled agriculture — had so thoroughly saturated Western common sense that even the most humane observer could look at Palestine and see a blank. The Palestinian, in this grammar, is what Said calls a "nonperson." The contest, he writes in the Introduction, "has been almost comically uneven from the beginning. Certainly so far as the West is concerned, Palestine has been a place where a relatively advanced (because European) incoming population of Jews has performed miracles of construction and civilizing and has fought brilliantly successful technical wars against what was always portrayed as a dumb, essentially repellent population of uncivilized Arab natives." The sentence lands with the force of a verdict.

Chapter 2, "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims," shifts from discourse to practice. Said traces Zionism genealogically as a nineteenth-century European settler-colonial project and then documents, through Israeli and Zionist primary sources, the concrete mechanisms by which a native population was dispossessed. The centerpiece is Herzl's 1895 Diaries:

We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either.

Chapter 3, "Toward Palestinian Self-Determination," is the book's most constructive section and in some ways its most historically vulnerable. Said traces the reconstitution of Palestinian national consciousness after the catastrophe of 1948 across three communities: the remnant that stayed inside Israel and became second-class citizens, the exiles dispersed across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the Gulf, and the population of the West Bank and Gaza that came under Israeli military occupation after 1967. He calls this condition "cubistic" — a fractured, multi-planar existence without territorial continuity, where national identity had to be maintained through memory, literature, and political organization rather than through the normal apparatus of a state. The reading of Palestinian literature here is genuinely illuminating: Mahmoud Darwish's "Identity Card" and Tawfiq Zayyad's "We Shall Remain" are treated not as propaganda but as evidence of a national self-consciousness that dispossession could not extinguish. Emile Habibi's The Pessoptimist, a novel of tragicomic survival inside Israel, becomes a document of what it means to persist when history has declared you gone.

The political analysis of the PLO and Fateh is careful and, by the standards of 1979, courageous. Said defends the PLO's claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people — a claim the 1974 Rabat Summit had formally recognized but that the United States and Israel refused to accept — and traces the organization's evolution from a maximalist vision of a secular democratic state in all of Palestine to a pragmatic acceptance of a state on any liberated portion of the territory. He presents the intifada, then ongoing, as a "blueprint for Palestinian political and social life that is lasting, relatively nonviolent, inventive." But the chapter's boosterism sits uneasily with what we now know. Said's treatment of Arafat is respectful to the point of protectiveness, and his insistence that the PLO's internal debates were essentially democratic understates the authoritarian dynamics that would later corrode the Palestinian Authority. The chapter is valuable as a snapshot of a moment — the late 1970s, when the Palestinian national movement seemed to have rebuilt itself from the ashes of Black September and the Lebanese civil war — but it is not a critical history of the PLO as an institution. Said's loyalty to the national cause occasionally mutes his critical voice.

Chapter 4, on Camp David and its aftermath, is where Said's argument achieves its sharpest political edge. He reads the March 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty not as a breakthrough but as a framework for perpetual Israeli control thinly disguised as "autonomy." Fayez Sayegh's summary, which Said quotes approvingly, captures the structure: "A fraction of the Palestinian people (under one-third of the whole) is promised a fraction of its rights (not including the national right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of its homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole); and this promise is to be fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in which Israel is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement." Said then documents what "autonomy" meant in practice. Ariel Sharon's Ma'ariv interview of January 26, 1979, is quoted at length: "Not only [should there be] settlements: there should be roads which will ensure the territorial continuity between the towns and settlements. And not only roads: a wide infrastructure of army camps and military training belts." Zeev Schiff's Ha'aretz analysis confirms that under the proposed autonomy, interrogation and arrest powers would remain exclusively with Israeli security forces, with Palestinian police cooperation reduced to a formality. The analogy to South African Bantustans is explicit and, on the evidence Said marshals, difficult to refute.

The chapter's most corrosive insight is that the United States was never a neutral broker. Said traces the architecture of American exclusion: Kissinger's 1975 memorandum of understanding with Israel promising not to negotiate with the PLO, Brzezinski's "Bye-bye PLO," the Bush-Baker exclusion of the PLO and East Jerusalem Palestinians from the 1991 Madrid conference. He cites Eqbal Ahmad's phrase about "inherited instincts" to characterize a policy establishment that simply could not conceive of Palestinians as political agents with legitimate claims. The $77 billion in U.S. aid to Israel between 1967 and 1991, the AIPAC official's boast that the Reagan-era Congress was "the most pro-Israel in history," the ritual humiliations imposed on PLO diplomats before the brief 1988–1990 dialogue — Said assembles these as evidence that the "peace process" was structurally designed to make the Palestinian question disappear rather than to resolve it. "It is not too much to say," he writes, "that the rhetoric of Middle Eastern peace used today without dissent by the United States is coterminous with the desire to trim down, and perhaps even to make disappear, the question of Palestine." The sentence is characteristic Said — the cool syntax of the academic sentence delivering an accusation of enormous scope.

The book's intellectual situation is complex and repays careful placement. Said draws on Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony — the idea that domination is secured not primarily through coercion but through the production of consent, through the work of "experts in legitimation" who make the existing order seem natural. He draws on his own prior work in Orientalism to show how the Western representation of "the Arab" provided the epistemological groundwork for political dispossession. He draws on the materialist tradition's attention to institutional detail — the JNF's land charter, the Absentees' Property Law, the water allocation ratios — to counter the idealist claim that Zionism was simply a national liberation movement tragically misunderstood. And he draws, implicitly but unmistakably, on the anti-imperialist tradition of Fanon and Césaire, for whom colonialism was never merely an economic arrangement but a structure of consciousness that dehumanized both colonizer and colonized.

The book's relationship to its cross-references is revealing. Hannah Arendt is quoted in the Introduction — "the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs" — and her presence haunts the text even when unacknowledged. Said is effectively extending Arendt's analysis of statelessness and the nation-state's production of surplus populations, but he does so from the position of the stateless themselves rather than from the philosopher's chair. The engagement with Niebuhr and Wilson is more adversarial; Said is arguing that the American "man of letters" tradition, far from being a neutral arbiter of culture, functioned as what Gramsci would call an organic intellectual for empire. The Bibliographical Note, which steers readers toward revisionist Israeli historians like Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, and Avi Shlaim, constructs what amounts to a counter-archive — an alternative body of scholarship that mainstream political science and pro-Zionist historiography had suppressed. The gesture is both scholarly and strategic: Said is not merely citing sources but building an infrastructure for future work.

The book's weaknesses are inseparable from its method. Said's prose, for all its forensic clarity, can become relentless; the accumulation of evidence sometimes substitutes for the analysis of counterarguments. Theodore Draper and Commentary are dismissed rather than engaged, and while Draper's position — that Palestinian national aspirations must be subordinated to Israeli security requirements — is certainly rebuttable, Said's tendency to treat it as self-evidently disingenuous weakens the argument for readers not already convinced. The treatment of Israeli society is almost entirely undifferentiated: we learn a great deal about Herzl, Weizmann, Begin, Sharon, and the Koenig Plan, but very little about the Israeli peace movement, the internal Jewish critique of occupation, or the revisionist historians Said himself cites in the Bibliographical Note. Israeli dissent appears in the footnotes but not in the body of the argument, which has the effect of making Zionism appear more monolithic than it was. And the book's prescriptions, while morally compelling — "no human being should be threatened with 'transfer' out of his or her home or land" — are stated as axioms rather than developed as political programs. Said insists that "genuine Jewish-Palestinian encounter has yet to occur on any important scale," but he offers little sense of what institutional form that encounter might take or how it could survive the asymmetries of power he has so carefully documented.

These limitations, however, are in some sense the price of the book's achievement. The Question of Palestine was published in 1979 and updated in 1992, and it was written against a discursive environment in which the Palestinian was either a terrorist or a refugee — a security problem or a humanitarian problem, never a political subject. Said's task was to establish, before anything else, that Palestinians exist as a people with a history, a culture, a political organization, and a legitimate claim to self-determination. The book succeeds at that task so thoroughly that it is easy to forget how embattled the claim was when it was made. The extensive chapter notes, the careful documentation of Israeli and Zionist sources, the Bibliographical Note's construction of a counter-archive — these are not scholarly ornaments but the substance of an argument designed to make Palestinian presence inescapable. The book is, in the deepest sense, an act of what Said elsewhere called "the permission to narrate."

Who should read it now? Anyone who wants to understand why the "peace process" has failed for half a century, and why it was designed to fail. Anyone who suspects that the categories of Western journalism — "cycle of violence," "ancient hatreds," "both sides" — are evasions rather than explanations. Anyone who needs to see, in detail, how a discourse of liberal universalism can function as the handmaiden of dispossession. The book does not offer a roadmap to peace; its prescriptions are stated at the level of principle rather than mechanism, and the intervening decades have made the political landscape more fractured, not less. What it offers is something prior to prescription: a diagnosis of the interpretive machinery that makes a people disappear, and a demonstration that disappearance is never complete. The Palestinians, Said insists, will continue to exist and will continue to have their own ideas about who represents them, where they want to settle, and what they want to do with their national and political future. That insistence, stated in 1979, restated in 1992, and left as the book's final word, is not optimism. It is simply the refusal of erasure.

Notable Quotes

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either.

Moshe Dayan speaking in Ha-Aretz, April 4, 1969, cited by Said to illustrate the systematic erasure of Palestinian presence from the land. — erasure, colonization, settlement, Palestinian villages

We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

Theodor Herzl writing in his Diaries in 1895, planning the displacement of Palestinian Arabs — cited by Said as evidence that Zionism's colonial dimensions were present from its inception. — Zionist planning, displacement, colonialism, native removal

For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the forms of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

Arthur Balfour's memorandum of August 1919, expressing the explicit colonial logic of overriding the wishes of Palestine's native majority in favor of Zionist claims. — Balfour Declaration, colonial power, native rights, imperial hubris

It was a miraculous cleaning of the land; the miraculous simplification of Israel's task.

Chaim Weizmann's remark about the 1948 exodus of Palestinians, cited by Said as an example of how the displacement of an entire people was transformed into a benign narrative of divine providence. — 1948 exodus, Nakba, Zionist narrative, euphemism

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.

Joseph Conrad quoted by Said to illustrate how European colonialism — and by extension Zionism — depended on a dignifying 'idea' to rationalize the dispossession of native peoples. — colonialism, ideology, moral rationalization, Conrad

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 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 by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

Hannah Arendt, quoted by Said to frame the central irony: the resolution of Jewish statelessness through Zionism produced Palestinian statelessness. — irony, refugees, statelessness, Hannah Arendt, Zionism

It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. No 'development' will bring us closer to our aim, to be an independent people in this small country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide-open for us. And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.

Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund, writing in his diary on December 19, 1940, articulating the logic of transfer that would be enacted eight years later. — transfer, demographic engineering, Zionist ideology, Palestinian removal

The present state of affairs would necessarily tend towards the creation of an Arab Palestine, if there were an Arab people in Palestine. It will not in fact produce that result because the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times, and the effendi is dishonest, uneducated, greedy, and as unpatriotic as he is inefficient.

Chaim Weizmann writing to Arthur Balfour in 1918, applying racial stereotypes about Oriental backwardness to deny Palestinian claims to their own land. — Orientalism, racial hierarchy, denial of Palestinian peoplehood, Weizmann

Exile is thus the fundamental condition of Palestinian life, the source of what is both over- and underdeveloped about it, the energy for what is best, say, in the components of its remarkable literature and in its extraordinary network of communications, associations, and extended families.

Said's summation in the 1992 Preface of how exile functions as the defining condition of Palestinian experience — simultaneously a source of creative energy and intractable political disadvantage. — exile, Palestinian identity, dispossession, diaspora, literature

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.

Said articulating what he calls the 'complex irony' at the heart of the Palestinian predicament — the reversal by which historical victims became oppressors. — victims of victims, irony, Holocaust, Palestinian suffering, moral complexity

No national movement has been so unfairly penalized, defamed, and subjected to disproportionate retaliation for its sins as has the Palestinian. The Israeli policy of punitive counterattacks seems to be to try to kill anywhere from 50 to 100 Arabs for every Jewish fatality.

Said in the 1992 Preface, commenting on the asymmetry between Palestinian acts of violence and the scale of Israeli state retaliation. — asymmetric violence, state terrorism, disproportionate force, Palestinian resistance

When our forces encounter civilians during the war or in the course of a pursuit or a raid, the encountered civilians may, and by Halachic standards even must be killed, whenever it cannot be ascertained that they are incapable of hitting us back. Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he gives the impression of being civilized.

A booklet issued by the Israeli army during the 1973 war, written by the central command's rabbi Abraham Avidan with a preface by General Yona Efrati, cited by Said as evidence of the dehumanization of Arabs within Israeli military culture. — dehumanization, military ethics, religious justification, racism

No one has produced any evidence of such orders sufficient to produce so vast and final an exodus. If we wish to understand why 780,000 Palestinians left in 1948, we must shift our sights to take in more than the immediate events of 1948; rather, we must see the exodus as being produced by a relative lack of Palestinian political, organizational response to Zionist effectiveness and, along with that, a psychological mood of failure and terror.

Said countering the claim that Palestinians left in 1948 because Arab leaders ordered them to, arguing instead for a structural explanation rooted in the asymmetry between Zionist institutional preparation and Palestinian political weakness. — 1948 exodus, Nakba, historical revisionism, Zionist organization

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kindship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, quoted by Said to show how the Victorian desire for rootedness and homeland animated the Zionist project — while entirely ignoring the existing inhabitants of the land where that rootedness was to be planted. — homeland, rootedness, Zionism, George Eliot, colonialism

Palestine is the last great cause of the twentieth century with roots going back to the period of classical imperialism. I am certain that its partisans, Arab and Jewish, will outlast the opposition, because it is certain that coexistence, sharing, and community must win out over exclusivism, intransigence, and rejectionism.

The final lines of the 1992 Epilogue, expressing Said's ultimate conviction that the Palestinian cause will prevail through reconciliation rather than domination. — hope, coexistence, justice, persistence, reconciliation

The consciousness of what one really is…is 'knowing thyself as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.' The job of producing an inventory is a first necessity.

Said quoting Antonio Gramsci to frame his project of recovering Palestinian history from beneath the 'traces' deposited by Zionist and Western narrative dominance. — Gramsci, historical consciousness, subaltern history, inventory

Transfer — post factum; should we do something so as to transform the exodus of the Arabs from the country into a fact, so that they return no more?…His answer: he blesses any initiative in this matter. His opinion is also that we must act in such a way as to transform the exodus of the Arabs into an established fact.

Joseph Weitz recording a conversation with Moshe Shertok of the Israeli Foreign Ministry on May 18, 1948, about making the Palestinian exodus permanent. — transfer, ethnic cleansing, 1948, Israeli policy, right of return

I went to visit the village of Mu'ar. Three tractors are completing its destruction. I was surprised; nothing in me moved at the sight of the destruction. No regret and no hate, as though this was the way the world goes.

Joseph Weitz describing his visit to a demolished Arab village, demonstrating the psychological normalization of Palestinian dispossession that Said identifies as central to Zionist consciousness. — village destruction, normalization, moral indifference, 1948

The intifada has provided a blueprint for Palestinian political and social life that is lasting, relatively nonviolent, inventive, brave, and confoundingly intelligent. Based on non-coercive norms of behavior that contrast stunningly with Israeli practices against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the intifada soon became a model for movements of democratic protest.

Said in the 1992 Preface celebrating the intifada as the most authentic expression of Palestinian national will and a model for nonviolent resistance worldwide. — intifada, nonviolent resistance, democracy, Palestinian agency

The task of criticism, or, to put it another way, the role of the critical consciousness in such cases is to be able to make distinctions, to produce differences where at present there are none. To write critically about Zionism in Palestine has therefore never meant, and does not mean now, being anti-Semitic; conversely, the struggle for Palestinian rights and self-determination does not mean support for the Saudi royal family, nor for the antiquated and oppressive state structures of most of the Arab nations.

Said insisting on the necessity of critical distinctions: criticizing Zionism is not anti-Semitism, and supporting Palestinian rights is not endorsing Arab authoritarianism. — critical thinking, anti-Semitism, distinctions, intellectual honesty