Said Discusses Experiences of Palestine

Said Discusses Experiences of Palestine
BY DANA DURBIN
Rice News Staff
April 2, 1998

During his lecture here last Thursday, Edward Said, drawing on his own experiences,
discussed the realities of Palestinian life since the state of Israel was created
in 1948.

Said, a native of Palestine and professor of comparative literature and chair
of the doctoral program at Columbia University, spoke on ”The Tragedy of Palestine"
as the final talk of this year’s President’s Lecture Series.

"Palestine in our time has become synonymous with displacement, dislocation
and, above all, dispossession," he said.

Like many Palestinians, Said’s family fled Jerusalem in 1947 during the creation
of the state of Israel, becoming "a collection of refugees, scattered as
they still are today all over the world," he said.

"Our property, our history, our collective identity as the Arab people
of Palestine was lost, the result of a deliberate campaign by another people
who claimed Palestine as their own; and Israel was the state that was born out
of the ruins of our society in 1948," Said said.

Unlike other countries such as South Africa, Algeria and India that were colonized,
no efforts of restitution have been made for Palestine. "In all [of] these
cases, it was later possible to argue that colonization had been an injustice
and that the time had come to give back land," he said.

"Only for Palestinians was their very status as native inhabitants with
an unbroken existence of 2,000 years in Palestine unacknowledged," Said
continued.

But the colonization of Palestine is complicated by the fact that colonists
are "the heirs of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism in the West that
culminated with the collective insanity of the Holocaust," Said said.

In order for there to be peace in the Middle East, Said believes that there
must be a process of reconciliation that includes the historic truths and realities
of the Palestinian experience being recognized.

Said does not believe, however, that peace will come about through the peace
process initiated in 1993. He is critical of those involved in drafting the
Oslo peace document, including the Israelis, the United States and PLO Chairman
Yasir Arafat.

"My position has always been to argue for a peaceful settlement between
us and Israeli Jews on the basis of two states partitioning Palestine,"
Said said. "The Oslo peace process, however, in my opinion, has buried
that possibility forever."

The peace accord gives Palestine "little more than local autonomy without
sovereignty," he said, creating a situation where Palestinians are enforcing
the occupation of their own land.

At the heart of the Oslo document’s failure is the lack of any mention of the
end of Israeli occupation of Palestine. "Israel refused to concede that,
and the PLO leadership, in all its brilliance, accepted it," he said.

Said believes that Palestinians may be approaching the darkest period of their
history.

"What we need now, and certainly the U.S. can change the status, is a
restatement of the basic premise that there is peace only when land is genuinely
given back and that the goal is for independence and statehood for two peoples,"
he concluded.