Left Coast by Alexander Cockburn

Though the range of Said’s intellectual interests is wide and his writings on history and culture immensely influential in the academies, his role as spokesman for the Palestinian national cause is preeminent, never more so than in recent years since the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements. Time and again Said has issued acrid critiques of the evolution of the so-called "peace process" and the relentless degrading of Palestinian national aspirations.

First by the mere fact that he is an articulate Palestinian, then by reason of his intellectual distinction and influential roost at the University of Columbia, Said has, down the years, elicited truly amazing onslaughts from the irreconcilables who tolerate no questioning of the moral and political propriety of the Zionist cause as applied against the Palestinians on the practical plane by Israeli governments down the years, and as unconditionally endorsed by Israel’s claque in the United States.

It’s a backhanded tribute to his effectiveness as spokesman for the Palestinian cause that the attacks on Said have, across the last couple of years, reached new levels of envenomed absurdity. A couple of years ago the journal Commentary, a shoddy publication sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, published an attack on Said by an Israeli-American called Justus Wiener, with a desk at an Institute in Jerusalem financed by the Michael Milken Foundation.

Wiener’s appointed task was to seek to demonstrate that Said had been mostly raised outside Palestine, therefore wasn’t really a Palestinian and thus had no standing as a tribune for his people! In fact as I dragged myself through Wiener’s interminable diatribe, it was plain that Wiener was in effect trying to portray just the sort of rootless intellectual with shadowy kinships spread across the Levant that was beloved of anti-Semitic pamphleteers in the nineteenth century.

Wiener’s mad attack was given wide publicity. There’s always space in the US press for charges that Palestinian do not in some complicated manner "exist", and that therefore by the same token the Palestinian national cause has no merit. The acme of this mode of abuse was a book accorded immense deference a number of years ago, called From Time Immemorial. Its author, Joan Peters, was wildly acclaimed in publications such as the New York Times for her supposedly learned discovery that by reason of hitherto unknown migratory eccentricities, Palestinians had no secure claim upon the soil of Palestine. Then suddenly the row died away as Peters’ "scholarship" crumbled under scrutiny.

The latest storm over Said concerns a trip to Lebanon he took last summer, in the course of which he and his family took the opportunity to visit the recently evacuated "security zone" occupied by Israeli forces. As did many Arabs, the Saids shuddered at the horrors of Khiam prison, built by Israel and used for the incarceration and (subsequently admitted) torture of Palestinian and Lebanese captives.

Then the Saids drove to a deserted border post, abandoned by Israeli troops, and now crowded with festive Lebanese throwing exuberant stones at the heavily fortified border. In competitive paternal emulation of his son, Said pitched a stone and was photographed in the act of so doing. You can scarcely blame him for being stunned at the consequences. Throw a rock at a border fence and if you are a Palestinian called Edward Said you’ll be the object of sharply hostile articles about the infamous stone toss in the New York Times, face a campaign to be fired from your tenured job at Columbia and be disinvited by the Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna from a long-standing engagement to deliver the annual Freud lecture there in May 2001.

As with the efforts to prove Said was somehow not a Palestinian, these assaults have a humorous absurdity to them. For decades the Israelis wreak mayhem on Southern Lebanon, without much commotion in the US press which is indifferent to UN resolutions telling Israel to abandon its illegal occupation. Both the Israelis and their hired Lebanese puppet force harass, torture and kill the inhabitants and demolish their houses. Indifference and mostly silence here. Then Said throws an innocuous stone at the border in understandable exultation at the flight of the occupiers and all hell breaks loose. To its credit, Columbia University stands by him and says the calls for his removal are preposterous and offensive.

What, aside from being an articulate Palestinian, is Said’s crime? As he himself has written, while "I have always advocated resistance to Zionist occupation, I have never argued for anything but peaceful coexistence between us and the Jews of Israel once Israel’s military repression and dispossession of Palestinians has stopped." Perhaps that’s the problem. The problem is that Said makes a reasoned and persuasive case for justice for Palestinians. He doesn’t say that the Jews should be driven into the sea. Such men are dangerous.

Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety