Edward Said and the Question of Palestine Today

Thank you, Mahmood Mamdani for organizing this panel, and for sharing the video of Edward Said’s last lecture, which is so important to view in this moment.1 It is very moving to watch, in the middle of this moment we are now all very much a part of, whatever role we are actively playing or find ourselves playing—a moment of vigorous political protest and uprising against the ongoing U.S.–Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza, led here on our campus by the brave and principled students of CUAD (Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of 116 student organizations working toward a liberated Palestine by demanding university divestment from Israel) who have organized the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in support for freedom and justice for Palestine and the end of Israeli apartheid and occupation.2

Said’s own reflective mode provides an occasion to reflect on where we are with respect to the question of Palestine in the terms he himself set out in this lecture, terms that I have long grappled with precisely as a result of Said’s monumental influence on my own work on the Philippines as well as the work of my own generation of scholars and activists, and by now a couple of more generations in and from the postcolonial or former third world. Those terms have to do with the critical apprehension of the practices—scholarly, military, economic, political, cultural—composing our dominant imaginative geographies, the “somewheres” in which every idea or system of ideas exists, as Said writes in “Zionism, from the Standpoint of Its Enemies” (1979), acting as part of the “reality” we seek to understand, contest, and transform. 

In this keynote lecture in 2002, more than twenty years ago, Said situates the “postapartheid” moment of the conference (in the context of South Africa) not just in relation to the longer history of Palestinian struggle, but also with respect to the personal and political present of that moment in which he is speaking. He mentions both his illness, which would lead to his untimely death, and the imminent U.S. war on Iraq, which would be launched six months later, expanding a global war on terror that had already begun and that would continue for more than twenty years. And he situates that present postapartheid moment with regard to a yet only imagined future in which the story of Palestinian experience and suffering might figure as a concrete and universal touchstone for liberatory struggle.

I feel we are on the cusp of this very future that twenty-two years ago Said envisioned and called for. The worldwide protests and nationwide student uprisings for a free Palestine attest to the fact that Palestine has definitively emerged out of the Middle East ghetto that he lamented it had far too long been confined to. Palestine is no longer trapped in a space of exception or isolation in the field of moral and cultural struggle, which Said upheld as paramount particularly in the aftermath of the disappointments of the Oslo Accords and the limitations of tactical military successes on the side of Palestinian liberation.

The partnerships with other liberatory movements that Said could glimpse here and there but, nearing the end of his own life, regretted were yet too sparse, are now in abundance. One has only to survey the statements of solidarity and impassioned cries of protest across a transnational panorama of political communities to see the results of decades of coalition-building among anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, Black, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and trans struggles. These are partnerships that I must emphasize Said’s own work helped to make possible, in no small part by unsettling the dominant, colonial apparatuses of Western knowledge and reality production undergirding our contemporary world order and by linking his own scholarly and geopolitical interventions on Orientalism and the question of Palestine to “the experiences of feminism or women’s studies, black or ethnic studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their point of departure the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical reality” (2002, 200).

Said wrote those words in 1985. As he recognized then and as continues to take place to this day, concerted struggles of the colonized to take back these signifying and representing functions—to seize control over their historical reality, as people in Gaza have been doing with the daily video recordings they stream of their own internationally denied genocide—these struggles have made the theoretical, social, cultural, and political connections across diverse contexts that have begun to redraw the dominant imaginative geographies of our political belonging. 

In the wake of the decolonization and liberatory movements of the post–Second World War period, and in the context of globalization and the intense contradictions of platform capitalism, contemporary intellectual, social, and political struggles have enlarged and refined our critical analyses of larger systems of colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperialism such that these critical views elucidate rather than obscure those very connections that invite precisely that engagement with Palestine among nonspecialists, which Said strongly urged. It is those connections that allowed the resolution of academic boycott of Israel to be passed by the transformed American Studies Association ten years ago, when Palestine was still a taboo subject in most mainstream academic circles. It is also those connections that undergird the growing positive response to the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and the very growth and power of commitment of student-led pro-Palestine solidarity movements across the United States and elsewhere. In the lengthening shadow of Israel’s unrelenting genocidal war on Palestinians since October 2023, those ever-thickening connections of history, political understanding, and experience have given rise to the sprouting of over a hundred academic institutions organizing Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters across the country.

Indeed, today, Palestine is, as Tareq Baconi has recently argued of Gaza, the epicenter of a transnational liberatory movement—the galvanizing cause and case for a worldwide decolonizing struggle. Palestine is the very moral and political center of transnational struggle in our global times, an exemplary site of application and realization of the cry, “No one is free, until everyone is free.”

At the same time, as suffered to such an unspeakable degree by the people in Gaza—its body–land front line and lifeworld effigy—Palestine is also the grossest and most severe site of a revanchist colonial war to defend the racial capitalist order in which a white supremacist norm of humanity and its violent conditions of inhabitation, wealth accumulation, and power—our dominant global mode of life—are at stake. I have called the revanchist imperial defense of this dominant global mode of life, which is the consequence and afterlife of more than five hundred years of European colonialism, as “the war to be human.”

The convergence of white nationalists and supremacists, Zionists, right-wing fascists, and finance capitalists clamoring outside the encampment, calling for its eradication in tandem with the Israeli campaign of scholasticide, epistemicide, and genocide in Gaza, testifies to this revanchist imperial defense. In the unending global war on terror begun twenty-three years ago, which has so far resulted in the deaths of at least 4.6 million people in the so-called post-9/11 war zones (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and spreading to eighty-five countries around the world), this imperial war has shown itself to be the moral, ideological vindication and practical measure for securing the exclusive rights of freedom and privileges of the already human for those at the helm of this war. The Israel genocidal campaign is undoubtedly the epitome of this “war to be human”—a settler–colonial war of dispossession of Palestinians of their land, life, and very historical being, as the very condition of its own valued citizen life. But imperial war is also a broader phenomenon and logic intrinsic to our contemporary global, capitalist mode of life. In the twenty-first century, the “war to be human” is waged by new and old agents to secure what I have called “life worth living” of the already human, that status of colonial supremacy, protected belonging, and freedom (defined as exemption from enslavement, servitude, and punishment), which defines the very life-form of value animating contemporary global capitalism, including permanent war as a financialized capitalist enterprise in its own right.

Gaza is the front line of Western civilizations’ colonial crusade to secure their own political, financial, and moral domination over a world that is in revolt against it. It is important therefore to see that the counterinsurgent war against the transformative political connections and emergent imaginative geography of decolonizing struggle that Palestine as this epicenter realizes, that this counterinsurgent war is waged daily in the most ordinary, normalized forms of dispersion and separation, which Said described as the very conditions lived by Palestinians as a consequence of their dispossession. These are conditions of dispersion that a reorganized global capitalism creates and depends on—divisions of labor, life, care, and reproduction that allow imperial war to be the rule, not the exception, where disposability and the expenditure of life fuels global powers.

The institutional havens of Western liberal education, like the larger society of the U.S. nation, which is a settler–colonial nation like Israel, continue to be founded on these same imperial, racial capitalist relations of wealth appropriation and labor exploitation. It means that these institutions themselves depend on a global political economy of wealth accumulation that depends on the disposability of other land, life, and people—most often the land, life, and people of the colonized and their descendants—to serve as the means of creating value for the few.

So it is not entirely surprising that these institutions should now choose to violently defend and suppress dissent against what is clearly a muscular, militarist reassertion of the colonial world order and global political economy under Western hegemony. The current clampdown at our universities on expressions of solidarity and protest through changed policies and procedures, the insidious equation of anti-Zionism and any critique of Israel with antisemitism, and the bringing of state police forces on campus to dismantle the solidarity encampments and arrest pro-Palestinian students and faculty (and at Barnard and Columbia, to remain on campus in place of members of our communities, effectively as forces of university governance)—these acts are major demonstrations not only of how deep in the pockets of Israel our universities are, but also how directly and indirectly our institutions are invested in this settler–colonial project, which upholds their own moral and economic values. As Columbia President Minouche Shafik made explicit in a letter released just before authorizing the police raid, the university would not divest from Israel, a statement only later forcefully reiterated by the spectacular police theater that played out that night on the bodies of the students. What Steven Salaita gathers from the flagrant display of Zionist impunity today thus might very well ring true for the wealthiest trustee-run U.S. academic institutions today: “It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without our extinction.”

Even as they uphold the sacred safety of their select, purportedly vulnerable students, Western educational institutions and their quiescent faculty have remained silent before the decimation of all the universities and a majority of schools in Gaza, not to mention the libraries, mosques, hospitals, homes, doctors, aid workers, journalists, poets, professors, and artists who bear the past, present, and future of Palestinian life. Beyond present-day facts brought to us by countless on-the-ground journalists who have been killed (and the blackouts and prohibition of outside reporters to enter Gaza), there are the historical truths, social knowledge, cultural memories, stories, and perspectives of the Palestinian people that are targeted for obliteration.

Although those of us in universities in the United States are not all bearers of these histories and memories, many of us come from decolonizing struggles of our own peoples and see the injustice and catastrophic violence that Palestinians are being subjected to as part and parcel of our own movements. It is from our own understanding of the ways that a colonial heritage continues to structure and shape the world we live in, both with impunity and with disastrous consequences for our own peoples, that we can see and understand how the life-worlds we fight for in lands where we, too, would belong might only be realized in a world in which Palestine is free.

In contrast to the Zionist vision of separation, partition, war, walls, and Bantustans, Said believed wholeheartedly, as he declared in this last lecture, that the Palestinian vision was inherently inclusive and generous, that that justice in and for Palestine was above all a cultural and moral struggle that could reshape our worldly landscape. We see this inclusive and generous vision animating and guiding the student-led pro-Palestine liberation movements today.

Following in the decolonizing footsteps of many writers and fighters in the former third world and colonized world, Said gave us the tools to dismantle Western colonial forms of knowledge production, which continue to dominate our institutions and imaginative geography of the world to this very day. What the student uprisings have allowed us to understand with even more clarity is that it is not just the forms but also the places of knowledge production and learning that have to be transformed—transformed into precisely the places of learning that the solidarity encampments’ own articulation as people’s universities modeled for us.

In 2000, on the southern border of Lebanon, Edward Said threw a stone at an Israeli guardhouse in the distance to express his standing with the people he struggled for and alongside. In the aftermath of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon after eighteen years of occupation, the act was, as he said, “a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended.” Perhaps following this gesture of both solidarity and victory celebration, we would do well to build within and outside our institutions encampments of liberated and liberating learning—collectively organized somewheres where other knowledge- and reality-making might take place—in solidarity with the tremendous wave of student uprisings and their own expressive and material gestures of solidarity with a Palestine struggling against dispossession to live free. 

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of Philippine cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy, and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of four books, including most recently Remaindered Life (2022).