Edward Said lecture fills Crowell

by Miriam Gottfried
Assitant News



“What I propose is an effort in understanding, understanding being a never-ending process,” said controversial speaker Edward Said (pronounced Sah-eed) as he began his lecture to a packed audience in Crowell Concert Hall Tuesday afternoon entitled “The Palestinian Situation Today.” The talk was presented by the group, Students for a Free Palestine (SFP).

Said’s appearance provoked protests by members of the group, Students for Israel, and others who passed out pro-Israel literature at the lecture and put up anti-Said posters throughout campus last week (see article on page 14).

Over one hundred people were turned away at the door after Crowell reached its capacity. Some tried to listen through windows.

“My purpose is to put forth a narrative that is more inclusive, but it is not meant to be anything more than restoring a history,” Said said.

After stating his purpose, Said outlined the framework for his goal of portraying the Palestinian history and current situation.

“We need to remember that we live in a time, not of the clash of civilizations, but of the clash of interpretations of history and identity,” he said.

Said explained the idea of a fragmentation of history, which he sees as a modern phenomena resulting from the inclusion of the voices of more marginalized sections of societies. He stated that, while this process was something to be celebrated, he also saw it leading to incoherence because of the variety of perspectives that might come out of one event.

According to Said, the world is becoming more heterogeneous, as is evidenced by the now mixed populations of formerly homogenized European countries. In response to this many people are reverting to fundamentalist versions of religion where the “right way” is open to different interpretations.

“Palestine/Israel is the most deeply invested geography so far as claims, counter-claims,” Said said. “Religion is the natural product of Palestine, not cotton or transistors, and it’s not a very happy product.”

Said spoke about the existence of many histories concurrent with the Hebrew Bible that were normally not looked at, emphasizing that Israeli history is only one of many histories of the ancient Middle East.

He stated that the recognition of the Palestinian history was essential to establishing peace in the region.

“It is imperative to see [the Palestinian] narrative in order to arrive at a state that can reasonably be called peaceful,” Said said, maintaining that neither side would ever defeat the other militarily.

“The only hope is to find a state of coexistence between the two peoples who have lived there for so long,” he said.

Said restated the goal of peaceful coexistence during the questioning period after the speech. When asked if he was opposed to idea of Jewish state, Said responded:

“I’m suspicious of any kind of state that thinks of itself as homogenous when in fact it is not. My hope is in the end, there will be one multinational state because the model of partition has not worked thus far,” he said.

Though Said acknowledged that there was a legitimate Israeli perspective to the issue, he criticized what he saw as a failure by the American media to relate the Palestinian story in a manner that was equivalent to its coverage of the Israeli past.

‘The Palestinian people has endured terrible injustices, all mostly unrecognized, and labeled preposterously by the American media and government as justified retaliation,” Said said.

The theme of imbalance and asymmetry permeated much of the rest of Said’s speech. He described the difference between Israeli and Palestinian military power, citing that Israel has 300 to 500 nuclear warheads, while Palestine is in his words “poor and relatively defenseless.”

“This is not a battle between two sovereign states, it is a colonial attack against relatively unarmed people,” Said said, comparing Israel’s action to those of the U.S. in Vietnam.

“For every Palestinian, Arab and Muslim, Israel was created on the ruins of the society of the Palestinian people who were totally dispossessed,” Said said. “Lost is any sense of a Palestinian history and of the covenants and resolutions that protect Palestinian rights. They have been overshadowed by an Israeli movement that wants more land and less Arabs living on it.”

Said proceeded to recount a brief history of the region from the Palestinian perspective since the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 when two-thirds of the Palestinian population was forcibly expelled, according to Said. In 1967 Israel conquered the rest of Palestine and has since built many settlements, Said said.

Said expressed his indignation that the phrase “occupied territory” has been left out of most articles about violence taking place in the West Bank and Gaza. This omission, he said, resulted in a misrepresentation of the Palestinian people.

“Occupied people have the right of resistance, and many Americans don’t realize that this is the current situation,” he said.

When asked during the questioning period about his view on the place of violence in the conflict, Said stated that he was not a pacifist and saw a time and a place for violence.

“I don’t believe in violence, but I also don’t believe in lying down and playing dead. However, the process has to be more civil than military,” he said.

Said questioned the reason for so many cases of civilian casualty on the Palestinian side. He said that the official answer was retaliation and self-defense, but that Israel’s military strategy was really not designed to prevent terrorism because the civilian deaths have little effect on terrorism.

“It’s like trying to empty the sea with a spoon, but what they’re really doing is humiliating and punishing an entire people to break their will,” Said said.

In light of this, Said asked how Israel could expect security and acceptance from the Palestinians.

Calling it a “suicidal policy” Said described the Israeli blockade of universities, schools and hospitals, telling the audience that American taxpayers were underwriting this policy. The U.S. provides about 4 billion dollars per year in aid to Israel.

Said pointed to these policies as having been responsible for the 50 percent Palestinian unemployment rate and for the over 55 percent living on less than 2 dollars per day.

He prefaced his summary of the different phases of the peace accords with a disclaimer regarding his view of the process.

“I was a critic [of the peace process] from the beginning because I knew it couldn’t get anywhere. Not only was the U.S. on the side of Israel, the texts of the agreements had nothing about the end of settlement or the end of abuse.”

According to Said, by 1999, 17 percent of the country was self-ruled Palestinian territory.

“The result is that the Palestinians are cooped up in 225 ghettos from which they cannot emerge,” he said.

Said followed this with a proposal for future changes in the policies and structure of the region.

“It is quite clear that we are at a dead end, a stalemate. Therefore, I and many others, including Israelis, who have been awakened to the failure of their policies, are calling for and end to the occupation program and for the withdrawal of soldiers to begin immediately,” Said said.

In his final remarks Said added that learning the Palestinian narrative would prove useful in terms of finding the roots of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“Understanding this history is absolutely essential to the present disquiet that exists between the American and Islamic worlds,” he said.

Said was born in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States at Princeton and Harvard. He began teaching at Columbia University in 1963. He has been awarded 16 honorary doctorates and is a member of multiple academic societies. He served as a member of the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991. He is presently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a former member of the Palestinian National Council.

Said is the author of more than twenty books, including Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); Covering Islam (1980); The World the Text and the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996); Entre Guerre et Paix (1997); and Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). His most recent publications include The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000), Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2001), and Power, Politics, and Culture (2001).

Said was introduced by Shireen Tawil ’04, a co-president of Students for a Free Palestine.

Tawil said she thought the lecture went very well and was pleased with the audience’s response, in particular the standing ovation that about two-thirds of the audience gave him at the end of his speech.

“It was a really good opportunity for Wesleyan,” Tawil said. “It was something that needed to happen.”

Tawil said her group’s mission statement, “To educate the Wesleyan University community on the present state of the Palestinian people, with an emphasis on human and civil rights,” has been misconstrued in the past.

“It was a really powerful reinforcement to come through from somebody as authoritative as Edward Said,” Tawil said.

According to Tawil, Said was very pleased and had a good time.

Tawil said the decision to have the question and answer session moderated by Professor of Philosophy Brian Fay was due to concerns that arose after the lecture of Yosi Olmert several weeks ago.

Olmert, a one-time advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was invited to speak by Students for Israel. A shouting match occurred among the audience during the question and answer session that followed his talk, which was not moderated by a faculty member.

Tuesday, there was increased security by Public Safety and the Middletown Police to escort people out if there was an outburst, Tawil said.

“I thought it was an excellent lecture,” said Dean of the College Freddye Hill, who attended the lecture and whose office co-sponsored the event. “I agree with him that the solution to the current situation is a State or entity that is based on tolerance and a willingness to live more together.”

In addition to Students For a Free Palestine and Dean Hill’s office, the Office of the President, the Adelphic Educational Fund, and the University’s religion, anthropology, and sociology departments sponsored Said’s speech.

Dean Hill and Director of Communication for the University, Justin Harmon, refused to disclose the amount that was paid to Said, or what portion each group paid.

“We don’t want this to degrade into a conversation of who got the funding from where,” Harmon said. “[The amount of money each group gave] is a bad measure of intent.”

Harmon added that no matter who the speaker was, the University wouldn’t disclose how much it cost.

In an email to the Argus, Hill said it was not the University’s policy to divulge the amount paid to people invited by the University.

“What is the purpose of disclosing Said’s or anyone else’s honorarium and associated costs?” Hill asked.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
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