Edward W. Said and Rethinking the Question of Palestine

Abstract

Edward W. Said has been described as both conscience of and a citizen of the world. The paper explores his thinking on the question of Palestine over three decades. He played a key role in transforming international discourse on Palestine: issues such as the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, Palestinian dispossession, Palestinian oral history, the right of return of the Palestine refugees, the authoritarianism and corruption of the Palestinian Authority constituted some of Said's concerns. Said's search for an alternative to the flawed Oslo process led him back to the one-state solution, based on equality and justice and a joint Palestinian–Israeli struggle. Said's rethinking of the Palestine question was an indictment of the narrow brand of ethnic (Jewish and Arab) nationalism. For him, Zionist ethnocracy and settler colonialism had brought about the death of the two-state solution, and this meant that the architects of the Oslo accord had inadvertently set the stage for a single, non-sectarian...