Edward Said on Palestine (region)

“By what moral or political standard are we expected to lay aside our claims to our national existence, our land, our human rights? In what world is there no argument when an entire people is told that it is juridically absent, even as armies are led against it, campaigns conducted against even its name, history changed so as to “prove” its nonexistence?”

“The asymmetry between common understanding of Zionism and of the Palestinians, however, has in general suppressed the values and the history of troubles animating the Palestinians throughout this century, since most Americans seem unaware that the Palestinians actually lived in Palestine before Israel came into existence. Yet only if those values and history are taken account of, can we begin to sece the bases for compromise, settlement, and finally, peace.”

“A certain number of basic premises inform the book's argument. One is the continuing existence of a Palestinian Arab people. Another is that an understanding of their experience is necessary to an understanding of the impasse between Zionism and the Arab world. Still another is that Israel itself, as well as its supporters, has tried to efface the Palestinian in words and actions because the Jewish state in many (but not all) ways is built on negation of Palestine and the Palestinians. Until today, it is a striking fact that merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable, so powerfully does our bare existence serve to accuse Israel of what it did to us.”

“Ever since its founding in 1948, Israel has enjoyed an astonishing dominance in matters of scholarship, political discourse, international presence, and valorization. Israel was taken to represent the best in the Western and biblical traditions. Its citizens were soldiers, yes, but also farmers, scientists, and artists; its miraculous transformation of an "arid and empty land" gained universal admiration, and so on and on. In all this, Palestinians were either "Arabs," or anonymous creatures of the sort that could only disrupt and disfigure a wonderfully idyllic narrative. Still more important, Israel represented (if it did not always play the role of) a nation in search of peace, while the Arabs were warlike, bloodthirsty, bent on extermination and prey to irrational violence, more or less forever.”