Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Feature
Capital crusader
The World Bank's Joseph Stiglitz is articulating a new philosophy for global economic reform, and ruffling feathers at the International Monetary Fund.
By David Moberg
[09/25/99]

Feature
He vs. she, part 1
Even new resident Monica can't handle this one, as Rudy and Hillary prepare to take their fearsome domestic quarrel to upstate New York.
By Jake Tapper
[09/24/99]

Feature
Buchanan, McCain go head-to-head
GOP presidential hopefuls debate whether U.S. had any business stopping Hitler.
By Jake Tapper
[09/23/99]

Feature
Murky future for tax cuts
Republicans regroup and plot strategy after President Clinton's veto of their $792 billion tax-cut package.
By Sarah Keech
[09/23/99]

Feature
"Kill mankind. No one should survive"
The writings of Eric Harris reveal an equal-opportunity hater who rails against minorities and racists and can't stand the WB.
By Dave Cullen
[09/23/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Like Rigoberta Menchu and Betty Friedan, Edward Said is a postmodern Marxist uninterested in the concrete realities of individual lives and what they actually imply. For 30 years, he has presented himself as a Palestinian Everyman, in autobiographical writings and published interviews, and even in a film for the BBC. In all of these he has shaped his personal story as a holograph of the criminal dispossession that he claimed Jews had committed against his people.

To be sure, Said was a wealthy Everyman, a member of the moneyed Palestinian and cultural elite. But that very fact served to emphasize the dispossessions of home and homeland that the poorest Palestinians felt. Thus, reviewing one of Said's many books on this subject, the novelist Salman Rushdie observed that by writing about his "internal struggle: the anguish of living with displacement, with exile," Said "enables us to feel the pain of his people."

According to the official biography Said constructed and then retailed for 30 years (until his recent unmasking), he was born in 1935 in Jerusalem and grew up in a house located at 10 Brenner Street in the Talbiyeh district until he and his family were "dispossessed" by the city's Jewish occupiers when Israel became a state in 1948. "I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt," Said wrote.

Said's political uses of the memories surrounding the house at 10 Brenner Street are further reflected in a speech he gave last year at Birzeit University on the West Bank: "The house from which my family departed in 1948 -— was displaced -— was also the house in which the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber lived for a while, and Buber of course was a great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn't mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."

In other words, even Martin Buber —- the most prominent Jewish critic of a specifically "Jewish" state, who had proposed instead a bi-national solution to create a Palestinian state that was both Jewish and Arab, didn't mind benefiting from the dispossession of the Arabs. Such hypocrites, these Jews.

Except that it was Said's aunt and uncle -- who actually owned the 10 Brenner Street house -- who evicted Buber, not the other way around. The eviction took place in 1942. Buber had been living there as a refugee from Nazi Germany, which he had left with his wife and two teenage granddaughters in 1938.

These salient facts, among others, were retrieved from Said's false memory by a Jewish scholar and lawyer named Justus Weiner, who spent three years researching the historical record. What he discovered speaks tomes about the veracity of Edward Said and his respect for historical truth.

In 1917, the Balfour Declaration allowed the possibility of a Jewish "national home" in the British Mandate in Palestine. It is an event that in Said's telling marks the beginning of the criminal dispossession of his family and people. In that year, however, the Saids were not residents of Palestine, but were living halfway across the world, in Boston, where they had landed in 1911 and where his father had become an American citizen.

This was not untypical of the Palestinian elite itself, which, by most historical accounts, had no strong sense of national identity, let alone nationalist grievance until 30 years later, after the establishment of the Jewish state. In fact, the Palestine Liberation Organization was not created until 1964, 16 years after the birth of Israel.

Indeed, when the Saids left America in 1926, it was not to emigrate to a "homeland" in Palestine but to Cairo, where they established a prosperous business. Not once in the ensuing 20 years before the establishment of Israel did the Saids think to resettle in the land called Palestine. Egypt was their home.

The myth Said has so artfully fabricated may play well on liberal guilt strings, but it plays havoc with the historical facts. The United Nations partitioned Palestine in 1947, leaving well-defined sectors for both Arabs and Jews. But the Palestinian Arabs rejected the partition and led a coalition of the surrounding Arab states in an attack on the Jews to drive them into the sea.

Next page | Caught in his own web of lies