Letter from a dead man
Edward Said died 21 years ago, but he never went away. He was born in Jerusalem in a Christian family, and was arguably the greatest Palestinian intellectual of his age. He was a graduate of Princeton and Harvard and for many years one of the most reputed academics of Columbia university, and wrote some of the most impoortant books on orientalism, colonialism, the Arab-Israelo conflict.
In An Open Letter to American-Jewish Intellectuals, composed in 1989 he wrote
“I cannot understand how raw, naked evidence can be overridden by American intellectuals just because the ‘security’ of Israel demands it.
…
But it is overridden or hidden no matter how overpoweringly cruel, no matter how inhuman and barbaric, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims what it is doing. To bomb a hospital; to use napalm against civilians; to require Palestinian men and boys to crawl, or bark, or scream ‘Arafat is a whore’s son’; to break the arms and legs of children; to confine people in desert detention camps without adequate space, sanitation, water or legal charge; to use teargas in schools: All these are horrific acts, whether they are part of a war against ‘terrorism’ or the requirements of security. Not to note them, not to remember them, not to say, ‘Wait a moment: Can such acts be necessary for the sake of the Jewish people?’ is inexplicable, but it is also to be complicit in these acts. The self-imposed silence of intellectuals who possess, in other cases and for other countries, supremely fine critical faculties is stunning.”
Those words were written 35 years ago, and nothing has changed.
