Besides Noam Chomsky another public intellectual from the academe who wrote about the Palestinian question was the late Edward Said whose family was the victim of Zionist eviction of Arab inhabitants from what is now the state of Israel.

The elder Said was a businessman who was able to move his family to Cairo where Edward had his early schooling.

One of his classmates was Omar Sharif (his screen name) whom he remembered as a sadistic “head boy.” Edward was then sent to the US to study in an elite prep school where he felt out of place but nevertheless excelled in his class. He later wrote his autobiography Out of Place. He attended Princeton for his undergraduate degree in English literature, and Harvard for his Masters and Ph.D. His thesis was on “Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography.”

He got his doctorate in 1964, a year after I got mine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with my thesis also on Joseph Conrad. Epifanio “Sonny” San Juan Jr, a US based professor of literature got his Harvard Ph.D. in 1965, a year after Said. So I asked Sonny if he knew Said personally. He said he never met him in Harvard.

Sonny who like Said has worked in the same vineyard of cultural studies had written a long essay, “Secular Humanism and Marxism,” a critique of Said’s interpretation of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and Orientalism, considered the “bible” of postcolonial critics, and other influential works of Said. Sonny called him “the originator and inspiring patron saint of postcolonial theory and discourse as well as a representative transatlantic intellectual.” A group of Anglo-Indian intellectuals picked up and developed postcolonial studies (subalternity, hybridity, gender, etc) and themselves influenced some local scholars.

Sonny eschews postcolonial theory and prefers the use of neo-colonialism as the problem of former colonies. When I posed the question of neo-colonialism at a dinner for Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka hosted by National Artist Frankie Sionil Jose a few years ago, Soyinka called it a “communist” term.

Sonny, a noted Marxist critic, wrote: “The inability to comprehend neo-colonialism results... from the failure to comprehend uneven and combined development, itself due to an idealist metaphysics that over-valorizes the intervention of the diasporic intellectual or the dissident anarchist in political struggle.”

It is the secular humanist in Said that leads him to misread Antonio Gramsci or Georg Lukacs, both Marxist intellectuals. Those not comfortable with Marxist theory may well settle for Said’s idea of the function of criticism: “Criticism must think of itself as life enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination and abuse; its social goals are non-coercive knowledge in the interest of human freedom.”

In this respect Said deserves the tribute given to him for espousing the cause of the oppressed, in Palestine and other parts of the Third World. For a time Said was elected to the national council of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He argued for a Palestinian state, equal rights for Palestinians living in Israel, and the right to return of displaced Palestinians, and against the Israeli occupation and oppression of the West Bank and Gaza. He was sympathetic to national liberation struggles in the Third World. However, despite the anti-martial law materials sent to him by Filipino exiles in the US, he did not pick up the question of human freedom in the Philippines particularly during the Marcos dictatorship—unlike Noam Chomsky who like other anti-imperialist writers (Daniel Boone Schirmer of the Friends of the Filipino People and Howard Zinn of Boston University) invariably wrote about US war crimes during the Philippine-American war comparing them to those committed by the US in the Vietnam war.

A product of elite and Ivy League schools Said was somewhat of a snob socially and intellectually. According to long time colleague Michael Wood, the Saids royally entertained intellectual celebrities, often French, in their New York apartment. As an academic icon he became president of the imperial Modern Language Association of America.

Wood wrote that Said’s son Wadie used to joke that Edward had no “blue collar pleasures,” meaning he did not sit around in his vest drinking beer and watching American football on television. Actually Edward did drink beer and watch American football. It is sitting around in his vest that is hard to imagine.”

Said did venture out in the Middle East with his son, and threw a small rock (a pebble, he said) in the direction of the Israeli guardhouse in the UN demarcated Israel-Lebanon border. He said it was a stone-throwing contest with his son. For this action, anyway, he was dubbed “professor of terror” by Jewish students in Columbia University where he was teaching. The school cleared him saying it was an exercise of freedom of expression.

Said was an accomplished pianist, gave concerts, wrote music criticism, and organized an orchestra with Palestinian, Arab and Israeli young musicians. He died of leukaemia in 2003. He was 67.

Just like what Noam Chomsky felt about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, Said declared: “You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit.”

He believed that “humanism is the only—I would go so far as saying the final—resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

 The United Nations Assembly’s overwhelming decision to give the Palestinian state “non-member observer status” (like the Vatican) has been received with jubilation by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as well as those in diaspora all over the world. They know it is a significant step on the long road for them to regain full humanity in their ancestral home.

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