{"id":938,"date":"2013-09-24T12:45:06","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T19:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/?p=938"},"modified":"2013-09-26T06:00:02","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T13:00:02","slug":"938","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/?p=938","title":{"rendered":"Ten years after his death: remembering Edward Said and his quest for a just peace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Edward Said died ten years ago \u2013 September 25, 2003, after a twelve-year battle with leukemia.\u00a0 One of the 20th<\/sup> Century\u2019s great intellectuals, Said, author of the masterworks<\/em> Orientalism and <\/em>Culture and Imperialism, was also a beloved professor to generations of students at Columbia University, a gifted amateur pianist and an opera critic for <\/em>The Nation magazine.\u00a0 He was perhaps best known for his fierce defense of the rights of his people, the Palestinians, in numerous books and hundreds of essays and articles published worldwide. <\/em><\/p>\n

September also marks another fateful anniversary \u2013 the 20th<\/sup>, of the now-infamous Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn, which sealed the Oslo accords.\u00a0 The legacies of Oslo and its greatest critic, Edward Said, stand as polar opposites.\u00a0 Indeed, it was Said who was among the first to sharply criticize the accords, in part because, unlike many satisfied pundits of the day, he had actually read them.\u00a0 For this reason, his widow Mariam told me, he had declined a White House invitation to attend the ceremony in September 1993.\u00a0 Today his words on Oslo are the soundings of a prophet. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Israel has gotten is official Palestinian consent to continue occupation,\u201d Said wrote in \u201cThe Middle East \u2018Peace Process\u2019,\u201d an essay in <\/em>Peace and its Discontents.\u00a0 \u201c[A] kingdom of illusions, with Israel firmly in command.\u201d\u00a0 He wrote these words in response to \u201cOslo II,\u201d of 1995, when Israel\u2019s full military control of the West Bank shrank slightly, from seventy-two to sixty percent \u2013 the same as today, 18 years later.\u00a0 Indeed his earlier concerns, written four days before the White House ceremony he had declined to attend, were born out.\u00a0 \u201cThe \u2018historical breakthrough\u2019\u2026leaves Palestinians very much the subordinates, with Israel still in charge of settlements, East Jerusalem, and the economy,\u201d Said wrote in the <\/em>Guardian and Cairo\u2019s <\/em>Al Ahram Weekly.\u00a0 \u201cIsrael will control the land, water, overall security, and foreign affairs\u2026.\u00a0 For the undefined future, Israel will dominate the West Bank, including\u2026almost all the water and land, a good percentage of which it has already taken.\u00a0 The question is, <\/em>how much land is Israel going to in fact cede for peace?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

You are forgiven if it seems these words were written last week.\u00a0 In the two decades since Edward Said wrote them, a succession of would-be peacemakers have recycled their failures an a diplomatic \u201cGroundhog Day\u201d:\u00a0 Same old ideas, same failed \u201cprocess.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet Edward Said, despite the frequent vitriol of his critics (<\/em>Commentary dubbed him \u201cProfessor of Terror\u201d), was not an opponent of peace <\/em>per se. He was, rather, an advocate of a just peace.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1998, nearly five years into the Oslo process, Said began investigating alternatives to the peaceful and just coexistence he deeply believed in for all of the people between the river and the sea \u2013 the Jordan and the Mediterranean.\u00a0 This conviction led him into a friendship with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and pianist, Daniel Barenboim, which resulted in their founding the West Eastern Divan orchestra.\u00a0 Today, ten years after the death of Edward Said, the Divan remains popular with audiences in the U.S. and Europe.\u00a0 But with the spirit of rapprochement long faded from the Holy Land, the orchestra has fallen out of favor with many Palestinians.\u00a0 Indeed, some of the orchestra\u2019s Arab musicians have left out of frustration that the Divan is unwilling to make a unified public statement against the occupation of the Palestinians.<\/em><\/p>\n

What follows is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (due out in fall 2014), tentatively titled <\/em>Children of the Stones. The excerpt focuses on Edward Said\u2019s determination to find what he called \u201can alternative way of making peace.\u201d \u00a0The account is based on multiple interviews, video footage, secondary and first-hand accounts, including Tania Nasir’s\u00a0remembrance <\/a>in Al Ahram Weekly.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Children of the Stones <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Excerpt \u00a9 2013 by Sandy Tolan<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Edward\u2019s skepticism of the peace accords deepened in the Spring of 1998, when he traveled across Israel and Palestine for an autobiographical film produced by the BBC to mark the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the creation of Israel and the Palestinian \u201cNakba\u201d (Catastrophe) of 1948.\u00a0 One day he went to a rubble-strewn field where, hours earlier, a Palestinian home had been demolished by Israeli bulldozers.\u00a0 \u201cEvery day, every hour, every minute for fifty years, and it\u2019s continuing,\u201d a visibly anguished Edward told the film crew.\u00a0 Behind him, an old man in a checkered keffiyeh knelt beside the fallen stones outside his former home, praying to Mecca.\u00a0 \u201cLook, the little bits of plastic, the little logs, the bit of railing here, a tin can crushed here,\u201d Edward said.\u00a0 \u201cThese are the atoms out of which the tragedy of Palestine is constructed.\u201d\u00a0 Edward paused repeatedly, short of breath, holding back tears.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s very very hard for me to stand here talking about it\u2026when I see my own people going through this\u2026without any relief, without any sympathy or support from the so-called civilized world. And we hear about the peace process, but who is protecting, who is giving these people peace?\u201d<\/p>\n

Edward had been battling leukemia for nearly seven years, and probing urgently for an \u201calternative way of making peace.\u201d\u00a0 Encounters like this drove him deeper into the search for new ideas.\u00a0 He remained convinced that one day, Palestinian independence was inevitable\u00a0 \u2014 just not through Oslo.\u00a0 \u201cPalestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel\u2019s concerted efforts,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0 \u201cAs an idea, a memory, and as an often buried or invisible reality, Palestine and its people have simply not disappeared.\u201d\u00a0 As he traveled the Holy Land that spring, Edward encountered artists, politicians and intellectuals on both sides who shared his views, and who were willing to try new things to put them into action.\u00a0 This alternative thinking, he believed, should focus not on the details of a flawed agreement, but on bringing together the two peoples on equal footing.<\/p>\n

In his search for alternatives based on equality, Edward had found a kindred spirit in Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli musician who had become his best friend, and with whom he traveled that spring. \u201cWe must do something for our people,\u201d Daniel would tell Edward again and again.<\/p>\n

Edward was in East Jerusalem, at the American Colony hotel, excited to share his ideas, and his friendship with Daniel, with his friends in Palestine. \u00a0He picked up the phone and got an outside line.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cTania,\u201d he said when he heard the voice on the other end.\u00a0 \u201cKeefek?\u00a0 Keefcom? <\/em> How are you and Hanna?\u201d<\/p>\n

Tania and Hanna Nasir were old friends of Edward and his wife, Mariam.\u00a0 Edward and Hanna went back to the days of Palestinian West Jerusalem in the 1940s, before the war of 1948 resulted in the flight and expulsion of Palestinians from the western portion of the city.\u00a0 Later, the two couples knew each other in the Palestinian diaspora, most recently in Jordan, where Hanna, the president of Birzeit University in the West Bank, lived in exile for nineteen years after his expulsion by Israel.\u00a0 He\u2019d been charged with \u201csecurity violations\u201d following protests at the university against Israeli rule. In the early days of Oslo, as a high-profile gesture of reconciliation, Israel had allowed Hanna to return.\u00a0 When he crossed over the River Jordan and onto home soil for the first time in nearly two decades, Edward and Mariam had been watching the historic event on television.\u00a0 That evening, from New York, they called their old friends in celebration.<\/p>\n

Now Tania and Hanna were back together in the home they had shared with their children before his exile.\u00a0 It was the same house in which Hanna\u2019s Christian family\u00a0had established the Birzeit Higher School in the 1920s.\u00a0 That school would evolve into Birzeit University, eventually under Hanna\u2019s leadership.\u00a0 Hanna\u2019s sister, Rima Tarazi, was a co-founder, and his nephew, Suhail Khoury, the new director of the Palestine National Conservatory of Music (the Mahad), which was established under the auspices of the university.\u00a0 Tania, trained as a soprano, collaborated frequently with Rima, a pianist, on Palestinian songs of liberation, set in a classical vein.<\/p>\n

Now Edward had a proposal for Tania, with whom he shared a deep love of classical music.<\/p>\n

\u201cTania,\u201d Edward said from his room at the American Colony, his voice energized and urgent. \u00a0\u00a0“I am here with my close friend Daniel Barenboim. He is a wonderful man, a great human being.”\u00a0 Tania knew of Daniel\u2019s reputation as an advocate for the Palestinian cause.\u00a0 As a musician, she had long been familiar with Barenboim, and she knew the two men had become close friends.\u00a0 \u201cIt was part of the general atmosphere of people seeking rapprochement,\u201d she recalled.\u00a0 Edward had taken a stand against the Oslo accords, but nevertheless, a sense of possibility was in the air.\u00a0 \u201cIt was all part of our inner dialogue: to where will this lead us?\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Edward was suggesting, it could lead Tania to a concert hall in West Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaniel is giving a concert this weekend in West Jerusalem,” Edward told her.\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re invited, Tania.\u00a0 We want you to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tania paused, unsure of how to respond.\u00a0 Under different circumstances, she would have said yes immediately. She wanted to preserve the remnants of positive feeling she and Hanna had felt since their return from exile, despite the growing violence and expanding settlements – including one on the hill just outside her living room window.\u00a0 But attending a concert in West Jerusalem would be a huge leap.\u00a0 She\u2019d been born there nearly fifty-seven years earlier, in 1941, but hadn\u2019t been back in decades.\u00a0 She was not allowed, in fact, to go by the authorities.\u00a0 Even if she obtained a permit, crossing from occupied territory to the land of her long-time enemy might be more than she could handle.<\/p>\n

Tania believed as a musician that the arts could be a vehicle for understanding.\u00a0 But with the facts on the ground being what they were, she did not feel comfortable traveling to West Jerusalem, now part of another country, when that country still held her people under occupation.\u00a0 The situation was not normal and she did not want to suggest by going to Israel that it was.\u00a0 Still:\u00a0 Why should she decline to attend a piano recital in West Jerusalem by one of the world\u2019s great musicians \u2013 and a defender of her people\u2019s rights \u2013 on the invitation of her dear friend, Edward Said?\u00a0 What purpose would that serve?<\/p>\n

Tania promised Edward she would think about it.\u00a0 She trusted and believed in Edward, and admired that he was trying to open new possibilities.\u00a0 \u201cEdward was hungry,\u201d she recalled.\u00a0 \u201cHe wanted to know what could change.\u00a0 There was this feeling that we could push for something.\u00a0 His friendship with Daniel was part of this.\u201d\u00a0 Tania felt she owed it to Edward, and to Daniel for his invitation, and to herself, to find out what this was all about.<\/p>\n

Soon she called Edward back, and found herself not only accepting the invitation to the concert, but inviting Edward and Daniel to dinner at the family home in Birzeit.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong><\/p>\n

The guests arrived in the early evening, walking into a family room of twelve-foot cross-vault ceilings and foot-thick plaster walls draped with Palestinian embroidery, and framing an upright piano, above which hung Nasir family photos dating back to the 1930s.\u00a0 Persian carpets covered the red-tiled floors.<\/p>\n

Daniel, Edward and their hosts settled into couches, sipping Arak and snacking from plates of grape leaves and candied almonds.\u00a0 Daniel asked about Hanna\u2019s experience of deportation and exile.\u00a0 In November 1974, the university president explained, following the demonstrations of his students, he was arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded, place in a van with other deportees, and \u201cdriven for seven hours towards an unknown destiny.\u201d\u00a0 Soldiers removed the blindfold and told Hanna he was in Lebanon.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then you moved to Jordan?\u201d Daniel asked.<\/p>\n

Yes, Hanna replied.\u00a0 In exile.<\/p>\n

Tania noticed the concern on Daniels\u2019 face.\u00a0 She was struck by his respectful, probing questions.\u00a0 She told him about the years of shuttling their children back and forth between Birzeit, where their family was determined to remain present, and Amman, where their father now lived.\u00a0 They needed travel permits, which required multiple stamps of approval from various occupation authorities.\u00a0 \u201cFrom the municipality, the police station, the ministry of education, the tax center, whatever,\u201d Tania said.\u00a0 \u201cI would sometimes have to do this over several days, because you\u2019d have such long lines, and all this waiting.\u00a0 And all of a sudden there would be a soldier there, and someone would be out of line, or if whimsically he would just decide that we had misbehaved, he would start scolding us like children, and kick us all out.\u00a0 I would have been waiting for three or four hours, from the morning.\u00a0 \u2018We\u2019re finished now.\u00a0 Come tomorrow.\u2019\u00a0 That\u2019s when you really feel occupied.\u00a0 And there was a fear inside you, that he would never stamp your permit, so you would shut up.\u00a0 And I would burn inside, because I had to get to Amman, to my husband, to the children, who had to go back to school.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the Allenby Bridge at the River Jordan, the dividing line between the West Bank and the kingdom of Jordan, \u201cwe would wait for eight hours, the children would have no food, no water, no diapers, no changing.\u00a0 I would be terrified if they would find a piece of paper in the children\u2019s clothes, like a chocolate wrapper or something.\u00a0 And then they would send you all the way back to the end of the line.\u00a0 They knew it was chocolate, but it was an excuse: \u2018You never know what\u2019s on that piece of paper.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

When Oslo arrived, Hanna said, as a kind of confidence-building measure in the peace process, Israel allowed him to come home.\u00a0 Tania went to Amman to accompany him, and Hanna made a point of saying that he would never cry and kiss the ground upon seeing Palestine again, like so many of the more sentimental refugees had done.\u00a0 The moment they crossed the Jordan and reached Palestinian soil, however, Hanna leapt from the bus in tears, kneeling down and kissing the ground.\u00a0 \u201cRight on the bridge!\u201d Tania laughed.\u00a0 \u201cHe was the first to go down from the bus!\u201d<\/p>\n

In nearby Jericho, throngs of jubilant Birzeit students cheered their president\u2019s triumphant return.\u00a0 She and Hanna returned, Tania said, in a \u201cgenuine spirit of hope and reconciliation.\u00a0 We shared a sense of cautious joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Five years later, the hope was dimming, Tania said, amidst an \u201cavalanche of militancy and violence,\u201d and the ever-expanding settlements.\u00a0 She pointed through the living room\u2019s twin arched windows.\u00a0 Daniel looked to the southeast, beyond the darkened palm and cypress trees, to the bright yellow lights of a hilltop settlement a mile away.<\/p>\n

Throughout the cocktail hour, and over a dinner of stuffed chicken and red wine, Tania sensed Edward\u2019s pleasure at being with friends from both sides of the divide.\u00a0 He was listening intently; he knew all these stories, but his friend Daniel did not.\u00a0 \u201cThis was the first time I was confronted with people who had lived such a destiny,\u201d he said years later.\u00a0 \u201cI was very, very moved by that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Politics dominated the evening, but music was never far away.\u00a0 Hanna\u2019s sister Rima, was a co-founder of the Palestine National Conservatory of Music. In the future, Daniel would play concerts there. \u00a0Now, Edward and Daniel were in the nascent stages of a grand project \u2013 something that would focus on musicians from both sides, in a way that could promote a just peace and show what was possible.\u00a0 This was the idea.<\/p>\n

The project still hadn\u2019t taken shape.\u00a0 But soon Daniel would be considering an invitation by the city of Weimar, Germany, to play as part of the 250th<\/sup> birthday celebration of Goethe, a son of Weimar.\u00a0 Goethe sparked Edward\u2019s sense of the possible. Unlike the \u201cOrientalists\u201d he regularly skewered as representatives of Western imperial and military domination, Edward saw Goethe as the epitome of a Westerner reaching out to understand the \u201cother.\u201d\u00a0 Goethe began his inquiry into Islam and the Arab world after receiving a torn page of the Koran from a returning German soldier in the early 19th<\/sup> Century.<\/p>\n

Such an inquiry, Edward believed, represented what could be possible, two centuries later, as a kind of parallel alternative to what he saw as a collapsing peace process.\u00a0 No place would be more appropriate for this than Weimar, where the currents of high culture and terrible history swirled together.\u00a0 It had been home to Bach, Liszt, Wagner, Nietzsche, and the death camp at Buchenwald.\u00a0 The Weimar invitation excited the imagination of the two friends, and soon they would begin thinking about bringing together young musicians from across the Middle East.<\/p>\n

It was close to midnight by the time Edward and Daniel rose to leave and summoned their driver for the ride back to Jerusalem.\u00a0 Again, Daniel extended his invitation to Tania to attend the concert the next night in West Jerusalem.\u00a0 Tania assured him she would be there.\u00a0 There was risk involved, everyone knew \u2013 if caught trying to enter Israel without a permit, Tania could be arrested.<\/p>\n

Late the next afternoon Edward sent a taxi eight miles north from Jerusalem to Birzeit.\u00a0 Tania climbed into the back alone, heading for the first time in decades to the city of her birth.\u00a0 Hanna had also lived in Jerusalem as a child, and as she rode, Tania recalled his old haunts:\u00a0 the Cinema Rex, the coffee shops, the YMCA, where he played tennis and studied Arabic typing, where his family attended concerts by the Palestine Symphony, and where the Palestinian musician Salvador Arnita gave his organ recitals.\u00a0 Now, without a permit, Tania would recall, \u201cI had to come to Jerusalem in secrecy.\u00a0 I had to infiltrate it like an outlaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alone at the piano, Daniel played the first notes of Tchaikovsky\u2019s Sixth Symphony in B minor, the Pathetique.\u00a0 Tania began to weep.\u00a0 She longed to disappear into the music, and for moments, she would, only to be gripped by doubts over whether she should have agreed to come.<\/p>\n

An hour later, after Daniel had played the last notes of Liszt\u2019s Sonata in B Minor, the audience rose in a standing ovation.\u00a0 Tania and Edward rose, too.\u00a0 Daniel walked forward, closer to the audience, spoke briefly in Hebrew, then switched to English.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast night I was in the West Bank, at the home of a Palestinian academic, who has recently returned from an unjust twenty-year deportation by the Israeli government,\u201d Daniel said.\u00a0 \u201cHe and his family received me not just as a friend, but more as a member of the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tania was astounded.\u00a0 She and Edward looked at each other.\u00a0 What was Daniel trying to say?\u00a0 It was silent in the auditorium.\u00a0 Daniel stood in the small pool of light, speaking into the darkened hall.\u00a0 He spoke of peace and justice, and of the need to end the suffering on both sides.\u00a0 Suddenly Tania heard him say:\u00a0 \u201cI am happy to have my Palestinian hostess of last night with us here this evening.\u00a0 She has accepted my invitation to come to Jerusalem, despite prohibitions and many reservations.\u00a0 To thank her, I would like to dedicate my encore to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Edward was embracing Tania.\u00a0 \u201cOnly Daniel can do it,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cOnly he has the guts.\u201d\u00a0 Tania was overcome with emotion, which only grew deeper as Daniel sat down at the piano to play a Chopin nocturne.\u00a0 As a child, Tania had danced to the nocturnes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Said died ten years ago \u2013 September 25, 2003, after a twelve-year battle with leukemia.\u00a0 One of the 20th Century\u2019s great intellectuals, Said, author of the masterworks Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, was also a beloved professor to generations of students at Columbia University, a gifted amateur pianist and an opera critic for The more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":941,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}