Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation
Saree Makdisi

In distinguishing Palestine as an idea from Palestine as experience and will, however, Said recognized that the struggle for the idea of Palestine, though tied to its people and their cause, is somehow larger than Palestine itself, that it is a struggle animated by a sense of justice and a concept of humanism not predicated on claims of ethnic, racial or religous exclusivity but, rather, on inclusivity and community. Precisely because it was born of the most brutal - almost literally inhuman - conditions, what Said identified as the idea of Palestine is a struggle for the articulation of a new sense of what it means to be human.

Indeed, the struggle for what Said called the idea of Palestine takes on its particular significance precisely because of the nature of what it set out to oppose, namely, Zionism. In this context it must be remembered that, given its emergence at the height not only of European interest in ethnically based nationalism but also of the age of European empire, it was inevitable that mainstream "political" Zionism (as opposed to the "cultural" Zionism of, say, Judah Magnes) would articulate its vision according to epistemological terms provided by or borrowed from a racially and ethnically fueled imperialism - principally, the epistemological framework opposing a European self to a non-European other. As a range of writers from Hannah Arendt to Amil Alkalai to Said himself consistently warned, the opposition between this Zionist self and the Palestinian other was essential to political Zionism from its very beginning; and it has remained institutionalized in the practices and policies of the Israeli state to this day. It should hardly have been a surprise, then, that when the Zionist fantasy of discovering a land without a people for a people without a land collided with the actual (albeit somewhat awkward and inconvenient) reality of a land with a people - the Palestinians - the earliest Zionist spokesmen were uncompromising. "The penniless native population," wrote Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, would simply have to be "spirited away" to make room for Jewish immigrants from Europe.