Throughline - Edward Said and the Question of Palestine

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Edward Said brought the question of Palestine into the American mainstream. He taught at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, and today, more than two decades after his death, pro-Palestine student protesters on that campus and others have invoked his name. Meanwhile, his interviews circulate on social media and his books are taught at universities around the world. On this episode: the story of the man who pushed for recognition of the Palestinian perspective, the pushback he faced, and the dangers he foresaw.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On this week's Wild Card podcast, comedian Mark Maron reflects on being content-ish. I can honestly say there's never been a better time in my life, and I'm not even sure this one is that great. I'm Rachel Martin. Mark Maron's on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. Imagine it's the year 1982. You've just turned on the TV, you're flipping through channels, and then this generic Arabian melody catches your ear. So you linger.

A grainy black and white video shows a man flying across the screen on a floating carpet. Suddenly, it cuts to a belly dancer bedazzled in red and yellow sequins spinning around as a sheer orange scarf envelops her. Cut again, a forlorn face hunched over in a dark black shroud, only one eye peering out. Cut, a man in a white turban with furrowed brows stares intensely, angrily back at you. And then, as this visual collage continues,

you hear a voice. The Orient, a mysterious East, a place of fantasy, imagination, desire. The voice belongs to a man named Edward Said, and he's narrating this documentary on PBS called The Shadow of the West. Said was himself from the so-called Orient, the Middle East. — I was born in Jerusalem

when it was part of a country called Palestine. By 1948, when Palestine became Israel, all my family had left. My birthplace is now inaccessible to me. For many hundreds of thousands of my fellow Palestinians, their native towns, villages, farms, are inaccessible to them. For a lot of people tuning in,

this might have been the first time they're hearing someone called a Palestinian talk about a place called Palestine in English on their TV. It wasn't a common thing to see in the 80s, and Edward Said might not have been what they expected. He had like a pocket watch that he would use to check the time, wrote with a fountain pen, very well dressed. Think Tweed jacket, no turban or keffiyeh in sight. He exuded a kind of old European charm. He had two pianos and loved playing from the time he was a kid. Classical music was the soundtrack of his life.

Beethoven, Mozart, Bach. ["Bach's Concerto in C major, Op. 16, No. 2"] Music has curative powers. You're taken outside of yourself. I mean, there's a state of almost ecstasy. ["Bach's Concerto in C major, Op. 16, No. 2"] And it was this person who, in the second half of the 20th century, took it on as his mission

to explain Palestine to the West. For nearly 30 years, you could find him narrating documentaries on TV, lecturing on college campuses, writing for the New York Times, engaging politicians. And in the U.S., he became... The most distinguished and certainly the best known representative of the Palestine struggle for national independence, for liberation. Today, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent

Palestinian civilians. The conversation around Palestinians remains fraught. I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians. — The situation on the ground is worse than ever. — Hunger, hunger, hunger. There is hunger in Gaza. There is humiliation.

You bring me aid to kill me. — And Columbia University, where Edward Said taught from 1963 until his death in 2003, has been the epicenter of the student protest movement. And its crackdown. Remove pro-Palestine demonstrators. — Columbia University's caving to the Trump administration. — Grad student Mahmoud Khalil was at a federal immigration court. — Among the scattered belongings that were left behind on the lawn were a few rumbled Palestinian flags, some sleeping bags,

and a copy of Culture and Imperialism by Edward Zayed. Though he passed more than 20 years ago, Saeed is still present in that conversation. Student protesters invoked his name with signs like this. Columbia, why require me to read Professor Edward Saeed if you don't want me to use it? His books are still taught in university classrooms across the world. When it comes to understanding the Middle East as a Westerner, there is perhaps no concept more important than Edward Said's Orientalism.

I mean, it was literally the first thing I was taught in a university lecture. His interviews have been circulating on social media, sparking conversations there. Think about Edward Said today, because we're living in an era where politicians are being asked to step down for speaking up against genocide. The period we're living in is not the clash of civilizations but the clash of definitions. He was very adamant about understanding the human in all of the complexity. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the life of Edward Zahid, the man who brought the question of Palestine into the mainstream, the pushback he got for doing that, and the dangers he foresaw that laid a path towards the current moment. ["The Three Lines"]

Hello, this is Lissa Malloy from Charlestown, New Hampshire. You're listening to Three Lines for NPR. Most people have some albums, some movies, some book from when they were young that helped shape how they came to see the world. That's no less true for the Code Switch crew. It's still really touching and I cried rereading it. So there. Listen as we revisit some of our old faves on Code Switch from NPR or wherever you get your podcast.

Part One. The Professor. The first time I met him was in 1967. This is Maryam Saeed. I am the widow of the late Edward Saeed. I knew one of his sisters from the American University of Beirut. She was a classmate. She'd had a horseback riding accident. So I went to visit her in the hospital,

and he was there drinking coke and eating popcorn, or chips, I don't recall. And I walked in and he said, and eating popcorn or chips, I don't recall. And I walked in and he said, oh, good, here's your friend, now I can leave. And he walked out. Two years later, I happened to meet him in Beirut. What was different about that time that made you connect with him? I don't know, but I noticed that he was looking at me.

They started to talk. She knew Edward Said was a Tweed-jacketed professor of literature at Columbia University, but she learned that he'd been born in Jerusalem, while Mediam had been born and raised not so far away, in Beirut, Lebanon. Both of their childhoods were shaped by the founding of Israel in 1948. Both of them hads were shaped by the founding of Israel in 1948. Both of them had been star students in school. And the more they talked, the more connected they felt. We talked mostly about politics.

June 5, 1967, the Israelis decided to strike first. — The 1967 war. — Also known as the Six-Day War, after Egypt mobilized its military, Israel launched a surprise attack against all of Egypt's air force bases. — The frontier of the Gaza Strip, just a mere kilometer away. — Egypt, Jordan, and Syria responded with force. — They've been here all day and they began this war this morning at around 6 o'clock. — But with the shock of the surprise attack and help from American weapons, Israel had

the upper hand. And six days later… — The whole war was lost. — The Arab states accepted a ceasefire. Israel seized control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Although by international recognition, there are Palestinian territories that are supposedly sovereign, Israeli troops arrogate to themselves the right to militarily occupy it with no intention of leaving.

The world I knew was shattered. There was a need for an Arab voice. I mean, all we heard was the triumphalism of Israel, the triumph of the West. The chorus was deafening. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Yashko must be the proudest man in the world. 60 fantastic hours in which the Israeli forces

have routed the armed might of their Arab neighbors. I think that the general consensus is that, you know, he was an apolitical man who was politicized by the setback of 1967. This is Timothy Brennan. The book that I wrote is called Places of Mind, A Life of Edward Said. The first comprehensive biography of Edward Said. Most of his students back before 1967 say that we all knew he was Palestinian, we all knew that he had his commitments to the Palestinian independence movement, but he just hadn't

really kind of expressed it. Suddenly he's moved to activism. But he doesn't know how. Your history is a result of a huge jumble of traces left inside you. Then I think what you have to do is to convert these traces into a narrative." Said spent his early years in the late 1930s and 40s going back and forth between what was then called Palestine and Cairo. And then, suddenly, he was cut off from his family home in Jerusalem.

He watched as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including some of his family members, were forced to flee their homes after the state of Israel was created in 1948. — His aunt played a very active role in receiving and caring for the huge number of Palestinians who were forced out. — But on the other hand, he was living a life of privilege in Cairo.

Opera, lush parks and tropical gardens and horse riding and polo and tennis courts and so on. He lived with this deep contradiction at the core of his experience. There were actually several contradictions at play in his life. The Saeeds were a Christian family, part of a small religious minority in a majority Muslim country. Saeed was baptized in the Church of England, but lived in Egypt, a country that the British had colonized. Saeed spoke English at home, not Arabic.

He literally dreamt in more than one language. And those contradictions all came with him when he moved to the U.S. for school as a teenager. This is the world that he grew up in. We can break out of the confinement, to use the phrase from Foucault, and enter a community where we are as the others are. The important thing is to overcome separation. Philosophically, I think separation is an instrument of power designed to keep the inferior

inferior. And so I want to overcome that through music, through literature, through thought. The legacy of the Six-Day War is a bitter occupation. Two people with the same claim on the same homeland. Two people with the same claim on the same homeland. In the wake of the 1967 war, Zayed traveled to the Middle East, trying to understand what it meant. How it is seen from a Jordanian perspective, how it is seen from a Lebanese perspective. He had read a lot of stuff the Israelis had put up. And when he came back to his apartment in New York,

he found the American perspective was shifting, too. The post-67 cultural moment in the United States is also the moment when the United States becomes much more pro-Israel. And in that regard, it became much more dismissive of anything Palestinian. This is Mostafa Bayoumi, a professor at Brooklyn College, who's also a former student of Said

and co-editor of the Edward Said Reader. Every so often, the Middle East rushes out into attention with a clutch of headlines. Whenever some Arab potentate puts the squeeze on America for higher oil prices. The U.S. was becoming more dependent on Middle Eastern oil at the same time that it was ramping up its military and financial support to Israel. The stereotype of the Arabs loomed larger and larger by the hour in the United States. Word spreads quickly an Arab has attacked a Jew with a knife.

Armed Jewish vigilantes rush up offering unwanted help. And there's no space in between for who the people really were, and especially what the situation was for Palestinians. Palestinians in the occupied territories were living under Israeli military rule. Some Israelis began to build settlements there, which the UN would eventually deem illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

And throughout the Middle East, Palestinian refugees felt the Arab nations had failed them, treating them as second-class citizens. It was an existential question, really, to claim one's Palestinian-ness in the post-67 moment. A Palestinian national movement began to gain momentum. Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country.

This was the scene at the Zaka airstrip in Jordan recently when the massive pall of smoke from three blazing airliners told a world which needed no reminding that the Palestinian guerrillas meant business. And then, beginning in 1968, The idea of kidnapping planes happened. The planes had all been hijacked by the guerrillas a week earlier. When he heard about the hijackings, Zahid told Maryam,

It is a mistake. In the long run, it's a mistake. The hijacking of the planes, sort of armed resistance wing of the movement, arguably gave a lot of fodder to people in the US government who could cast the entire movement in that light as being a terrorist movement, right? So he saw that, even in that moment. Yeah, he always saw things others did not see. He tries to make the argument that the way forward is political, not military. The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a man named Yasser Arafat, was emerging as the movement's leader. But he mostly spoke Arabic, and in public appearances,

he wore a kaffir and army fatigues. He wasn't exactly relatable to the average American. And Saeed, who was living in the U.S. and wasn't part of the PLO, thought he could help the movement by trying to humanize Arafat for the American public. In 1974, Arafat was scheduled to give a talk at the UN on behalf of the Palestinian Liberation Movement. This was a huge deal. It was the first time Arafat would be before the world advocating for Palestinians.

It was mostly written, apparently, by Mahmoud Darwish in Arabic. Mahmoud Darwish, known as Palestine's national poet. But they needed an English version of the speech to give to the people in the room and to broadcast on TV and radio. There was already a rough translation, but they needed someone to really bring it to life. And they had 48 hours before he was supposed to deliver it.

Zayed's travels around the Middle East had connected him with people on the front lines of the movement, and his reputation as a man who had a way with words had spread. So they called him. And said, you have to translate it for us. Zayed holed up in a room with an editor and got to work. I had the privilege of typing because nobody knew how to type except me. And finally, it was finished around three in the morning. They sent a car to deliver the translation, just in time Radafat to take the podium in front of the UN.

Zayed's translation let the world understand Adifat's message. Mr. President, those who call us terrorists wish to prevent world public opinion from discovering the truth about us and from seeing the justice on our faces. At the end of the speech, Arafat says, Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall for my hand. I repeat, do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. The olive branch, people say that it was Edward's idea. And I was one of the first to realize that a good part of our war against Israeli occupation would have to be in the West, in the Western mind. Coming up... My troubles began then, in the early 70s Hi, this is Maria Montalvo from Chicago, Illinois, you are listening to through line at Ampira Part two The spokesman.

He never ever thought that it will shake the world. In 1978, Edward Said published a new book called Orientalism. And at the time, a lot was happening in the Middle East. The West Bank and Gaza remained under Israeli occupation. Civil war was raging in Lebanon, where the PLO was based. Egypt would soon sign a treaty with Israel, normalizing relations between the two countries. Iran was on the brink of an Islamic revolution. soon sign a treaty with Israel normalizing relations between the two countries.

Iran was on the brink of an Islamic revolution. And in the U.S., the shadow of Vietnam loomed large. Everybody who has been dominated by a colonial system in some way, shape or form sees themselves in that book. This is Said's former graduate student, Mustafa Bayoumi. In Europe, the Orient is the so-called East, Muslim Middle East. What's important about that Orient, among other things, of course, is it's right there. It's right next to Europe.

And this is Said's biographer, Timothy Brennan. Its proximity is precisely why there's an attempt, Edward is complaining, to try to create a wall, a cultural wall. Zaid writes, for Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the 17th century, the Ottoman peril lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger. The Orientalists that he's referring to in the title of the book are these French and English 19th century scholars who studied the Orient.

This writing was an organized form of writing like an organized science, you know, what I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up, you know, the sensual woman who's there to be sort of used by the man. The East is a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters. What Edward is trying to say, I think, is that there's a lot of mischief that happens in the act of representation, that you can create a reality that has no correspondence to another reality.

What interested Said is the way those ideas just keep on replicating themselves. And then you end up with Aladdin. And then you end up a... A centrillion. Exactly. Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam. Where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense.

It's barbaric, but hey, it's home. Zayid continues, Always There lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend, or both, the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert

waiting to burst into bloom. Then the book turns to Said's birthplace. Its inhabitants, inconsequential nomads, possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence. Who are the Palestinians? Where are the Palestinians? They don't exist. You know, so many of the people who call themselves Israelis come from Russia and the United States

and from Europe. This war between peoples is, I believe, inextricably entangled with the fantasies, dreams, and ambitions of the West to rule and possess the East. To some extent, the state of Israel itself has been created and sustained by those fantasies, dreams, and ambitions. The book made waves and had plenty of critics. Some prominent British historians like Bernard Lewis thought his views were reductive, flattening the West while flattering the East.

The answer to a stereotype is not, of course, a negative stereotype. Some academics from the East thought his focus on culture and identity overlooked the role of capitalism in all of this. Some said he minimized the complex identities and historical experiences of people within the Islamic Middle East, especially minorities like Christians, Kurds, and Jews. But Said also had defenders, including within the American Jewish community. But Zaid also had defenders, including within the American Jewish community. He was a great lover of the book, The Non-Jewish Jew, by Isaac Deutcher, who made the case that one of the reasons why there's this universalist defense of justice and a kind of an attack on tribalist modes of thinking among so many great Jews in history.

Spinoza or Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg or Noam Chomsky in their own day has to do with their marginal status and the fact that they had known oppression. Not long after Orientalism came out, Said was preparing his next manuscript, this time a book all about Palestine. He said he hoped to make clear, quote, the Palestinian interpretation of Palestinian experience.

But when Zayed came back to the publisher with a draft, building on his ideas in Orientalism... — About Europe and its relationship to the Jews and to Zionism with anti-Semitism. — The anti-Semitism of Europeans. — Yeah. — And describing the collision between Zionism and the Palestinians from the Palestinian perspective. The publisher was like...

— This is not what we wanted you to write. — It's a dead end. And Said would be rejected again before he finally found a publisher willing to print it. In 1979, the question of Palestine hit bookshelves. And not only did it feature the Palestinian story, it proposed a vision for a future Palestinian state. — We realized that we are being asked to pay the price for what happened to the Jews in Europe under the Holocaust. It was an entirely Christian and European catastrophe.

And we are being dispossessed. We've become the victims of the victims. But not all of us say, well, they should be thrown out. So we have another vision, which is a vision of coexistence, in which Jew and Arab can live together, which I think it requires a kind of creativity and invention that is possible. Throughout the 1980s, Edward Said did everything in his power to convert his vision of a two-state solution into reality, even as violence intensified in the region. Israel launches a major assault into southern Lebanon.

I think we are seeing in Lebanon now the development of some fringe groups that have some Iranian influence. — Meanwhile, civil unrest is continuing in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Three more Palestinians were shot by Israeli troops— — Zayed acted as a liaison between American officials and the PLO, a role he'd reluctantly played ever since the late 1970s, when Egypt's president

named him the Palestinian representative to peace talks between Egypt and Israel. — I opened the door one day, and I found 300 journalists outside my door. And my whole life was transformed. — But for the Palestinian struggle, he didn't believe high-level talks between officials

was going to be enough. — He writes constantly to friends back here in the United States, complaining about the disorganization of the PLO leadership and how to advance the struggle. — He believed the narrative about Palestinians needed to change in the minds of the American public and politicians. And it would be an uphill climb.

And it would be an uphill climb. I think it's about time we stop those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There's no apology to be made. None. That's then Senator Joe Biden expressing a view it was normal to hear on the floor of Congress and see in the pages of the New York Times. I think that the one group that probably captured his ire more than any other group in the United States was liberals.

It was the liberal establishment that vaunted the state of Israel. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. So how would he change the narrative? With a pen? And his voice? I remember the first talk. I went with him. There was a lawyer from Haifa, and he was going to debate him.

Edward fell apart. When we left, he threw up. But he kept going. He wrote for newspapers and magazines, went on talk shows, hosted documentaries, and agreed to debates. In the mid-'80s... I was to supposedly debate the Israeli ambassador. —...the ambassador to the United Nations,

named Benjamin Netanyahu. — And then I found the most extraordinary thing that not only would he not sit in the same room with me, he wanted to be in a different building, so as not to be sort of contaminated. — There's no recording of the debate. But according to Edward Zahid, this is how it went down. They eventually ended up on a stage together, sitting in silence.

And when the presenter said to the audience, — Professor Said and Ambassador Netanyahu refuse to speak to each other. Said interjected, — No, no, I'm perfectly willing to speak to him. The presenter then asked Netanyahu, — Mr. Ambassador, why don't you speak to Professor Said? Netanyahu responded, because he wants to kill me. The whole thing was totally absurd.

Said is basically acting as the kind of, you know, unofficial spokesperson for the movement. Very much so. Yeah, very much so. This is a professor at Columbia University, you know, one of the most elite universities in the US. And he faced a lot of heat for this, right? I mean, he was investigated by the FBI. How did he navigate the political sort of firestorm of being so vocal on the question of Palestine and Palestinian identity at a time when it wasn't very common to do that? His whole life was spent pouring over how one needs to speak and how one needs to write in order to cross

that unbridgeable chasm between the world of art and aesthetics and the world of political confrontation. The worst aspect of it is of course the occasional threat of violence. I mean my office has been raided and vandalized. I've received death threats and I suppose in general I do feel, given the atmosphere surrounding Palestine and Palestinians, in New York in particular, I do feel as if I'm a delinquent, sort of before anything gets going, I am somehow guilty as charged. It was very scary sometimes.

But we lived with it. I don't know how, but we lived with it. Saeed and Meriem had two children by this point, and the threat of violence hung over all of them. You remember Kahani? He was threatened by the Kahane people. Mayor Kahane was a far-right American rabbi who founded the militant Jewish Defense League in the U.S. and then moved to Israel and founded a political party that pushed for the expulsion

of Palestinians. There is no Palestine, no Palestinians. There never was, there never will be. They're harassed and let them go live in Jordan. — During the 80s, you could find him lecturing on college campuses or talking on CNN. — There is no coexistence possible with them. They have to leave. — And while he was condemned by many American Jews and Israelis, he was also amassing a loyal following.

Edward Said was near the top of their hit list. Kids broke into his office, Edward's office, at the university and burnt the top of the desk. Colombia put bulletproof windows all around the house. My son was always afraid that he was going to be killed as a little kid. I remember once walking into Es'ad's office and he was just, you know, in the middle of a conversation with himself

about these things. I remember him bellowing, saying, what they want is my silence. And they will never get it. A demonstration in front of the main hospital in Gaza. — I saw an army truck stop. Soldiers dragged a young man towards the burning tires, kicking him and beating him with the butt of a rifle. — In 1987, the first intifada, or uprising, broke out in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

— These children are the ugly face of 20 years of frustration over Israeli occupation here. — The militant Islamic group Hamas emerged in Gaza as a political opponent to the PLO. Things have gone to such an extent here that the people want a solution no matter through whom this will come. Meanwhile, the PLO decided to capitalize on the momentum of the first intifada to begin to lay the groundwork for a future Palestinian state. They wanted the world to see them not only as a liberation movement, but a legitimate,

peaceful state in waiting. So they called in Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said to write a Palestinian Declaration of Independence. So they called in Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said to write a Palestinian declaration of independence. Darwish drafted the version in Arabic, Said translated it into English, and Yassir Arafat read it aloud in Algiers, a city with its own anti-colonial legacy. It outlined a vision for a Palestinian state that was secular, democratic, and committed to quote, the universal declaration of human rights. A contrast to the region's Arab countries, which were ruled by dictators with shoddy

human rights records. And Adafat assumed the title as the president of Palestine. Coming up, Edward Said clings to a dream of coexistence as reality looks more and more like a nightmare. This is Kalu and Jaco calling in from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you are listening to Thru Line on NPR. Part Three. The Humanist. In 1993, Chairman of the PLO, Yasser Atafaq, and Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin

stood alongside U.S. President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn as they signed the first Oslo peace accord. We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears. Enough! Applause Now, as we stand on the threshold of this new historic era, let me address the people of Israel. Do you remember when Edward found out about Asl?

Did he find out with the rest of the world? Yeah, the rest of the world. Arafat recognized Israel's right to exist, and the Israeli government recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, whom it gave limited governing authority in the occupied Palestinian territories. Much of the world celebrated,

but Edward Zahid was furious at Arafat. He committed the Palestinians without ever informing them of what he was committing them to. Even he didn't know it. One of his closest assistants, who in fact is the architect of Oslo, said that it took Arafat a year to understand that he didn't know it. One of his closest assistants, who in fact is the architect of Oslo, said that it took Arafat a year to understand that he didn't get a state.

He was very upset, extremely upset, because you talk about democracy and you don't tell your people you are doing this. He was at a low ebb in terms of popularity and money, and so I think the agreement was a way of saving himself rather than thinking of his people. — And while many in the American media touted it as the first step towards peace, Zayed was sounding an alarm. — Nothing in the agreements that I've had assigned

says anything about the end of occupation. The Israelis are still there. The armies are still there. The settlements are increasing in size and number. So it's a terrible deal. In my opinion, the future really looks very, very bleak. He never talked to Arafat after that. And he came out looking like a prophet. The fact is that more Palestinians have been killed

since the thing was signed. The Gaza Strip is a forsaken spot, a mixture of graffiti-filled deprivation and Israeli occupation. The militant Islamic group Hamas says the Israeli incursions have simply created more militants prepared to die for the Palestinian cause. The Hamas faction says one of its members blew himself up yesterday in a seaside hotel north of Tel Aviv, just as a crowd was beginning a traditional Passover meal.

Israeli police say 20 people died. This idea that somehow we should protect ourselves against the infiltrations, the infections of the other, is, I think, the most dangerous idea at the end of the 20th century. The challenge now is coexistence. How do we accept difference without violence and hostility? I'm thinking about this 90s and early 2000s period, the last decade of his life when he's watching the intensification of the occupation, and he's watching violence between Israelis and Palestinians amplify.

What maintained his belief in coexistence, even in the face of those realities, towards the end of his life? Because it's the only way to go. It's the only option left. The two-state solution, which is still formally maintained as the objective of the Palestinian leadership, is absolutely negated by what's already happened on the ground. Israel's been far too successful at separating all the little pockets of occupied territories from one another,

creating a pass-card system as the white South Africans did under apartheid. The only option left is a one-state solution. That's, I think, his vision for coexistence. Unless we find ways to do this, you know, there's going to be wholesale violence of the sort represented by the Gulf War, by the killings in Bosnia, the Rwandan massacre. But Said continued to face attacks questioning the sincerity of that vision.

One headline in commentary magazine read, Professor of Terror. Shortly before Said's memoir, Out of Place, was released in 1999, an Israeli-American lawyer who had once worked for Israel's Ministry of Justice published a piece called My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said, questioning Said's claims of growing up in Palestine. He never talked to me, never asked me any questions,

anything, he said it wasn't necessary, he did it all from the records. Be that as it may. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all the major newspapers carried either articles by him or about this. I submitted a rebuttal. None of them would publish it. Acting on a whim, I said, let me send it to Haaretz in Israel.

They published it the next day in Hebrew. So I could publish more easily in Israel than I can in the United States. Quite extraordinary. — And then there was the rock heard round the world. In 2000, Zayed traveled to the Lebanese-Israeli border, soon after the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended. — There's a lot of fencing at the border,

and then there's like a no-man's land in between, watchtowers that had been abandoned. And so people were picking up rocks and throwing it over the border. Zayed picks up a rock and throws it. A photographer snaps a photo. And then... Then that picture was widely interpreted as, oh, he's an apostle of violence.

And the pro-Israel crowd latched onto it, and there were calls for his removal. His removal from Columbia University, where he'd been a professor for nearly four decades by this point. Said issued a statement where he described it as, quote, a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended. The administration stood by him and told him, don't worry about it, we know who you are,

we know what you stand for, and we are willing to withstand the pressure. Time is in only one direction. And in a certain sense, the actual performance of a piece of music and the flow of music, there's something so inevitable about it, right? At the same time, that it's not recoverable, because once you've played it, it's gone. It is this feeling of having lived through a life. Edward Said was diagnosed with cancer in 1991. He decided to use the time he had left to begin a new project based in his lifelong

love of classical music. And he would do it alongside his close friend, Daniel Barenboim. Mr. Barenboim, can you remember that first meeting? What struck you about Mr. Said? I knew, of course, who he was and what he had written. I found him extremely charming and very pleasant company. Daniel Barenboim is an Israeli Jewish conductor. His family emigrated from Argentina to Israel in 1952 or 1953.

And when Edward bumped into him in a hotel lobby in London in the early 90s, Daniel was the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They hit it off immediately. I think the main thing is the fact that we're both passionate about music. In 1999, they decided to organize a workshop together, which would bring Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli musicians together in one orchestra to play a concert. And they would do it in a city in Germany called Weimar. Weimar is a very special city in German history. It was in East Germany, of course, but it also was the city of Goethe and Schiller. Plus the fact that a few kilometers away was

Buchenwald, one of the worst of the death camps. They were worried no musicians would want to be a part of the workshop given everything happening on the ground. But they got hundreds of applications from Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian musicians. When the orchestra performed in Weimar at the end of the workshop, there were Germans playing with Israelis and with Arabs. At the moment that they were playing, in a strange sort of way, their personal identities and histories sort of dropped away. They become sort of way, their personal identities and histories sort of dropped away. They become sort of irrelevant. And what's relevant is what they're doing towards

you. After the workshop, Edward and Daniel decided to create a foundation together to make the orchestra more permanent. They called it the West Eastern Devon Orchestra. It faced some pushback. People who said... That this is normalization. Normalization of dangerous realities on the ground

through one small example of harmony. But for Edward... Edward said, this was the most important thing I did in my life. When Edward Zaid died in 2003, Mediam and Daniel teamed up to make sure the orchestra lived on. They've made space for Iranian musicians in the orchestra as well, and created a music conservatory in Berlin, Germany.

In 2016, the West Eastern Devon Orchestra was named a UN Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding. I came across this poem that Mahmoud Dardouiche, the famous Palestinian poet, his friend for many years, wrote to honor him. It's called Dibak, which means counterpoint or contradiction. And there's this moment in the poem where Dhadwish is imagining a conversation with Edward Said. I say, life only known by its opposite is death. It is not life. Says he, we shall live,

even if life leaves us alone. We must be the masters of words that will immortalize readers. If I die before you, I urge you to cling to the impossible. I asked, is the impossible distant? He replied, a generation away. What was that impossible thing that that he clung to? Liberation, I think. Maybe it's two generations away now. A Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judea and Samaritan.

And dozens of Israeli settlers steal in, wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks. There's no such thing as an occupation. The weekend attack on Israel by hundreds of Hamas fighters has touched off a war. Videos show militants rounding up men, women and children. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. An incredible piece of important real estate. Relentless bombardments of people have been pushed to the very brink. Children are starving.

Every hospital is the sound of children screaming. Peace be Palestine! Very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for these horrible, inhuman animals. Long live Palestine! Long live Palestine! Everybody asks the question, what would he have said? Nobody knows what he would have said.

He always had a vision that nobody else, in my opinion, nobody else had it. And he always said, you have to keep giving the people hope. The words of Edward Said provide some measure of continuity, of struggle, some measure of maybe even desire to look for life in a time of extreme death. He was a man who really represented the possibilities of life. And he represented it not just for himself, but for the Palestinian people. Is it too soon to expect that these histories of blind prejudice and powerful fantasy can

be balanced and perhaps resolved by a more enduring history of ordinary lives, of reconciliation and recognition? That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Al-Ablui. I'm Randhapit Fattah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.

Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. This episode was mixed and mastered by Jimmy Keeley. Thank you to V.P.R.O. and Levin and Werkin. Thanks also to Amber C., Tony Kavan, James Heider, Nadia Lancy, Johannes Durgi, Jessica Payne, Nicolette Kahn, Katie Doggart, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.