The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, one year after Said’s pivotal book Orientalism and two before Covering Islam—a trilogy that helped found post-colonial theory and develop a framework to critique the West’s stereotypical and often racist lens of the Arab and Muslim world. The Question of Palestine was particularly noteworthy for being the first English-language book to narrate the Palestinian experience and deconstruct Zionism as a settler-colonial project.
It remains an essential read from arguably the most influential Palestinian-American scholar to have lived. Reading it today brings reflections on how everything and nothing has changed, as Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, its bombing of Lebanon, and annexation of the West Bank continue. That is why a new re-issue of this book is so timely. In the UK, Fitzcarraldo Editions’ re-issue will be published on November 21, with a new preface by literary critic (and Said’s nephew) Saree Makdisi, plus an added chapter titled “The One-State Solution”, which Said wrote for The New York Times in 1999. For American audiences, Said’s seminal trilogy will be re-printed in new editions by Vintage Books and available imminently.
Edward Said died at 67 in September 2003 after a long battle with leukaemia. He had two children: law professor Wadie Said, and actor, writer, and activist Najla Said. Both were children when The Question of Palestine was published, but they recounted what it was like to grow up in New York with the Palestinian-American Columbia professor, and how his book holds up 45 years later.
“After a year plus of what’s been happening in Gaza and now Lebanon, I think people are going to need more critical knowledge and more of a deeper understanding of what has happened before”, Najla told me. She cited how westerners who start getting interested in Palestine tend to first go for the works publishers tend to promote—books by Ilan Pappé or Noam Chomsky, or Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Although these are all important works, she said that her father was really the first writer to speak out about all this in English, and readers ought to go to the source material.
posted by f.sheikh