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.

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The artist and activist Nan Goldin makes no secret of her views about Israel and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

She has signed high-profile protest letters calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “a genocide.” She has marched with pro-Palestinian protesters and was arrested at a demonstration in New York. In a magazine interview last year, she said she had “been on a cultural boycott of Israel for my whole life.”

So a major exhibition of Goldin’s photo slide shows and films that opened over the weekend at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin seemed like a high-profile anomaly in Germany, where lawmakers have said that support for boycotting Israel is antisemitic, and where artists who have taken positions like Goldin’s have had museum shows canceled, prizes suspended and talks shut down.

But none of those artists were as famous or influential as Goldin, who has been an art-world star for decades.

“If an artist in my position is allowed to express their political stance without being canceled,” she said in a speech at the show’s public opening, “I hope I will be paving a path for other artists to speak out without being censored.” Goldin, who is Jewish and American, accused Germans of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and looking away from the horrors unfolding in Gaza, which she repeatedly described as a genocide.

Tension built throughout the 17-minute speech, during which members of the public shouted an anti-Israel slogan, and its conclusion set off a reaction in the museum hall that snowballed in the news media.

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The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on Thursday for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will reverberate through that country, but it also raises questions for the United States.

If the international court believes that Israel may have committed war crimes in Gaza and engaged in a policy of deliberate starvation of civilians, then whose weapons were used? Which country protected Israel in the United Nations and blocked more robust efforts to channel food to starving Gazans? The answer, of course, is the United States.

President Biden in May denounced the I.C.C. prosecutor’s request for warrants and said that “there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” But there is a moral equivalence between an American child and an Israeli child and a Palestinian child. They all deserve to be protected. We should not operate as if there is a hierarchy in the value of children’s lives, with some invaluable and others expendable.

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( This is the first genocide in which US is directly complicit in funding the genocided against our and International Laws. It is not just Netanyahu, but Democratic leadership is eqully liable for crimes against humanity. f.sheikh)

The United States government must stop blatantly violating the law with regard to arms sales to Israel. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear: The United States cannot provide weapons to any country that violates internationally recognized human rights. Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act is also explicit: No U.S. assistance may be provided to any country that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

According to the United Nations, much of the international community and every humanitarian organization on the ground in Gaza, Israel is clearly in violation of these laws. That is why I have introduced, with colleagues, several joint resolutions of disapproval that would block offensive arms sales to Israel. The votes will take place in the Senate on Wednesday.

As I have said many times, Israel clearly had a right to respond to the horrific Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages, including Americans. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government has not simply waged war against Hamas. It has also waged all-out war against the Palestinian people. Within Gaza’s population of just 2.2 million, more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 103,000 injured — probably 60 percent of whom are women, children or elderly people. A recent U.N. assessment of satellite imagery found that two-thirds of all structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. That includes 87 percent of housing, 84 percent of health facilities, and about 70 percent of water and sanitation plants. Every one of Gaza’s 12 universities has been bombed, as have hundreds of schools.

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