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Notes -
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most engaging parts of Said's The Question of Palestine were when he did literary analysis of novels and colonial writings. A lot of interesting facts or claims or documents about Israeli oppression and violence appeared, which will keep me busy for some time in reading up.
The prose is characteristically smooth, and ultimately his appeal for common sense, dedication and looking beyond the initial appearance of the Other had an impact, albeit mainly in abstract. This was likely because of my own lack of historical knowledge, which made it difficult to come up with an opinion on the topic at hand.
But also, Said's case sometimes seems to rest on the ability to ignore what people say and observe instead the context underlying their actions and words. I'm a firm believer in putting less faith in what people say, but one wonders if in this case it doesn't amount to casually dismissing the Israeli position while pig-headedly proclaiming that the cause of Palestinian liberation is really about democracy.
I can't easily call to mind any specific instance of this from this book, but in the third book in this trilogy, Covering Islam (which I'm still reading), Said takes issue with the framing of Hezbollah as a "terrorist, militant Shi'a group backed by Iran," and says that they are better understood as guerrillas whose purpose was to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Failing to call them guerrillas means that "resistance is both dehumanized and rendered illegitimate." Granted that the context matters, isn't it natural that the religious element, the anti-Zionism and the ties to Iran matter to Israel and its allies from a security perspective?
It doesn't help that many things which have lost some trust with me are cited: Chomsky, United Nations, Amnesty International, etc. I suppose it goes both ways, as Said makes me wonder if perhaps I have been too hard on Chomsky after reading about the Khmer Rouge stuff.
I've come to believe that Said's books are genuinely important, but mainly because figuring out what he got right and got wrong may point a way forward to understanding. On their own, I have decidedly mixed feelings.
In broader strokes, many parts serve as a plea for things of merit. Ultimately Said wants a solution which allows both Israelites and Palestinians to see each other as the human beings that they are. A quote from Covering Islam, because I didn't highlight the interesting ones in Palestine, and because the same theme runs throughout it:
I really like this side of Said, whatever else I may think. Unquestionably, these books have encouraged me to keep listening and thinking, and to seek a more involved understanding than I have thus far.
At the time Said was writing, this was straightforwardly correct. (Israel are in belligerent occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, and Hezbollah was founded to resist that occupation). The morality of what Hezbollah is doing changes after 2000 when it is no longer resisting an ongoing occupation (although the legal status doesn't - they can continue prosecuting their justified war against Israel until a peace treaty is signed and the only legal objection to what they are doing is that they are attacking civilian targets) - and the fact that they did what they did after 2000 allows us to retrospectively reassess their motives from the earlier period.
Amnesty was trustworthy up until shortly after the end of the Cold War, and it doesn't become obvious that they have gone full woke until after Said died in 2003. So I wouldn't hold reliance on Amnesty that against him.
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