Will I forget?
Oh, would, oh, would I could
This moment bring back my homeland
Out of myself!

(Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness)

I

In the Afterword to the published version of her Edward W Said Lecture at Columbia University given in late September 2023, Isabella Hammad asks what would Said say about the current crisis in Gaza. Although her lecture was given just before the October events, the Afterword — specifically penned to address the ensuing Israeli genocide — reads like an extended footnote to her lecture, exploring the gravity of Said’s work for an understanding of Israel’s decades-long occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonisation of Palestine. Hammad makes the point that the current heavy-handed policing in the United States of support for Palestinians is not so different from the silencing that had often been aimed at Said himself.  

Hammad puts into relief an aspect of Said’s views that tend to be underestimated by much of the secondary literature addressing his legacy, especially in postcolonial studies. This concerns his critique of Western racism directed in the main toward the global South, towards the “non-European”, more specifically toward Arabs and Palestinians. She notes Said’s unsettling of liberal humanism, which he pushed beyond its assumption of the non-European as somehow incapable of sharing Western liberal values. As Hammad writes in her Afterword: “I … began with Said’s idea of humanism, one that expands beyond the term’s discriminatory origins which described humanness only in relation to the non-humanness of Europe’s various others”. Linking this to the unqualified support of Western governments and the media for Israel, she continues: “The mainstream Western media, in step with Israeli state rhetoric, has offered an abundance of proof that this colonial principle of selective humanity has never gone away”.

Shortly before he died on September 25, 2003, Said addressed the notion of “non-European”, though in a productive critique aimed to rescue it from its xenophobic use as a trope, a modality even, of defining an enlightened Europe over and against a sub-human, presumably un-enlightened Other. He developed this in his late lecture Freud and the Non-European, which he was first invited to give in 2002 at the Freud Institute in Vienna. However, the event was cancelled, after the Institute’s directors deemed his lecture “controversial”. Said subsequently presented his talk at the Freud Museum in London, with an engaging response from the feminist and psychoanalytical theorist Jacqueline Rose.

Said’s talk focuses on Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism, a text consisting of three parts first written and published separately, then brought together by Freud himself in a final book edition after he had moved to London in June 1938, a year before he died. Famously, Freud declared Moses to have been an Egyptian. The first two parts of his book elaborate on this claim, as he draws on a number of examples, most notably the monotheism of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, and another concerning circumcision, which was widespread in Egypt: “if Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion but also the commandment for circumcision, he was not a Jew but an Egyptian, and in that case the Mosaic religion was probably an Egyptian one”. Discussing this claim, Said links it to Freud’s “excavations” of Judaic history, acknowledging a plurality which Said argues has been conveniently left out of Israel’s nationalist narrative script. As Rose perceptively quips in her response: “in Said’s reading, as I understand it, Israel represses Freud” (her emphasis). For Said’s purposes, Freud’s unconventional reading of Judaic history serves to “mobilise the non-European past in order to undermine any doctrinal” notion of Jewish identity. To further quote Said:

Quite differently from the spirit of Freud’s deliberately provocative reminders that Judaism’s founder was a non-Jew, and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian, non-Jewish monotheism, Israeli legislation countervenes, represses, and even cancels Freud’s carefully maintained opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish background.  

In making this argument, Said champions what he refers to as an “undetermined history” — a potential historical narrative shaped more by irreconcilable gaps and fissures than the Zionist narrative of exclusive, supremacist rights to the land of Palestine affords. For Judith Butler, Said’s argument, spoken from the viewpoint of a non-European, provides a refreshing departure from Israel’s flattening out of Judaic history and Jewish identity “into a monolithic and unified identity, singular and exclusive”. For Said, Butler observes in Parting Ways: “If Moses stands for a contemporary political aspiration, it is one that refuses to be organized exclusively on principles of national, religious, or ethnic identity, one that accepts a certain impurity and mixedness as the irreversible conditions of social life”. 

In her lecture, Hammad notes Said’s employment of Freud so as to offer an “alternative archaeology to the Zionist archaeology” informing Israel’s exclusive claim to the land of Palestine. In doing so, she says, he “points to the position of a non-European non-Jew — ‘the great stranger’ — at the heart of the Jewish story”. She reminds us that, although Said passed away almost twenty-two years ago, his voice lives on as, amid other themes, a critic of Israel’s illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian lands. Considering his prodigious academic and journalistic writings, interviews, and public talks addressing the plight of Palestinians, he would of course have had a lot to say about the current genocide Israel has tacitly, and openly, been allowed by, in the main, Western governmental regimes, to perpetrate in Gaza — a genocide that represents yet another chapter of the Palestinian Nakba.

As I want to outline — following Hammad’s perceptive comments on the lingering force of colonial/imperial racism — the relevance of Said’s arguments, dating from the late 1960s, for the present lie in the pressing need to counter the decades-long and now rising tide of racism and ethno-violence rooted in Israel’s and the West’s liberal political cultures, and not only in their conservative circles. For despite the institutional characteristics of their liberalism, these countries maintain governmental regimes steeped in racism toward peoples of the global South, including their own Indigenous subjects.

An example of this deep-rooted racism is the way in which the liberal media establishment in the United States rallies against Trump’s autocratic, if not outright dictatorial characteristics, all the while underestimating that in its imperial reach and support for dictatorial regimes around the world, the political culture of the United States is irremediably autocratic and antidemocratic. In other words, and despite the liberal establishment’s hysteria, Trump is not an aberration. His autocratic political tendencies are steeped in the character of the United States empire, in its liberal political sensibility.

The liberal establishment in the United States always supports the imperial wars their government embarks on, in Iraq and elsewhere, and currently in respect to the genocide in Gaza, as well as Israel’s onslaught in Iran. The liberal media often displays a poor understanding of the social, cultural, and political aspects of Arab countries, as well as Iran, cursorily dismissing them as “regimes”. My point is that, with the underestimation of their political culture’s support for dictatorial regimes, on the one hand, and the chauvinistic demeaning of the political cultures of Arab countries and Iran on the other, the liberal establishment in the United States is profoundly racist and aggressively violent, supporting the imperial war machine that has raged across the globe since at least the mid-twentieth century — the stars and stripes of the US flag serving as symbolic emblems of war decoration.

In complementary variations, ethno-violence is shared, incorporated by Western states actively supporting Israel’s ongoing, now intensified efforts to erase Palestine and its Indigenous people from history. Remarkably, those Western states supporting Israel carry their own burdens of genocidal history, as in the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and the United States, and the colonial states of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany — the last two of these having turned their genocidal impulses inward, when in the mid-twentieth century Holocaust they saw fit to exterminate east European, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jews, as well as others they deemed alien to what in the process they maintained as a supremacist White European culture.

For my purposes, this symbiosis underpinning support for Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and onslaught in Iran suggests that racially motivated violence is not only an action carried out against a people, but structures the historical sensibility of the state itself, along with its justifying nationalist narratives. This is to say that Israeli racism is not only directed towards the abject Other — Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Iranians in their homeland — but also defines the temperament of Israeli political culture itself, informing its regime of apartheid and ethno-cleansing. Accordingly, I emphasise the phenomenological ethno, rather than the identitarian ethnic. In other words, racism transpires as a modality, as a taking place of events and incidents, either directly or symbolically, or indeed as circuits of know-how, of knowing how to know the other and oneself, of knowing how to employ knowhow according to racialising assumptions of self and other.  

Arguably, as Said was well aware, this modality of violence is fuelled by Israel’s incorporation of ethnopolitics, embodied in its Zionist assabiyya (as Ibn Khaldoun would have said) — the political sensibility informing its settler colonial project in Palestine. I use the term ethnopolitics in a different sense than its employment in the study of minority and majority nationalisms. This is due to the colonial settler attributes of the founding and longevity of the Israeli state, attributes that tend to fall out of the purview of the study of ethnopolitics, which tends to valorise ethnicity, in the process downplaying modalities of settler racism.

From the Greek, ethnos refers to capacities for community bonding, to the attributes, orientations, locations and alignments by which people reproduce a sense of themselves as a community, by which people develop a sense of themselves as subjects-in-common, oriented around common interests, common needs, and common hermeneutic schemes by which interests and needs are articulated, narrativised, and embodied. 

In this phenomenological vein, the relevance of Ibn Khaldoun’s notion of assabiyya lies in his employment of its affiliative registers, rather than ties of filiation, which is based on (mostly patrilineal) descent. Hence, in distinction to the category of ethnic, ethnos refers not so much to the identity of a particular group, but to the material and imaginary resources (archives, narratives, museums, school history textbooks, etc) informing the reproductive viability of a group, its recursive capacities to maintain itself as a collective, as a community, according to modalities of living-with — what Hanna Arendt called mitsein, or what in Arabic we can refer to as ma-ba’ad.

We can thus say, as I suggested above, that settler violence is not merely deployed against Palestinians and their resources — as seen in its currently accelerated form in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem — but is incorporated (even celebrated and enjoyed) in the very temperament of Israelis and their political culture. The perpetration of violence becomes a modality by which being-in-common takes place, informs a people’s sense of community. Of course, the problem relates to the exclusivity, some would say supremacist attributes, of the restrictive contours of this being-in-common.   

If both Israeli racism directed towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the racism underpinning the Israeli state’s settler viability were ever doubted — mostly by liberals of the pathway-towards-a two-state solution-stamp — the current holocaust in Gaza has shattered such feel-good hesitations and convenient uncertainties. To my mind, the racial logic and ethno-violence of Israel’s liberal establishment is no better demonstrated than in the use of terms such as “savages”, “scum”, “animals”, “subhuman”, “monsters” not to mention the pathological need to humiliate and torture Palestinian captives. The racist logic informs the founding of the Israeli state, represented by the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land”, which echoes the notion of terra nullius, Latin for “land belonging to no one”, which in Australia was codified by the British in 1788, used to murder indigenous subjects.

This racial logic is demonstrated by Donald Trump’s all too stupidly casual, though obscene, remarks on Gaza as “unliveable”, and that Palestinians would do best to leave en masse, all the while conveniently failing to acknowledge how Israel has decimated Gaza with 2,000 pound bombs supplied by his government. Indeed, considering Israel’s current blockade of Gaza with the ongoing support of Western governments, politics has become obscene, a vulgarity represented by smooth talking politicians of a liberal stripe, who very well know what’s going on in Gaza, and accordingly offer their sincere “concerns”, or else “grave concerns” when they are constrained to respond to more serious incidents.

To my mind, the term “humanitarian” has become foul, in respect to the putrid odour it carries when uttered by “concerned” politicians, though also in the sense of foul play, obfuscating and not owning up to the obvious. Our politicians are not stupid — they are well aware that Palestinians have for decades been living under an apartheid regime designed to obliterate them from history. However, it’s their deep-seated racism towards Arabs and Islamic cultures more generally that informs their accommodation of Israel’s apparent right to impunity and unaccountability.

What, then, we can call Said’s interventionist practice of scholarship is braced by his formidable critique of colonial racism, the varying hues by which racism informs liberal political cultures and their tacit approval of ethno-violence. Gaza, it has to be acknowledged, has laid bare the attributes of Western liberal racism, considering how Palestinian lives are expendable, beyond the bounds of grieveabilty (as Judith Butler would say) even in death. The Palestinian body can be humiliated, mutilated, starved, tortured, raped, chained for days on end, buried in mass graves — all the while representing an inconvenient anonymity for the decorum of liberal political commentaries — the politicians who decry Israel’s current starvation of Palestinians in Gaza as “intolerable”, all the while tolerating such through inaction, as well as direct participation in the forms of arms and logistical support to the Israeli genocide machine.

As I have suggested, much of the copious secondary literature on Said and his work tends to underestimate his critique of racism.[1] While he had much to say about what he referred to as his “colonial education” at the English schools he attended in Cairo in his childhood, his discussions of racism were directed toward liberal establishments. This is evident in one of his early essays addressing the representation of Arabs and Palestinians in the United States (where he was based in New York), “The Arab Portrayed”, written for a 1970 edited volume by Ibrahim Abu Lughod, in the wake of the so called Arab-Israeli six-day war of June 1967.

The essay opens with two illustrations of the portrayal of “the Arab” in what at the time Said calls “the American mind”, or else “the American consciousness”. The first of his examples is a reunion class at Princeton University that chose to dress up in the fashion of a stereotypical Arab: “robe, headgear, and sandals” Said writes, though with the added insult, he observes, of the members of the reunion mockingly holding their arms above their heads to signal the “abject defeat” of the Arabs in the June war. Said’s acute personal sense of racist offence resonates in the passion of his prose: “Surprisingly, there was no serious complaint made about the really vile taste at work as there might have been if any other national or racial group had been similarly insulted”. His discussion of this reunion is repeated, almost verbatim, in his famous work Orientalism (1978), although by the mid-1970s (under the influence of the work of Foucault, especially regarding the archaeological, or archival attributes of the production and circulation of knowledge and power) Said would drop expressions such as “the American mind”.

The second example he mentions concerns Arab characters in American movies, in the “average film in which an Arab appears”. The figure of the Arab, Said argues, always appears to be “over-sexed” and “degenerate” … often seen snarling at the captured American hero and a blonde girl, “My men are going to kill you, but — they like to amuse themselves beforehand. He leers suggestively as he speaks”. Said links such stereotypes to the way in which the liberal media, mostly championing Israel’s victory, often depict Arabs as an anonymous, hysterical mob; whereas Israelis are depicted as “stalwart individuals, the light of simple heroism shining from their eyes”, he writes.                                                                                                                           

Already in this early essay Said was establishing the methodological imprint of Orientalism, published ten years later, concerning the propensity of, in the main, European realist and escapist literature to reproduce and disseminate patterns, hermeneutic schemes, of racist associations. As he observes in “The Arab Portrayed”: “The symbolism repeated the simple pattern of a Cooper novel — was not the June War the conflict between the white European bravely facing the amoral wilderness in the person of savage natives bent on destruction?”

II

Don’t ever be surprised                                
among the ruins of the house: This is
how we survived.

Mosab Abu Toha, “A Rose Shoulders Up”

As is well known, in the last years of his life Said backed a model of a bi-national state for Jews and Palestinians. However, since the Oslo Accords of 1993, when Yasser Arafat presented himself on the White House lawns in Washington to sign an agreement with Israel, the so-called “two-state solution” has held more prominence, though it carries varying political value. For Israel and its Western supporters, “two-state solution” expediently signifies the status quo, the Palestinian state indefinitely deferred, with an occupied and disenfranchised Palestinian population corralled into segmented parts (Bantustans, some would say) of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — while Israeli settlements, for Jews only, advance at a swift pace. For others, such as the United Nations, the Palestinian Authority, some Arab governments, and many countries of the global South, the two-state model signifies an endeavour to realise a Palestinian state, alongside Israel. To my mind, talk of a “two-state solution” remains too idealistic, and its performative application amounts to a normative emphasis on a pathway to a Palestinian state, not the state itself. This despite over 140 members of the United Nations recognising a Palestinian state — including, of late, Spain, Ireland, and Norway — according to the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the capital. At the same time, while I am not convinced by arguments for a “bi-national state”, it is worthwhile to consider why Said made this argument, as his reasoning relates to his critique of Israel’s political and military culture of ethno-nationalism.

As I mentioned above, Said provided myriad forms of commentary and analysis on the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians since the first events of the Nakba leading up to and in the wake of the establishment of the Israeli apartheid state in 1948. Books such as The Question of Palestine (1979) and After the Last Sky (1986) were written with both a scholarly and public audience in mind.

In The Question of Palestine, composed on the heels of Orientalism, Said provides an elaborate discussion of Zionism in terms of its historical emergence and capacity to engage the logic of British colonial rule. “The Zionists”, he writes,

occupied a place that made it possible to interpret Palestine and its realities to the West in terms that the West could understand and easily accept, specifically and generally. Conversely, the refusal to accept the Zionist argument left anyone in the West with the poorest of alternatives: being simply negative, anti-Semitic, or an apologist for Islam and the Arabs.

“Zionism”, he continues, “offered the neatness of a specific solution (or answer) to a specific problem”. While he is well aware and often mentions how this “specific problem”, meaning anti-semitism, gained much attention in the wake of the Holocaust, he also notes the racism and pogroms directed towards Jews through history. 

In a key passage of his famous second chapter, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims”, Said switches to an autobiographical mode of address. Gramsci-like, he refers to a constellation of historical forces, personal inventory, and cultural repertoire — all encompassed by his interventionist reading of a Western historical archive otherwise.

While “ideas”, he writes, “have power” — referring specifically to the idea of Zionism for Jews — the power of ideas always takes place as a historical process and “is mixed in with historical circumstances”. Ideas involve certain capacities for human subjectivity —  capacities by which people learn and unlearn how to become subjects of their worlds.

What, Said asks, does Zionism mean for an Arab, and more specifically, for a Palestinian? The question, he appreciates, is manifold, mainly because there is not only one experience of Zionism common to all Arabs (one could add Arab-Jews). However, for Palestinians, Zionism bears an acute experience of exile and dispossession, especially in the wake of the Nakba, when around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their indigenous homelands, while their towns and villages were destroyed by the invading Zionists.

Said acknowledges how Zionism developed through a Western, European history of anti-Semitism, genocide, and related aspirations for Jewish national cohesion. This history, he points out, is part and parcel of what he refers to as his “Western education”, his “intellectual formation”. He continues: “In what I have read, in what I write about, even in what I do politically, I am profoundly influenced by mainstream western attitudes toward the history of the Jews, anti-Semitism, the destruction of European Jewry”. As a consequence of his Western education, he can appreciate the “intertwined terror and the exultation out of which Zionism has been nourished”. And yet as a Palestinian, as someone who has been displaced from his homeland by the Zionist drive for a national home for Jews, he is well aware of how the Western archive supports a delimitation of adversarial points of view, alternative narratives of history, such as those concerning the Nakba.

Said traces this conflicting inventory through the pages of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda. First published in serial form in 1876, it articulates a sympathetic view of Zionist yearning for a national homeland. Said explores a peculiar ambiguity of Eliot’s narrative, an ambiguity nurtured by a nineteenth-century European racist repertoire of defining a positive, enlightened West against a negative, regressive East. While Eliot alludes to the racism directed towards Jews in Europe, she is sympathetic to Jews as long as they embody attributes of Western culture. Eliot, Said observes,

is quite capable of seeing that Zionism can easily be accommodated to several varieties of Western (as opposed to Eastern) thought, principal among them the idea that the East is degraded, that it needs reconstruction according to enlightened Western notions about politics, that any reconstructed portion of the East can with small reservations become as “English as England” to its new inhabitants.

As he goes on to argue, while providing a complex, morally-charged depiction of conflicting motivations of European subjects, Eliot fails to extend this multidimensional prism in her references to the East and its inhabitants.

Said penned these words only a few years after the Palestinian novelist and critic, Ghassan Kanafani, wrote his study On Zionist Literature, first published in Arabic in 1967, and only recently translated into English. Remarkably, in his discussion of a number of literary works valorising a racial logic to Jewish identity, Kanafani’s insights into a literary assemblage refusing what he calls an “integrationist” ethic of alterity pretty well anticipates Said’s views. However, not being well-versed, at the time, in Arabic, Said I think wasn’t acquainted with this particular work of Kanafani.

Be that as it may, both writers recognised the pitfalls of Israeli exceptionalism, steeped in a liberal racist logic that at present is hell bent on erasing Palestinians from history. Both Said and Kanafani draw attention to a genealogy by which the political culture of Israel has failed to acknowledge what Freud recognised as the composite characteristics of Judaic history and Jewish identity. At present, this failure, this will to Jewish supremacy, is venting its rage in Gaza. As I write (June 2025), over 50,000 Palestinians, a third of whom are children, have been murdered by Israel. Once some sort of end to this onslaught is brought about, there is a grave danger that Israel and its Western liberal supporters will revert to giving lip-service to a two-state solution, all the while supporting Israel’s regime of occupation, settlement and apartheid in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Genocide thrives on a racial logic by which the abject Other, the non-European, is hermeneutically incorporated, rehearsed, pathologically embodied as a condition of self-awareness.

[1] For further discussion of this theme see my Nafssiya, Or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism (2024)

Works reference

Darwish, M, 1995, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Butler, J, 2012, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Columbia University Press, New York.
Freud, S, 1985, Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and Other Works, translated by James Strachey, Penguin, London.
Hammad, I, 2024,Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Fern Press, London.
Ibrahim, A-L, 1970, editor, The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
Kanafani, G, 2022, On Zionist Literature, translated by Mahmoud Najib, Ebb Books, London.
Mosab, AT, 2022, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, City Lights Books, San Francisco.
Said, EW, The Question of Palestine, Vintage, New York.
—— 2003, Orientalism, Penguin, London. 
—— 2004, Freud and the Non-European, Verso, London.
Said, EW and Jean Mohr, 1999, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Columbia University Press, New York.