SOURCE: "Arafat's Man in New York," in New York, Vol. 22, No. 4, January 23, 1989, pp. 40-6.

[In the essay below, Smith provides an overview of Said's life and career.]

On the afternoon of December 14, a Columbia University professor returning home from London, where he'd delivered a lecture on Yeats, pushed open the door of his Morningside Heights apartment and found his wife and two children gathered around the television set. History was being made.

It was history that Edward Said, a Palestinian-born professor of English and comparative literature, had helped create. Said joined his family around the TV and listened as Secretary of State George P. Shultz announced that the United States—after years of refusing to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization—would begin talks with the group's representatives in Tunis. Said sank into a chair. "The taboo has been lifted," he said.

For years, the Palestinians, Israel, and the United States had been caught in a deadlock over the future of Israel. Now some of the old assumptions had begun to change—though how much is not yet clear. With prodding from the Americans, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat had finally made statements at a press conference, declaring Israel's right to exist and renouncing terrorism. The Palestinian National Covenant—the PLO charter—still pledges to "liquidate the Zionist presence in Palestine." But Arafat's statements—the last of a series of comments he made over several weeks—were seen as a significant move forward. All through these weeks, Said had been on the phone to colleagues in the PLO hierarchy, urging that Arafat make his position unambiguous.

As soon as Shultz's press conference broke off, the phone began ringing in Said's dark-paneled apartment. The news shows were calling to ask for more interviews.

In recent months, Said has become a familiar figure on American television, a distinguished-looking man of 53 dressed in well-cut suits, speaking in a perfect American accent, with a perfectly American demeanor—espousing the Palestinian cause. He is nothing if not a man of paradoxes. An American citizen, he has been a member of the Palestine National Council—the Palestinian parliament-in-exile-since 1977, and in November, at the P.N.C. meeting in Algiers, he helped draft the Palestinian declaration of independence. He serves as an independent, unaffiliated member of the council, not officially connected to the PLO (or any of its constituent groups, such as Fatah or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), though he is a PLO supporter.

Baptized as an Episcopalian, Said is a member of a minority within a minority—most Christian Arabs are Greek Orthodox. He has spent almost all his adult life in the United States, yet he is fighting for a land he's barely seen since childhood. He is an intellectual—one of America's leading literary critics—thrust into the role of political activist.

Said is a Palestinian living in a city of almost 2 million Jews—"My friends are only Jews," he says with perhaps only a little exaggeration. Yet he is an admirer of Yasser Arafat, a symbol of terrorism for most Jews. To Said, Arafat is a hero—"the old man," in the words that Arafat's followers often use to describe him. In the December [1988] Interview magazine, Said gave an affectionate account of sitting down with Arafat in Tunis for breakfast (a large salad bowl filled with cornflakes, over which the PLO leader poured hot tea. "I invented this during the siege of Beirut," he said). Said wrote that Arafat's "international stature has come to him as leader of a genuinely national and popular movement, with a clearly legitimate goal of self-determination for his people."

Opinions like that have put Said in a curious and sometimes dangerous position. There are phone threats, hate letters. In 1985, Said's office at Columbia was torn apart. (Victor Vancier, a member of the Jewish Defense League convicted of a series of J.D.L. bombings, later told writer Robert I. Friedman that the vandalism was the work of "Jewish patriots," but he would not say whether the J.D.L. had been involved.) Said worries about the security in his home and almost never gives out his phone number. But he says he tries not to become obsessed by the threats. "I'd get paralyzed," he says. When threats do come, "the city police and the FBI have been cooperative."

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that Edward Said is an academic, living and working in the world of ideas, while serving as a spokesman for a militant cause sometimes associated with terrorism. "I totally repudiate terrorism in all forms," he says. "Not just Palestinian terrorism—I'm also against Israeli terrorism, the bombing of refugee camps. I'm against collective punishment, like the detention of 850,000 Gazans by Israeli forces in their homes for a week during the meeting of the P.N.C. in Algiers."

Even Said's enemies acknowledge that he has never been involved personally in terrorist acts. Yet, in Algiers last November, Said sat in the same conference hall as Mohammed Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO executive committee who was convicted in absentia by an Italian court for the murder of the American Leon Klinghoffer, an old man in a wheelchair, during the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro.

Abbas is "a s―, a degenerate," says Said. Yet, "in the conditions of exile polities, very strange things occur." What's more, Said says, Shultz and President Reagan have met with Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. "Shamir was involved with terrorist activities in the Stern Gang," Said says, "and Begin at Deir Yassin," the Arab village attacked in 1948 by the Irgun, Zionist commandos led by Begin. Several hundred Arab men, women, and children were killed.

Questions about terrorism stalk Said wherever he goes, often overwhelming his analysis of the Middle East situation. Last year, while being interviewed for a BBC documentary, Said was again asked to explain his position on terrorism. "I'm totally against it," he said. But "I've always been much more impressed by the extent of Palestinian suffering."

"That seems very clear," the interviewer commented, "but very cold and unfeeling."

Said looked taken aback. "I'm not sure what you mean—unfeeling."

The interviewer said he was referring to Said's response.

Again Said expressed disapproval of terrorism. "It doesn't advance a political goal," he said—and then pointed out that "terrorism was first introduced into the Middle East by Zionists in the twenties."

For Said, all questions of Palestinian terrorism are over-shadowed by what he sees as Israeli terrorism against Palestinian civilians. "The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim," he says. "There is a moral difference. They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and terrorism is understandable. But what the Israelis do, in killing Palestinians on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the horrific and unjust dispossession of the Palestinian people. Far more Palestinians—by a ratio of 100 to I—have been killed by Israelis than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians."

Many prominent Jews are troubled by Said's statements. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, former vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, is a research scholar at Columbia's Middle East Institute. He has debated Said publicly. "I called Sabra and Shatilla a pogrom in 1982," says Hertzberg, referring to the massacres of Palestinian refugees outside Beirut by right-wing Christians while Israeli troops stood by. "When he has spoken out against Arab terrorism, his voice has been very muted and politically circumspect," Hertzberg says.

"He puts on a very nice face for an American audience," says Yossi Gal, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington. "With his American accent, he tries to put on a positive picture in an attempt to manipulate the media—that this is what the PLO is all about. Americans know the PLO equals terrorism, not the PLO equals Edward Said equals Columbia University."

Morris B. Abram, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, calls Said "a skillful propagandist. If Professor Said is the man he would have Americans believe he is, let him urge that the Palestine National Council repeal the Palestinian Covenant, which calls for the destruction of Israel."

Said has heard these criticisms before. "I'm not an apologist or paid propagandist," he says. "I do what I do out of commitment. I want people like Abram to point to things I've said that are not true. People don't refute my arguments—they just attack me personally. This attempt to defame my character and to slander me is because they cannot answer the factual truth of what I say."

As for the Palestinian National Covenant, "it nowhere calls for the destruction of Israel," says Said. He argues that when the framers of the document in 1964 wrote about the need to "liquidate the Zionist presence in Palestine," they "didn't say 'Jews.' The word 'Zionist' meant the movement that threw us out of our own country. That had to be defied and reversed." He goes on to add that, in any case, he thinks Arafat's statements and the resolutions of the P.N.C. "directly supersede" the covenant.

Increasingly, Said is being asked to explain the Palestinian cause to American audiences. Last March, George Shultz invited Said and his friend and colleague on the P.N.C., Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, professor of political science at Northwestern University, to Washington to talk about the Palestinian situation. Before they got down to business, Said and Shultz discussed their alma mater, Princeton. "Shultz said we needed credible and representative Palestinians," says Said—adding, with irony in his voice, "like myself, who have Ph.D.'s, not terrorists."

Also in March, Said was invited to attend Sabbath services and deliver a talk at Congregation B'nai Yisrael in Armonk, New York. It was Said's first time in a synagogue. "I was moved," he says. "I appreciated the gesture very much." Rabbi Douglas E. Krantz says the reactions to Said's talk "were more or less positive," but "what was most important about the visit was that the conflict was humanized in our sanctuary."

Last December, Said was invited to speak at a lunch at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Guests included Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Columbia professor who was Jimmy Carter's national-security adviser, and Robert Jervis, professor of political science and a specialist in national security. The atmosphere was cordial, yet Said was nervous, the sweat running down his face, his voice dry as he delivered a summary of the Palestinian uprising and of events in Algiers.

Brzezinski, for once, seemed to be on Said's side. "I admit the Palestinian position has evolved, whereas the Israeli position has not," he said.

There were questions from around the table. Jervis asked if one of the problems in the Middle East wasn't "the floridness" and the "exaggeration" of the Arabic language itself, "making for the difficulty of a political understanding."

Later, Said observed that Jervis's remark "typifies the clichés that come from ignorance and fear. Arabic is no more florid than any other great language. It can be used floridly, to conceal intention, but that's true of every language!"

The gathering was in many ways typical of Said's daily life. Always a gentleman, yet always a stranger, he in some ways never quite seems to belong.

He was born into an old Jerusalem family in 1935, delivered, he says, by a Jewish midwife. His father, Wadie, was already an American citizen, having fled to the United States to avoid the Ottoman draft. In 1917, Wadie joined the American Army and served in France. After attending college in Cleveland, he returned to Palestine and became a wealthy businessman, the head of a company that made office equipment and published books. Said's mother is half Palestinian and half Lebanese. She grew up in Nazareth, where her father was the first Baptist minister in Palestine.

The family home was in a comfortable neighborhood of West Jerusalem, near the King David Hotel. Said was the oldest and the only boy. Mother and son were very close. Wadie Said was more severe. "He taught me to judge myself and others by unmeetable standards," says his son.

Said's memories of Jerusalem are filled with "images of the sun, pastel colors, people wearing dark-colored clothes, peasants and sheepherders…." He remembers "idyllic" family gatherings on the slopes of Mount Carmel, at picnic lunches along the Sea of Galilee. A family picture of Said from his early childhood shows a little Arab boy with dark skin and curly hair, wearing a kaffiyeh. In Palestine, he says, he had "a sense of belonging that I never had after that again." But his father "hated Jerusalem," Said remembers. "He said it reminded him of death."

Said went to St. George's, an Anglican school attended by Jerusalem's aristocracy, where his father had been a student and star athlete. A plaque with his father's name among the first elevens (the equivalent of the varsity cricket team) still hangs there, and Said says he dreams of one day taking his own son, Wadie, to see it.

As Said approached his twelfth birthday, the British Mandate in Palestine was in its final days, and Jerusalem had been divided into zones. Soon Said would need a pass to get from his home to his school. "The situation was dangerous and inconvenient," Said remembers. Said's family left in December 1947 for Cairo. "I certainly didn't think I was never going to return," Said says.

In the spring of 1948, with the British gone, war broke out between the Arabs and the Jews after the Arabs rejected a U.N.-sponsored partition of the country. Within months, the rest of the Said family were refugees. "I have uncles in Athens, Washington, in Amman, in Pittsburgh, England, Switzerland," says Said.

While many Palestinians landed in refugee camps, Said and his parents, like other upper-class families, resumed their privileged existence. (Some of the children of these families later formed the nexus of the modern PLO Ieadership.) Compared with other Palestinians, "I suffered very little," Said admits.

But for all Palestinians, no matter what their class, says Said, the loss of Palestine has been known forever after as the nakbah, the disaster. "Since ancient times," he says, "the worst punishment given a man was exile and separation from his natal place. It is the most horrible fate, a permanent fall from paradise."

In Cairo, Said attended the American School along with the children of U.S. diplomats. Later, he entered Victoria College in Cairo, known as the Eton of the Middle East. Among the students at the school (which had a branch in Alexandria) were the future King Hussein of Jordan and Adnan Khashoggi. The head boy in Said's house at the school was the future actor Omar Sharif, then known as Michel Chalhoub. Said says Sharif—who was four years older—was a bully and Said "hated" him. Said felt like a stranger. "Most of the people at the school had been there all their lives," he says.

Victoria College was supposed to turn its students into little English gentlemen. Some of the teachers were shell-shocked veterans of World War II. One, Said recalls, "sometimes started to shake" in class. Said remembers writing "essays on the enclosure system in England. I knew more about the enclosure bill than any other subject. Arab language and literature were comic subjects."

Said's mother arranged for him to be tutored in Arabic and given lessons in riding, boxing, gymnastics, and piano. On Sundays, "I went to Sunday school at the Anglican church in the morning and in the evening went to the Presbyterian church. I know the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer very well." The result of these lessons was to turn Said into something of a modern polymath, an expert on the literature of many lands, an excellent athlete, a pianist of nearly concert-level skill.

In 1951, Said defied one of his teachers at Victoria College, and his parents and the faculty agreed that "my career in the British system was not going to prosper." So he was sent to Mount Hermon, an "austere evangelist school," as he recalls it, in Massachusetts. Said was miserable. He had never been away from home before, he had "no place to go at Christmas," and he saw his parents only in the summer. "I did brilliantly, but I was always penalized somehow," he remembers. "There was always a moral disapproval." He was happy, though, at Princeton. "For the first time in my life, I was able intellectually to flourish," he says.

During the summers, Said continued to return to Cairo, but Nasser's revolution in Egypt in 1952 changed forever the nature of Arab politics, marking the rise of Arab nationalism. By 1963, with a "wave of socialism" passing over Egypt, "there was no place for a man like my father," says Said. The family moved to Lebanon. "My life has marked a period of cataclysmic changes," he says. "Whole countries disappearing, whole nations realigning." The exodus from Cairo was traumatic for the Saids, and ever since then, the phrase "after Cairo" has been a family refrain. Said's father died in Lebanon in 1971. His mother and two of his sisters lived through the siege of Beirut by Israeli forces in 1982, and—though his mother is currently in Washington—she and the sisters maintain homes in West Beirut.

In 1962, as a graduate student in comparative literature at Harvard, Said met his first wife, an Estonian-American who was a friend of his sister's at Vassar. The marriage was troubled. Said says his wife had "little interest in Arab culture."

For his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, Said chose the Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad, like Said an exile. Conrad became a crucial figure in his life. In an essay, "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on a Life in Exile," published in Harper's in 1984, Said quotes Conrad: "It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth." The dissertation was later turned into his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography.

In his early years in America, Said says, he had "little political consciousness of myself as an Arab." But the 1967 defeat of the Arabs in the war with Israel changed him forever. He saw "the tremendous support for the Israeli victory and the total lack of support for the Arab position. I began to radically question my presence in this society."

He separated from his first wife in 1968 and began to "rediscover" his identity as an Arab. On a trip to Lebanon in 1970, Said met Mariam Cortas, a Lebanese Quaker who, like Said, came from a wealthy family. "I fell in love with her," says Said, and they were married at the end of the year. They have two children: Wadie, now seventeen, and Najla, fourteen, both students at the Trinity School.

At the time of his second marriage, Said was teaching at Columbia and making his reputation as a scholar. He was among the first literary critics to introduce the writing of French structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the post-structuralist Michel Foucault, to American audiences. The French structuralists wrote that the human mind has an innate structuring capacity, which it imposes on the outside world. Human thought, consciousness itself, human myths and kinship patterns, all have "deep structures," and it is the scholar's task to uncover them. In 1975, Said published Beginnings: Intention and Method, about the way intellectual endeavors—works of history, novels, and poems—begin and the significance of the author's choice of a beginning. Like much of Said's early scholarly writing, it is influenced by the structuralists and nearly impossible for an ordinary person to read. The book was awarded Columbia's Lionel Trilling prize.

During the seventies, Said became increasingly involved in the Palestinian cause. His cousin by marriage, Kamal Nasser, a poet and spokesman for the PLO in Amman, was killed in Lebanon in 1973 by Israeli commandos coming in from the sea, Said says. In 1977, he became a member of the Palestine National Council. "I've never really wanted to have even a semi-official affiliation," Said says. "I did it out of solidarity and commitment."

In 1978, he published the book for which he's best known, Orientalism, an examination of the way the West perceives the Islamic world. The book has a striking cover: a nineteenth-century painting, The Snake Charmer, by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. The painting shows a naked Arab boy, with a snake wound round his body, being regarded lasciviously by a group of Arab men. To Said, the painting epitomizes the West's "malicious" misconceptions about Arabs.

In the book, Said purports to show the way the Orient is portrayed as "mysterious" and "sensual" and Arabs and Muslims as "evil, totalitarian and terroristic." To Said, the West's vision of the Islamic world is "a web of racism, cultural stereotypes [and] dehumanizing ideology." He argues that Orientalism is like a form of anti-Semitism, as if "the Jew of pre-Nazi Germany has bifurcated. What we have now is a Jewish hero … and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab Oriental."

The book caused an uproar. Bernard Lewis, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, called it "false" and "absurd." He argued that it "reveals a disquieting lack of knowledge of what scholars do and what scholarship is about."

Still, Orientalism was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has changed the face of scholarship on the Arab world and the Third World in general. Professional groups have devoted symposia to the book, and it has been translated into fifteen languages.

Since Orientalism, Said has turned away from pure literary scholarship. In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), which won the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, Said argued that scholars are social beings interpreting works that have been created in the midst of political events. His books The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), After the Last Sky (1986), and Blaming the Victims (1988) have taken on an increasingly political tone. A new book, Culture and Imperialism, is scheduled to be published next year.

Today, Said continues to live uneasily poised between two cultures, Arab and American.

"Whether I'm with Americans or with Arabs, I always feel incomplete," says Said. "Part of myself can't be expressed. I always have a sense of being slightly at a disadvantage. There is always the sense that being Arab carries a special charge of being delinquent, guilty by association."

At home, he speaks Arabic—"a language I have loved more than any other," he has written. (Said also speaks French and reads Italian, German, Spanish, and Latin.) His apartment is filled with the mixed symbols of the cultures he inhabits—a poinsettia for Christmas, pillows covered with Palestinian weavings, jeweled boxes of beaten silver from Egypt.

In the outside world, Said seems thoroughly American, playing squash at the Columbia gym with friends, many of them Jews. To his close friend Jonathan R. Cole, recently named the provost of Columbia, Said is "a brilliant scholar, in his own way equal to Lionel Trilling.

"We haven't had a great many political discussions," says Cole, who is Jewish. "I definitely agree with him that we have to have an accommodation to the Palestinian question. The question is whether or not his friends reconstruct his positions to what they want to hear. If he supports the stereotypical PLO position calling for the annihilation of Israel, then I don't agree with him."

To some of Said's friends, his quality of separateness, of being apart from the dominant culture, has the effect of making him seem like a Jew. David Stern, assistant professor of medieval-Hebrew literature at the University of Pennsylvania, was an undergraduate student at Columbia when he first met Said. Stern is an observant Jew and a Zionist. "I felt a kind of sympathy with him as an outsider, in the same way as I felt an outsider," says Stern.

To Cole, Said "is a marginal man, as many Jews are. It's difficult for Edward to feel of a place. Of course, that's a situation that Jews have been in for many centuries. Edward and many of his Jewish friends are more similar to each other than to people who came from Western Europe."

Yet the similarity between Said and Jews ends when Said is asked about the Holocaust. Three years ago, he and his wife went to see Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's movie about memories of the Holocaust. "I'm sure we were the only Arabs there," Said remarked in the BBC documentary. Today, he says he was disappointed in the movie. "I knew Lanzmann had gotten money from the Israeli government for it," he says. "It was a disturbing film because of what it revealed about European anti-Semitism, [yet] ideologically, it provided an argument for Zionism that impinged on me as a Palestinian. It seemed to me much more about present-day politics than it did about the past. It's all part of a justification for the Palestinian situation, an argument for dispossessing Palestinians.

"I don't say there is an equation between the suffering of the Jews and the Palestinians," Said adds, "but the suffering of Jews doesn't thereby entitle them to dispossess us!"

Despite Said's commitment to the Palestinian cause, he has never gone back to Jerusalem and has visited the West Bank only twice, briefly, for family weddings (both times before 1967). Now that he's become a prominent spokesman for the Palestinian cause, Said is no longer welcome in Israel. Last year, when he was invited to Bir Zeit University on the West Bank to lecture, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said he would refuse Said a visa if he tried to return.

But even if there were a Palestinian state. Said would probably never live there. "It's too late for me. I'm past the point of uprooting myself again," he says. Besides, "New York is the exilic city. You can be anything you want here, because you are always playacting; you never really belong."

If he will never live in Palestine, why fight so hard for a Palestinian homeland? "I'm not fighting for the nationalistic element," Said says. "I'm fighting because I have a tremendous anger at an unacknowledged injustice to an entire people. Not a day goes by when I don't think in the minutest detail of how a relatively innocent people have been made to suffer this kind of tragedy, while the Western World celebrated their oppressors."

Now that the United States is talking to the PLO, Said says, his goal is an international peace conference. "We want to break down the taboos and naturalize the Palestinians, so they are not seen as monsters, as Nazis, etc. It's very important that American Jews and Israeli Jews understand how the Palestinians require from them acknowledgement of the immense historical injustice inflicted on us as a nation."

Said's hope is for "an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, in some kind of confederation with Jordan. There is an Israeli law of return; there should be an equivalent Palestinian law of return—that is an extremely important and sensitive issue. All Palestinians feel they have a right of return. But we are talking about numbers, both Jewish and Palestinian, that will simply overwhelm the capacity of both states to absorb—there have to be limitations on both states. They can't do everything they want. They have to negotiate some formula together."

Even as Said envisions a future Palestinian state, the thought of it makes the scholar-intellectual in him uneasy. "I feel deeply uncomfortable with nationalism," he says. "My commitment to the cause is because of the injustice to and sufferings of people of whom I'm a part. Nationalism itself doesn't interest me. I can see it as a necessity, but I myself am not interested in successful nationalism."

There is no sign that Said's advocacy of the Palestinian cause has affected him professionally. At Columbia, where he makes a distinctive figure striding about campus in a loden-green coat and a red-paisley scarf, Said is something of a cult figure. His lectures, which touch on fashionable trends in structuralism and deconstruction, are well attended. In 1983, he was invited to deliver the University Lecture at Columbia, considered a great honor. He is constantly invited to speak at other universities and has won most of the major awards of his profession. It takes twelve pages on his résumé to list all his books and essays. (In his spare time, he is also music critic for the Nation.) Three years ago, when he turned down an important offer from Harvard, Columbia gave him a bigger apartment with a new kitchen. "I get promotions, salary increases, all the perks," he says.

Last December, after the P.N.C. conference in Algiers, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger invited Said to have lunch with editors at the paper. Two days before the lunch was held, Arafat issued his statement recognizing Israel. Usually, discussions about the Palestinian situation have been dominated by questions about the Palestinians' refusal to recognize Israel. Now, at the luncheon, "it was as if an obstacle to discourse had been removed," Said says. The editors asked about the events that had led up to Arafat's statements and about the future. The conversation was so lively that Said hardly had time to eat the seafood salad that had been set before him.

Still, even as he and the newspaper editors sat together in an eleventh-floor dining room, in Israel, on the West Bank, the violence was increasing. By the end of the day, eight Palestinians in a funeral procession had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers, and the Palestinians were continuing to riot.