Refugee Voices
On 25 September 2003, Palestinian intellectual Dr. Edward Said passed away after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. In the days after his passing many thoughts were circulated on the internet. Many referred to Said’s outspoken opinions on the issue of Palestinian refugees in the context of a comprehensive peace in the region.
For Israeli Jews, like myself, [Edward Said] was the
lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of
growing up in a Zionist state onto a safe coast of reason, morality
and consciousness…. A few weeks ago we had our last meaningful
conversation on the phone - in which he beseeched me, as he did
others I am sure, not to give up the struggle for relocating the
Palestinian refugee issue at the heart of the public and global
agenda. He stressed the need to continue the effort of changing
American public opinion on Palestine and he was very hopeful and
encouraged by what he recognized as a significant change in
European public opinion. Edward probably left more than one
spiritual and moral will to us.
The one I am taking is the one above. In his memory and out of
respect to his intellectual genious as well as to his moral
courage, we should regroup our energies and reorganize our efforts
to impress on the world that there will be no justice and no peace
in Palestine, no stability in the Middle East and no tranquility in
the US relationship with the Muslim world, without the return of
Palestinian refugees to their home, the end of the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the building of
a state in Palestine that would respect human and civil rights, as
did Edward all his life.
Dr. Illan Pappe
Dr. Illan Pappe
Edward Said conquered death by his daily contribution to the
cultural monuments of our human values, and he will stay a
brilliant shrine and a marvelous example of the strength of the
will for our oppressed people against the huge dark powers who try
to suppress and cancel our dreams and our rights to exist on equal
footing with other people of the earth.
Palestine with Edward Said was more rich, wide, critical,
humane and sublime. Palestine without Edward Said is, different,
sad, missing one of its loyal voices who carried freedom's symphony
to the four corners of the world. With said, Orientalism as
methodology was changed forever, while the orient and its people
were empowered with more knowledge to their richness and
rootedness. With Said, Palestinians and Israelis had a vision for a
better future: personified by the long cooperation with his Jewish
musician Daniel Barenboim, with whom he established a common group
of more than 200 hundred Israeli and Palestinian young musicians,
playing together Beethoven and Mozart…With Said culture, knowledge
and power had different connotations where culture as seen as a
built symphony with all its variation, rather than the short minded
Samuel Huntington's thesis of the clash of civilizations.
With Said, universities and streets, the 'intellectual' and
the 'normal' are one, philosophy, politics, art, music and thought
are variations of the same humanity. With Said, Marx, Conrad,
Gramsci and Foucault were reread differently: by crossing the
borders of different disciplines and connecting knowledge, to power
to representation to decolonization processes in the third
world.
Dr. Mahmoud Issa
Dr. Mahmoud Issa