What all Palestinians refer to today as the Palestinian Revolution is not the negative distinction of being unlike others, but a positive feeling of the whole Palestinian experience as a disaster to be remedied, of Palestinian identity as something understandable not only in terms of what we lost but as something we are forging–a liberation from nonentity, oppression, and exile.
page 135, The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said
Table of Contents
Preamble
When I read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi last year, I knew that I had to read The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said (EWS for short) as well at some point. It was just the natural next step in developing my understanding of the Palestinian question and it is a book that I think everyone who is interested in Palestine should read.
So when I saw a copy of the book at a local indie book store I immediately bought it. That was in October 2024, I didn’t get around to reading this book until the last week of January 2025. The book was originally published in 1979, the copy I have is the edition that was published in 1992 with a new introduction and epilogue added.
What is The Question of Palestine?
Before we begin talking about the book I think it is worth defining the question of Palestine as Edward W Said puts it and I cannot do better than a quote from the man himself.
But what is most important today is the continuing avoidance or ignorance of the existence today of about four million Muslim and Christian Arabs who are known to themselves and to others as Palestinians. They make up the question of Palestine, and if there is no country called Palestine it is not because there are no Palestinians. There are, and this essay is an attempt to put their reality before the reader.
page 50, The Question of Palestine by Edward Said
EWS keeps coming back to this point throughout the book. That ultimately it comes down to the basic and intransigent fact that there is a population of Palestinians living in Palestine and they continue to exist despite the best effort of the colonizing forces at play.
Colonizer Characteristics
A good chunk of this book is infuriating to read. Not because it is poorly written or is uninteresting to read. It is infuriating because EWS uses quotes from the various colonizer types and their attitudes towards Palestine.
What strikes me is that the similarities in the dehumanizing tone colonizers use towards their subjects from Palestine to India to Algeria. It is all the similar. Sure the specifics of colonization differ from locale to locale but fundamentally colonization and a colonial attitude begins with a dehumanization of the colonized.
It starts with a negation of the humanity of the colonized and in the case of Zionism in Israel it reaches a level of absurdity where the colonizer’s physical existence, their very body is negated in the consciousness of the colonizer. This form of negation is played out via media of all kinds – books, newspapers, movies, music – the colonizer seeks to dispossess the colonized of their existence in the public consciousness and uses the tools of media to do this.
EWS astutely points out the culpability of the news media, especially in the Global North which is loathe to criticize Israel and its settler-colonial project out of fear of being branded as anti-Semites. This attitude is especially pervasive after the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust but it is something that is unfortunately still an issue that the mainstream news media has.
The PLO
One aspect of this book in contrast to Rashid Khalidi’s book is that EWS is a lot more positive about the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) than Khalidi was. EWS paints the PLO as a positive unifying force that provided much needed definition to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Khalid makes some very pointed criticisms about the PLO and its actions especially when it comes to the matter of the Oslo Accords.
I point this out mostly as a contrast between the two books and the two authors. I don’t have any strong opinion on the PLO and its actions nor do I think it is necessary for me to have one. The PLO is of course massively important to the history of the Palestinian struggle and is a topic that everyone interested in the Palestinian question should at least be familiar with.
Conclusions
After finishing the books I kept thinking about the order in which I read the two books about Palestine I’ve read (EWS and Khalidi) and whether I should have read The Question of Palestine first purely because it was published earlier and as far as timeline goes, its the spiritual predecessor of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
After thinking about it some more and in the process of writing this review I think that people should read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine first because it is a book that is easier to read. While both EWS and Khalidi are academics and write like academics, Khalidi’s writing style is much more approachable. That said the books are also different enough that I don’t think the reading order matters much and it wouldn’t be redundant to read Khalidi’s book first and then this one or vice versa.
I like to end reviews of non-fiction books with a quote from the book that I thought was particularly poignant. This quote is from the very end of the book, from the end of the epilogue that was added in the 1992 republishing.
The Palestinian people today constitutes a nation in exile, and is not a random collection of individuals. Anyone who knows the least bit about this people knows, too, the profound existential ties that bind it together, and that connect it historically, culturally, and politically to the land of Palestine. For too many years, the official policies of Israel and the United States, quite unlike the attitudes of the rest of the world, assumed that the Palestinians would fade into the Arab world, that Jordan would become Palestine, that Palestinians would accept permanent subservience under a Bantustanlike “limited autonomy” (or as the Likud formula has it, autonomy for people–not for land), that the people may even be willing to perform an act of collective politicide on itself and declare itself null and void. That is to fail completely, in moral and psychological terms, to grasp the reality. Nothing less than Palestinian self-determination will do; and only that will ever defuse the already far too explosive Middle East. Yet some Israelis and non-Israeli Jews have in fact understood that if Israelis and Palestinians can have any decent future it must be a common one, not based on the nullification of one by the other. In 1988, we Palestinians as a people took a giant step towards reconciliation and peace. We now await a corresponding gesture from the Israeli people and its government.
page 244, Epilogue of The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said
We are unfortunately as of this present moment, still waiting.
That is all from me, until next time.
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