Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 2 February 2026
Palestinian Cultural Mural honoring Dr. Edward Said (1935–2003) at San Francisco State University. It was painted by Fayeq Oweis and Susan Green and inaugurated on November 2, 2007.
Edward Said – a man for Palestine
Edward Said (1935-2003) was one of the most important Palestinian thinkers in modern times. He was born in Jerusalem and educated in Cairo; he later moved to the United States and continued his studies at Princeton and Harvard. He began teaching at Columbia University. He was both a professor of comparative literature and one of the most important writers on the Middle East. His focus on the Palestinian question raised consciousness in the English-speaking world. His work Orientalism (published in 1978) is a pivotal evaluation of Western thinking on the Middle Eastern. A year later he published The Question of Palestine (1979). Towards the end of his life, he was increasingly critical of the Palestinian political leadership, whom he saw as failing the Palestinian people.
Edward Said developed a vision and a discourse about what Palestine could be that is still highly relevant. He described the Palestinians as “the victims of the victims”, deeply sensitive to the experience of Jews in Europe. He showed how Palestinians had become wound up in Jewish history without having chosen to be. Their own history, culture and national life was cut short so that Europe could find a place for the Jews they had rejected.
Said was always willing to dialogue with Jews, and counted many Jews among his friends. He advocated for ways Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians could live together with equal rights while insisting on critiquing Israel and its ethnocentric regime.
Said acknowledged, “I do … understand as profoundly as I can, the fear felt by most Jews that Israel’s security is a genuine protection against future genocidal attempts on the Jewish people (…) But … there can be no way of satisfactorily conducting a life whose main concern is to prevent the past from recurring. For Zionism, the Palestinians have now become the equivalent of a past experience reincarnated in the form of a present threat. The result is that the Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to that fear, which is a disaster for them and for Jews.” (Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, (Times Books, 1979), p. 231)
This Al-Jazeera documentary gives an overview of his life and work. Some of those who knew him share their memories of him.