Julian Borger in Washington Monday August 23, 1999
The credibility of one of the best known torch-bearers for the Palestinian cause, Professor Edward Said, came under fierce assault over the weekend after he was accused by an American Jewish magazine of falsifying his account of his early years to portray himself as a refugee.
An article in a small right-wing periodical, Commentary, said Prof Said grew up in a wealthy household in Cairo, and challenged the US-based writer's claims that his family was driven out of Jerusalem by Jewish forces in 1947.
The article has stirred fierce emotions, because Prof Said is a well-respected and widely quoted Palestinian voice in the US media, which Arabs contend is dominated by the powerful pro-Israeli lobby. Much of his writing dwells on the experience of exile, both his own and his fellow Palestinians.
Prof Said is a central figure in the continuing struggle over western opinion between Arabs and Jews. The articulate Palestinian scholar is one of the few Palestinian voices to carry weight in US intellectual and media circles.
Much of the moral power of his arguments, spelt out in a series of books and countless articles on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, rests on the depiction of Palestinians as neglected refugees from their homeland.
His evocation of his own experience of exile has led many of his readers in the west to see him as the embodiment of the Palestinian tragedy.
The author of the Commentary article, Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar in residence at the Jerusalem centre for public affairs, alleged that Prof Said "has served up - and consciously encouraged others to serve up - a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations".
Prof Said, who teaches literature at Columbia university in New York, was reported to be travelling in Europe yesterday, but his friends denounced the attack as baseless and politically motivated.
They insisted that the Said family, including the 12-year-old Edward, left Jerusalem in 1947 when it became too dangerous to remain in the crossfire between Arabs and Jews over the city's future. Christopher Hitchens, a US-based British journalist and a Said family friend, said: "There's no question. The Saids decided to go because life was made hard for them. It became difficult and dangerous for him to go to school."
Prof Said has never denied having spent some of his childhood in Egypt, and that his father was a well-to-do Palestinian who carried a US passport.
In his 1994 book, the Politics of Dispossession, he wrote: "I was born in Jerusalem in late 1935, and I grew up there and in Egypt and Lebanon; most of my family - dispossessed and displaced from Palestine in 1947 and 1948 - had ended up mostly in Jordan and Lebanon."
Another friend, Israel Shahak - who is a Holocaust survivor and an Israeli human rights activist - said: "Commentary is a monthly of the most rightwing Jewish views, and the most conservative views in America, so I am not surprised by this attack."
Mr Shahak said that the argument over how the Said family left did not affect Prof Said's status as a refugee. "This is like saying the Jews who escaped from Germany before the war were not kicked out," Mr Shahak argued. "The main argument is that they were prevented from returning to their land. This is what it is about."
Mr Weiner said in his article that there was no evidence to support Prof Said's recollection of attending St George's school in Jerusalem.
But Mr Hitchens said that he had discussed his friend's schooldays with teachers and Anglican clerics from the school, who remembered the young Edward Said well.
"I know he was there," Mr Hitchens said. "The Anglican community spoke of Edward as a valuable member."
A powerful voice for his people
Edward W Said has written a series of books arguing for the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.
These include The Question of Palestine (1979) and The Politics of Dispossession (1994). He is known as a stern critic of the Oslo peace process begun in 1993, arguing that it sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. He also opposes the Oslo formula of carving a Palestinian entity out of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, arguing instead for the creation of one state, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights. He is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia university in New York. He has also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Yale universities in the United States.
Although he is severely ill with a form of leukaemia, he continues to travel and lecture in the Middle East and Europe.
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