The New York Times · 19 November 1979

CP-1979-033

The Palestinian Mission

By Edward W. Said

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Transcribed from the clipping

The question of Palestine is a matter with a detailed history traced in the lives of the four million Palestinians. It is not something that can be made, whether by legal, military, cultural, or psychological means, to go away.

Yet the question of Palestine is a concrete historical one that can be comprehended in human terms; it is not a gigantic, psychological monster poised to threaten the entire world. But this is precisely how it has been represented.

Zionism first refused to acknowledge the existence of native inhabitants in Palestine, and when it did, it recognized only native inhabitants with no political or national rights; insofar as those natives claimed rights, the struggle for those rights was equated with terrorism, genocide, anti-Semitism.

This is not only nonsense; it is also license to extend a century of violence against Palestinians for another long period of time, and to refuse to settle with history and with truth. Worse, such an attitude insures the recurrence of more violence, more suffering, more waste, more futile “security arrangements.”

The almost total impossibility of talking rationally about the Palestinian question in the United States today is of service to no one. On every level, it is an incontrovertible fact that attitudes of negation, denial, fear will only produce more fear, less peace.

Is there not an astonishing irony in a state of affairs by which the United States does not recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, while at the same time saying that the Palestinian question is at the center of the whole Middle East conflict?

In the end the Palestinians are not going to disappear, and fear of them and nonrecognition will not make them disappear either. I understand as best I can the fear felt by most Jews that Israel’s security is protection against future genocidal attempts on the Jewish people.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 6x to 22x by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by OCR and not by a person. The folio prints 'THE NEW YORK TIMES, MO' and is then cut by the clipping edge; 19 November 1979 was a Monday, which the surviving fragment supports, and there is no dateline because this is an Op-Ed page essay. The companion image on the same slide is a known duplicate, so this record takes the remaining label date, with the folio fragment as corroboration. This is the only item in its deck block written BY a Palestinian rather than about Palestinians; Edward Said is a professor and a member of the Palestine National Council at this date and is not counted toward the archive's tally of named ordinary Palestinians. The excerpt is long because the essay's argument - that Zionism 'recognized only native inhabitants with no political or national rights' - speaks directly to the archive's question about who gets named.

Cite this clipping

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