Said’s book Orientalism prepared the way for a revolution in the study of literature, history, and politics. humanities student in the past few decades has dealt with his legacy. Said was a political activist, scholar, memoirist, and literary and musical critic. There should be no doubt this is largely the legacy of Edward Said. public and political discourse for granted. policy-and it was here that Said’s eloquence struck its greatest triumph, with even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee warning its supporters that “challenging him will only make you look bad.” Today, Israel’s leaders can no longer take public complaisance or, as Said put it, the “near-total triumph for Zionism” in U.S. public’s complacency is one of the greatest aids to Israeli influence over U.S. For a couple decades, Said was the most influential spokesperson for the Palestinians in the United States-a lonely and courageous position at a time when using the word “Palestine” was considered a political provocation. The conflict in Palestine is as much a “war of images and ideas” as it is a question of policy, as Said clearly understood. foreign policy in the region as well as American national politics. This 30-year lag has done great damage to U.S. brokered talks in the 1990s rather than began with them. establishment is rarely willing to consider the idea that the Palestinian national liberation struggle-in so far as it had any hope of leading to a two-state solution-ended with U.S. The change has been led by the conversion of American liberals like Peter Beinart, whose recent articles supporting the rights of Palestinians in Jewish Currents earned him a profile in the New Yorker. media is beginning to catch up with his positions, which were considered radical in his own time, mostly because of the deep sense of history his writings evinced. Recent events in Palestine and Israel have shown Said was one of the few people to frame this issue properly. Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, Timothy Brennan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $35, March 2021
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