Culture and Resistance, Conversations with Edward W. Said

  This book is interviews by David Barsamian, published by South End Press in 2003. This is a series of interviews with the late, great, Edward Said, beginning in 1999 and concluding shortly before his death in late 2003, on the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. Awakened to political activism by the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Edward Said has been a strong and vocal advocate for the Palestinian cause in the U.S., even in the last decade when he was battling cancer as well as imperialism. The Palestinian people lost a valued brother and the people of the world lost an important ally with his recent passing.

Edward would not hesitate in condemning the Israeli state for its violence against the Palestinian people, in exposing the one-sided reporting of Palestine within the U.S. media or in repudiating the pro-Israeli tactic of labeling any criticism of Israel as anti-Semetic. He pointed out that while it is the state of Israel that is responsible for the violence against the Palestinian people-not the Jewish people or religion, it is being done by the state under their name which makes them complicit. This is much the same problem facing those of us living in the U.S. as our government and military wages war against the world under our name.

Edward Said frequently points out that one problem affecting the support of Palestine within the U.S. is the lack of understanding of scope of the lands taken and Palestinians uprooted and encourages people to study maps of the Israel expansion over the years to get a true sense of the impact to the Palestinian people. One place to start, after reading this book, is the website of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (www.passia.org).