He said, he Said

Revelations about a leading Palestinian rejectionist have sparked controversy across the world -- and in the offices of the Boston Globe and the New Republic

by Dan Kennedy

For a generation, Edward Said has been the intellectually respectable face of Palestinian rejectionism. An accomplished scholar, writer, and musician, the oft-quoted Said has been outspoken in his belief that Israel should be wiped off the map and replaced with a secular Palestinian state. So unyielding is Said that he quit the Palestine National Council to protest the Oslo peace agreement that PLO leader Yasir Arafat had reached with the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Thus it was no small thing when an American-Israeli researcher with Boston roots, Justus Reid Weiner, leveled a devastating charge at Said: that he had fabricated his background as a Palestinian refugee who, along with his family, had been driven from Jerusalem in Israel's 1947-'48 war of independence. Writing in the September issue of Commentary, a neoconservative magazine published by the American Jewish Committee, Weiner contends that Said grew up in luxury in Cairo; that Said and his immediate family were only occasional visitors to Jerusalem; and, most important (and most open to challenge), that these facts directly contradict Said's carefully constructed self-mythology.

"There can be no doubt that a great deal of the moral authority accruing to Edward Said derives as much from his personal as from his intellectual credentials," Weiner writes.

Weiner's 6500-word article, titled " `My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," created a minor sensation. A New York Post editorial called Said "the Palestinian Tawana Brawley." (The Post's editorial-page editor, John Podhoretz, is the son of retired Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz.) The article has been the subject of charges and countercharges in the Israeli and London media. New York magazine this week published a psychological profile of Said. And literary circles are buzzing over why the New Republic, where Weiner first shopped his piece, ultimately didn't publish it.

The piece caused a stir in the Boston Globe newsroom as well. Op-ed-page columnist Jeff Jacoby heartily endorsed Weiner's article, writing, "Only one thing is wrong with Said's deeply affecting autobiography. He made most of it up." Jacoby's piece was followed by an op-ed from Arab-American activist Hussein Ibish, who attacked Weiner (and, by extension, Jacoby) and managed to mangle the facts while doing so. Several weeks after that, the Globe ran a long, laudatory profile of Said by staff writer Mark Feeney that was dismissive of Weiner's case. On the surface, it would appear that the Globe had made a concerted attempt to undermine Jacoby, although it seems more likely that he was just a victim of the paper's bad judgment and unfortunate timing. (Disclosure/confession: I was in the midst of writing a profile of Nation publisher Victor Navasky -- who employs Said as a music critic -- when Jacoby's column appeared. That led me to include a thoughtless reference to the "loathsome" Said's having been "exposed"; see "Man of the Left," News and Features, September 3. As we shall see, Weiner, and thus Jacoby, got it essentially right, but ambiguities remain.)

Said (pronounced "sah-EED"), a 63-year-old English professor at Columbia University and the president of the Modern Language Association, has long been a favorite among trendy, anti-Israel lefties; "radical chic" is the dated phrase that leaps to mind. So the invective directed at Weiner by the likes of Nation columnists Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn was unsurprising. "The wretched Weiner," Cockburn calls him on the Web site of CounterPunch, the magazine he co-edits. "A half-baked article," writes Hitchens in the Nation and in Salon. Said himself, in an essay for the London-based newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly titled "Defamation, Zionist-Style," writes: "It is part of the Palestinian fate always to be required to prove one's existence and history!"

But though Said excoriates Weiner for the minor error of confusing the relationships among Said's extended family, he actually confirms in overwhelming detail the vast majority of Weiner's meticulously documented findings. In his just-released memoir, Out of Place (Knopf), Said writes that he did, indeed, grow up in Cairo, the son of Palestinian parents. (The section of Said's autobiography most relevant to the question of where he grew up was excerpted recently in the New York Review of Books.) Said's father emigrated to the United States and fought for the US in World War I before finally returning to colonial Egypt, where he settled. And though Said and his immediate family were occasional visitors to his aunt and uncle's home in Jerusalem, Said asserts that they were not directly affected by the 1947-'48 war.

"Contrary to what has been alleged in an article in Commentary . . . I speak, in this article and in my forthcoming memoir, only of my family as being refugees, not myself," Said writes in a footnote to the New York Review excerpt.

Yet there is considerable evidence -- reams of it, actually -- that Said has for many years allowed his audience to think he was, in fact, a refugee. Said, through a spokesperson, declined to speak to the Phoenix. "He thinks the whole controversy is a waste of his time, and he's tired of having to demonstrate that he lived where he lived," the spokesperson said. Nevertheless, Said's contradictory utterances over the years speak for themselves.

The controversy is likely to continue for some time. Commentary is planning to publish Weiner's original 23,000-word manuscript, complete with supporting documents, on its Web site, which Weiner hopes will silence at least some of his critics. And several journalists are said to be planning follow-up stories. For now, here is the state of the debate.

* Did Said ever claim to be a Palestinian refugee? Weiner cites example after example, in Said's own writings and in interviews he's given to publications such as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Current Biography, in which Said left the clear impression that he was born in Jerusalem in 1935 (true), grew up in Palestine (mostly false), and was forced to emigrate to Cairo amid the violence of 1947-'48 (definitely false). I consulted some of the sources that Weiner cites and found that he quoted them accurately and in context.

"I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt," Said wrote in the London Review of Books on May 7, 1998. Here's what Said wrote in After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986): "Born in Jerusalem in late 1935, I left mandatory Palestine permanently at the end of 1947." And here's an excerpt from a piece he wrote for Harper's in December 1992: "I was born, in November 1935, in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo."

It's unclear whether any of these statements is technically untrue. But Weiner's research and Said's own memoir make it eminently clear that he spent the vast majority of his childhood in Cairo, with a few summers in Lebanon and a bit of time here and there in Jerusalem. So rather than call Said a liar, let's call him Clintonesque: on many occasions over the past several decades, Said has been ambiguous about his past, allowing his audience to believe he was a Palestinian refugee when he was, in fact, no such thing. And he's done this even though he's occasionally been more candid -- such as in an article in House & Garden in April 1987 in which he talked about growing up in Cairo.

* Does Said's new memoir invalidate Weiner's claims? Given that Weiner's piece was published just as Out of Place was arriving in bookstores, Weiner's contention that Said is a fraud must be regarded skeptically. Said's memoir, after all, is the first time he's discussed his childhood in any detail, and it comports fully with Weiner's research. Said says he finished Out of Place last year, many months before Commentary published Weiner's piece -- and, given the long lead times inherent in the book-publishing business, he's surely telling the truth. Given those facts, how can Weiner credibly charge Said with falsifying his background? And if Said is changing his story, why is he doing so now?

There are several possible answers. Perhaps Said, who is slowly dying of leukemia, began thinking about his legacy and realized that the ambiguities he had encouraged over the years would not stand in a full-length autobiography. Perhaps he was aware of Weiner's project, which Weiner says took three years and involved some 80 interviews. And for sure, Said knew that if he didn't tell the truth, Weiner would not be the only enemy ready to pounce. In a column in the Jerusalem Post Magazine in January of this year, for instance, Moshe Kohn sneeringly laid out the contradictions in Said's "variegated biography." Weiner may have been the first to document those variations fully, but he clearly was not the first to notice them.

* Why Commentary? The short answer is, why not? Though small (circulation: 27,000), Commentary is well respected and influential, especially among the conservative elite. By appearing in Commentary, Weiner's piece obviously didn't have the impact it might have had if, say, it had displaced Elizabeth Taylor on the current cover of Tina Brown's Talk. But Weiner did ensure that it would be taken seriously in the academic and intellectual circles that care about such things. Commentary is so unquestioningly pro-Israel, however, that Weiner opened himself up to the criticism that he is merely an ideologue.

It's interesting to note that Weiner negotiated with the New Republic for several months before taking his ball and bat over to Commentary. With a circulation of about 100,000, TNR is nearly four times bigger than Commentary. And though TNR, too, is staunchly pro-Israel, its readership is far more secular and ideologically eclectic. (Weiner was able to put a short version of his findings before the 1.8 million readers of the Wall Street Journal with an op-ed piece on August 26. But the Journal piece lacked the space for full documentation of Weiner's case, and so had little impact.) Weiner himself -- contacted at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where he is a scholar-in-residence -- declines to discuss his TNR-related dealings. "My message is that people should read the article," Weiner says. "The research stands on its own."

TNR chairman/editor-in-chief Martin Peretz says he has no doubts about the accuracy of Weiner's work. "We certainly didn't turn down the piece," he says. TNR and Weiner were operating on different timetables, however. "He wanted fast rather than another going-over," adds Peretz. "I envy Commentary, actually." But TNR editor Charles Lane, though he agrees with Peretz, concedes that he was put off by Weiner's refusal to read and take into account Said's memoir (then in galley form) and to interview Said. "It seemed to us to make plain common sense to have him to do that," Lane says.

Weiner responds that he wanted to deal with how Said had portrayed himself in the years leading up to his memoir, not with the memoir itself. As for not interviewing Said, Weiner says he requested an interview with Said's assistant fairly early in his research and never received a response. "It's a red herring," Weiner says. "You talk to people who will talk to you. You don't harass people, you don't bug people. What are you going to do, call him up and say, `You're a liar'? `You're a fraud'? There's no point in that. All I would have succeeded in doing was he would have activated his friends like Cockburn and Hitchens, and they would have done the job on me that they're trying to do now, before I even would have had the chance to present my evidence."

This is an easy call: Weiner's being ridiculous. He may well have been distressed that Said's book would lessen the impact of his own work, but those are insufficient grounds for not dealing with it. As for not making more of an effort to interview Said, that's just inexcusable.

* Fallout at the Boston Globe. Jeff Jacoby's column supporting Weiner, headlined PROFESSOR SAID'S UNTRUE STORIES, appeared on August 30. Two days later the Globe ran the guest column by Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, in Washington, charging Weiner with a "pathetic attempt to `debunk' Said's unquestionable Palestinianness." Yet Ibish's own commentary makes several inaccurate statements, claiming that Weiner had asserted that "as a child Said did not live in Jerusalem but lived only in Cairo and has hidden this fact, that his family did not own a house in Jerusalem, and he did not attend school there." In fact, Weiner made none of those assertions, contending only that Said had greatly exaggerated the amount of time he had spent in Jerusalem as a child.

Then, on September 14, the Globe published Mark Feeney's profile of Said, which was far more laudatory than not. It took up a good chunk of the Living/Arts front; in a sidebar on the Weiner controversy, Feeney wrote, "An examination of Said's writings indicates . . . that he has never concealed his background." As evidence, Feeney cited the 1987 House & Garden article -- and Said's just-published memoir.

The editors of the Globe should have handled things differently -- Ibish's op-ed in particular. Op-ed-page editor Marjorie Pritchard says she ran the Ibish piece not as a rebuke to Jacoby, as one might perceive it to be, but to "get the debate going. We had both sides, and within a couple of days of each other." (Her supervisor, editorial-page editor David Greenway, who was on vacation when Ibish's piece was accepted, says that as a general rule staff columnists are supposed to be rebutted in letters to the editor, not in guest op-eds.) As for Ibish's inaccuracies, Pritchard says those were corrected in a letter to the editor from Andrea Levin, executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. But Pritchard is wrong. Levin's letter, published on September 13, was highly critical of Ibish, but it said nothing about his mischaracterizations of Weiner's work. The Globe should run a correction.

Feeney says he first started trying to arrange an interview with Said in June, when he learned that the memoir would be coming out. As it turned out, Feeney actually interviewed Said two days after Jacoby's column appeared. Feeney says this is a coincidence. Regarding Weiner's case against Said, Feeney responds: "There's an immense gray area here. He [Said] didn't perjure himself. He may have been misleading. But I don't think you can nail him for inferences that others draw." He does criticize Said for trying to "paint Weiner with an ideological brush" rather than responding in a more substantive manner.

Jacoby's own take on Said is actually more nuanced and thoughtful than what he wrote on August 30. "I think that the guy has said a lot about his own past during the course of these many years," Jacoby says. "On occasion he's said things about his childhood that were true. But on plenty of occasions he has fitted himself into a story that isn't true in order to make a larger point, or in order to gather an aura around himself of moral authority."

It's easy to dislike Edward Said. A bombastic polemicist who once referred to the Israeli government as the "Reich," he is a remarkably eloquent enemy of peace in the Middle East -- never mind that he piously claims to favor a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Presumably the Knesset could vote peacefully for the state of Israel to go out of existence.)

That aside, Out of Place actually lends more power, not less, to Said's stature as a spokesman for Palestinians. As detail piles upon detail, it becomes clear that Said's very rootlessness -- his childhood in Cairo, his father's American background, the summers in Lebanon, the visits to Jerusalem -- adds up to a definition of what it means to be Palestinian, or at least to have been Palestinian in the first part of this century. His ambiguities -- or whatever you want to call them -- were unnecessary all along.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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