Palestinians
Looking for Palestine is Najla Said’s story of an uncomfortable childhood in Morningside Heights. Said’s father was academic superstar Edward Said, author of Orientalism, founder of post-colonial studies, member of the Palestinian National Council, pianist and musicologist, best friend of Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim.
I knew Edward Said very slightly. In 1963, as young instructors at Columbia, he and my husband shared an office. “He’s a Christian Arab, born in Cairo,” my husband told me.
Oh, that was all right then. I didn’t have to be afraid of my husband’s officemate.
Ten years later, when they met again at Harvard, Ed admitted that he hadn’t told the entire truth. He was actually born in Jerusalem, but he had wanted to avoid controversy and get on with his chosen profession of scholarship in English literature. But after the Six-Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he felt obligated to acknowledge his true origins.
Najla Said probably does not know this story about her father, since she never mentions it when she recalls her own efforts to conceal her origins. “It got to the point that whenever anyone would ask where my parents were from, what kind of name I had, or what my brother’s name was, I would reply with one stock answer, ‘I don’t know.’” Of course she knew very well; she had spent summers with her loving maternal family in Lebanon (even as bombs fell from time to time), and she spoke Arabic at home.
On a shortlist of neighborhoods in the United States where being “other” should not be a problem, Morningside Heights has star billing (along with Cambridge and Berkeley). Said describes the families in her nursery school, and in her Columbia-owned apartment house, their strange first names and the many languages they spoke. But being Arab (not to mention Palestinian) was far more fraught than any other identiy, even then carrying a whiff of terrorist connections -- just as Najla’s father had feared, a decade before she was born.
Unfortunately, the author buries this unusual and revealing childhood experience beneath layers of far more conventional early angst. Sent to the upper-crust East Side girls’ school, Chapin, she felt stigmatized by her West Side address and the second-rank bus that took her there. She was taller than her classmates and felt (though this was almost certainly not true) that she was the only one without blond hair. The reader feels sympathy for these early pains, but also impatience with digressions from the main theme.
“There was something about being a native upper West Side family that made us all seem partly Jewish.” Najla was greatly affected by a Holocaust memoir she read in fourth grade and felt a guilt to which she could not put a name. She grew up with close Jewish friends, sometimes terrified that they would find out she was an Arab. Later she tasted the true upper West Side complexity of Jewish friends who were Zionists with some sympathy for the Palestinian cause; as well as Jewish boyfriends who all made some comment about making peace in the Middle East when they kissed her.
Ultimately, as the first intifada gave way to the failed Oslo peace agreements, and later the second intifada, Edward Said’s position as a proponent of Paletinian national rights grew more and more controversial. And indeed, although he was the gentlest and most tolerant of men, there is no denying that his positions were in some cases more defiant than those of many Palestinian intellectuals. Nevertheless, he was always a supporter of the Jewish right to a national home in part of pre-1949 Palestine.
Another Columbia University academic was accused of denying that right. Edward Said had died of leukemia four years before the battle over Nadia Abu El-Haj’s Facts on the Ground. This controversy has been exhaustively described and analyzed by Jane Kramer in the New Yorker:
Nadia Abu El-Haj (raised on Long Island, daughter of a Palestinian father and a Protestant American mother) was an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College, applying for tenure. Her book (originally her dissertation) had been published six years earlier by the University of Chicago Press, without arousing any great controversy either in the United States or in Israel. It is a study of how archaeology has been used, both consciously and unconsciously, as a tool of nation-building or, as Abu El-Haj puts if, of “self-fashioning” in Israel. Of course, such analyses of the uses of archaeology (and history) have become standard in recent decades, and do not raise eyebrows when applied to the archaeology of any other country. And it may be questioned whether an author without an Arabic surname would have provoked the same outrage.
But provoke it she did. One Barnard alumna living in the West Bank started an inflammatory blog comparing Abu El-Haj to Ahmadinejad. Kramer, whose account of the whole extraordinary sequence of events is cool and gripping, notes that the legacy of Edward Said has made Columbia a special target of groups that monitor “pro-Muslim” views in the classroom. Moreover, a significant number of Columbia and Barnard students have attended small Jewish day schools where they may never have heard any dissenting views on Israel, and “they are often alarmed by the shock of free speech that is not their own.”
Abu El-Haj got her tenure. Her second book, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology, once again examining how science can be used for political ends, could have aroused more controversy -- but didn’t. Nevertheless, passions have not completely died down. A Barnard alumna of my acquaintance says she will never again contribute to her alma mater, “since they gave tenure to that woman who claims Jews have no right to live in Israel.” Abu El-Haj, of course, wrote nothing of the sort. Yet this highly intelligent woman believes unshakably that she did.
Najla Said’s book is diffuse and poorly written. Edward Said’s own autobiography, Out of Place, is graceful and eloquent but, like the man himself, somewhat reserved and mysterious. Nadia Abu El-Haj’s work is dense and scholarly, not an easy read for the nonprofessional. Yet taken together they tell a poignant story. The quest for understanding and acceptance that made Najla’s girlhood so uncomfortable would not be any easier today. To be a Palestinian in Morningside Heights, or anywhere else in this country, still means to face prejudice and demonization. In fact (as in so many other aspects of American life) the chasms have widened and the inability to hear one another deepened. It is a sorrow.
