In the 15 months since October 7th, 2023, I have been turning over Edward Said’s assertion that Palestinians are the “victims of the victims.” The renowned literary theorist pithily summarized this “complex irony” in the 1992 edition of his landmark book The Question of Palestine. He wrote that “the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people.” As he told the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1986, “Any kind of criticism of Israel is treated as an umbrella for anti-semitism . . . Particularly in the United States, if you say anything at all, as an Arab from a Moslem culture, you are seen to be joining classical European or Western anti-semitism.” Still, Said had distinguished himself as one of the first intellectuals to traverse the profound chasm that marked out antagonistic discourses of historical trauma shaped by the Nakba and the Holocaust respectively; he persisted in his conviction that a compassionate understanding of the modern Jewish experience of antisemitic persecution in Europe was bound up with an affirmative recognition of Palestinian history and national rights. For Said, empathizing with “the disastrous problem of anti-Semitism,” as he called it in The Question of Palestine (originally published in 1979), offered some way out of the morass of competing victimhood. This intertwining of empathy reflected his conviction that the fate and futures of Palestinians and Israelis were inevitably tied together by the question of Palestine…..more
