The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
On Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Year First published in the National Catholic Reporter, fall 1997 Some years back, the political critics Noam Chomsky and…
Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss and dispossession by the very people who have taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus, ironically, we are the victims of…
I was foolish to think I could get anything done in that café Someone invariably would come up to me and want to talk Like that Thursday, M marched right up to my table And…
Palestinians in short do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative images. —Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map:…
1. In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within American culture (with a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind it) without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. …
The ideological position common to nearly everyone in the system is that America is best, its ideals perfect, its history spotless, its actions and society at the highest levels of human achievement and greatness. To…
From an internet cafe Somewhere on the outskirts of Ramallah 80 degrees and sunny outside Dear Layla So in your last email (Which I’ve read four times as of this morning) You wanted to know…
Bach’s music was for [Glenn] Gould an archetype for the emergence of a rational system whose intrinsic power was that it was, as it were, crafted resolutely against the negation and disorder that surround us…
Last week in our second meeting of Arab Writers in Translation Reading Circle, Amal, Fatima, Becca, Hala, Sharifa, and I discussed Ghassan Kanfani’s Men in the Sun, and Other Palestinian Stories. Sharifa provided this helpful…