Commentary vs. Edward W. Said
Weiner argues that over the years Said has promulgated a distorted "standard version" of his life story, at the heart of which is his family's expulsion from Palestine in 1948. The title of Weiner's article, "My Beautiful Old House," refers to the house at 10 Brenner St., in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbieh, now owned by a Christian Zionist organization. The house figures prominently in a BBC documentary about Said (broadcast last summer on PBS as In Search of Palestine). In one emotional scene, Said stands outside and gestures toward the window of the room in which he was born. Though Weiner does not dispute that Said was born there, he presents a mountain of evidence to show that Said's nuclear family could not have resided at 10 Brenner St. for very long in the years of Said's childhood and that the house belonged to Said's sister Nabiha and her husband, Boulos Said, who was also a cousin. (Weiner, by the way, gets these relationships wrong.)
All this is supported by Out of Place, and in any case it seems odd to marshal this kind of detailed factual evidence against what are, at bottom, emotional claims. What we think of as home is not a matter of deeds and titles--as Weiner, who immigrated to Israel in 1981 from the United States, must surely know. And Weiner hardly challenges what is, in the end, at the core of both the "standard" version and the supposedly "revised" version of Said's life: that Said was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family, that all his extended clan fled (along with three-quarters of a million other Palestinians) with the establishment of the state of Israel, and that as a result of these experiences--but more as a result of the Arab defeat in the 1967 war--Said made his identity as a Palestinian the center of his political life. This seems to be what bothers Weiner most, and it is surely what led Commentary to publish--and publicize--his work.
In any case, Slate readers should decide for themselves. Weiner's article can be found at Commentary's Web site. The elaborate documentation (more than 120 footnotes, with three appendixes) was added several weeks after the piece was first posted, and some of the footnotes appear to have been written in response to criticisms made in the wake of the article's appearance.
The story was quickly picked up by London's Daily Telegraph, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and the Forward, a Jewish newspaper published in New York, which ran a front-page story summarizing Weiner's views. The editorial page of the New York Post gleefully seized on the opportunity to trash yet another icon of the academic left (and a critic of Israel), and the Zionist Organization of America demanded that Said be removed as president of the MLA.
Said has addressed Weiner's charges in interviews given to Publishers Weekly and New York magazine, in both of which he also talked about his new memoir, his career, and the leukemia he has been battling since 1991. In a counterblast published in Al-Hayat and the CounterPunch Web site, Said charges that Weiner's piece shows "the lengths to which the Israeli right wing ... will go to further its claims on all of Palestine against those of the country's native Palestinian inhabitants who were dispossessed as an entire nation in 1948." He also points out a number of omissions and errors of fact, as does Christopher Hitchens, who has to date devoted two of his Nation columns to attacking Weiner. In his Oct. 4 column, Hitchens calls Weiner "a hack and a hireling, lacking in the skill to do serious work." Joining the counteroffensive is Alexander Cockburn, like Hitchens a longtime friend of Said's--though at least since last spring no friend of Hitchens'. (I must say it's rather heartening to see the graying enfants terribles of expatriate left-wing British journalism on the same side again. Has Justus Reid Weiner joined together what Sidney Blumenthal tore asunder?) Cockburn, in the New York Press, accuses Weiner of anti-Semitism for casting Said as a "rootless cosmopolitan"; derides him as a stooge for Michael Milken, whose foundation gives money to the think tank in Jerusalem where Weiner works; and ridicules his academic credentials--declaring him, in effect, a Zionist nonentity.
Interviewed by Craig Offman in Salon, Weiner has defended himself and qualified some of his claims. But in the same article, Offman reveals that the New Republic, a magazine which has been hostile to Said in the past, and which has to date remained silent on the current brouhaha, rejected Weiner's piece when he refused to take account of Out of Place. Excerpts from the book itself--an almost entirely apolitical reconstruction of the emotional life of a sensitive, misunderstood child--have appeared in the New York Review of Books and Granta. Read them.
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