The Edward Said Reader by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, Politics, Fiction, History, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780307428493
Amazon: 0307428494
Goodreads: 9913149
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2000-09-12T07:00:00+00:00

9

Permission to Narrate (1984)

[W]e’re here in Beirut as names for a different homeland, where meanings will find their words again in the midst of this sea and on the edge of this desert. For here, where we are, is the tent for wandering meanings and words gone astray and the orphaned fight, scattered and banished from the center.

—Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness August, Beirut, 1982

On the night of September 16, 1982, while Israeli flares lit a dark sky, Christian Phalangist militias massacred 2,062 Palestinians and Lebanese at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.1 The attack was a coordinated part of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that began on June 5, 1982, and involved an unrelenting siege of West Beirut that lasted for most of the summer. Without interruption, the Israeli military attacked Beirut from the air, from the sea, with cluster bombs, vacuum bombs, phosphorous rockets, mortars, all in an attempt to destroy the Beirut-based Palestinian leadership and the Palestinians themselves.2

In “Permission to Narrate,” Said examines why Israeli brutality was received with such incredible approbation in the U.S. media. “How is it,” Said asks, “that the premises on which Western support for Israel is based are still maintained even though the reality, the facts, cannot possibly bear these premises out?” In what was originally written as a London Review of Books essay on half a dozen books about the invasion,3 Said argues that the Palestinian narrative of dispossession has faced a concerted and systematic tendency to deny and suppress its authority. By labeling Palestinians terrorists, by branding critics of Israel anti-Semites, and above all by denying the historical and lived reality of a Palestinian homeland, the West, Said powerfully asserts, has revoked the permission to narrate the Palestinian experience.

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