Edward Said throwing rocks at the IDF.
Edward Said throwing rocks at the IDF.
JERUSALEM ** The silver-haired man in the smock, cap and stylish sunglasses seems a little too old, a little too portly, a little too distinguished to be hurling stones in the direction of Israeli soldiers.
But there he is, rearing back, right arm cocked, left arm flailing, striding into his toss, projectile poised for flight.
Could it be that Edward Said--celebrated intellectual, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and among the West's most prominent Arab voices--has joined the ranks of Palestinian stone-throwers?
Apparently so.
A photograph taken last week by a French news agency captured Said in mid-toss, firing a rock toward an Israeli position at Lebanon's border with the Jewish state. Since Israel's withdrawal of troops from southern Lebanon in May, the border has become a magnet for Arab tourists who come to gawk, yell insults and throw stones at the Israeli soldiers across the new border fence.
Said, a Palestinian whose wife is Lebanese, was visiting the liberated border area last week on his first trip there since 1982, the year Israel launched its full-scale invasion.
There were people with cameras all over, but Said had no idea that news photographers were among them, he said in a telephone interview the other day from Italy, where he was traveling after leaving Lebanon.
"I'm totally astonished... and somewhat disconcerted by this," he said. "It was a moment of elation, and the fact that there were no Israeli troops there anymore."
Said, 64, is the author of 18 books of criticism, essays, journalism and scholarly musings, as well as a recently published memoir, "Out of Place." His writings appear regularly in Le Monde Diplomatique, the Nation, the London Review of Books and the London Arabic daily Al-Hayat.
Said said he had spent last Tuesday morning touring southern Lebanon, including the notorious El-Khiam prison, where Lebanese sympathizers of Hezbollah, the Islamic guerrilla force that forced Israel's withdrawal, were confined and tortured during the war. After that he was taken to the border village of Kfar Kila where, according to an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, he stood a short distance away from Israeli soldiers in a two-story watchtower decked out with blue-and-white Israeli flags. With his family by his side, the newspaper said, Said heaved a rock over the border toward the soldiers. It struck a barbed-wire barrier.
In a statement released by Columbia University, Said acknowledged the incident, which he called "a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation has ended."
In a seeming effort to justify his mood at the time, or explain it, he called attention to the brutality and inhumane conditions that prevailed at El-Khiam prison, where he said he found "discarded objects with Israeli markings on them." Before the Israeli withdrawal, the prison was run by Israel's proxy Lebanese allies, the South Lebanon Army.
At the border, Said said in the statement, he was swept up in the moment:
"There were many people there of course... all of them, young and old, elated by the absence of Israeli troops. Many threw stones to see whether in this disputed area they could reach the barbed wire. For a moment I joined in: The spirit of the place infected everyone with the same impulse....
"I had no idea that media people were there, or that I was the object of attention. One stone tossed into an empty place scarcely warrants a second thought. Much is now made of an incident that is basically trivial, as if that could ever outweigh the work I have done over 35 years on behalf of justice and peace, or that could even be compared in the same breath with the enormous ravages and suffering caused by decades of military occupation and dispossession."
Trivial or not, Said's stone throw traveled farther than the Israeli-Lebanese border fence.
The photo, snapped by a photographer from Agence France-Presse, ran last Wednesday in newspapers and Web sites throughout the Middle East. In Israel, the best-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth devoted half a page to it. On the Web site of the Jordan Times, the photo ran above a caption that read, "SAID VS. ISRAEL."
Some Israelis pounced on Said's stone-throwing as an expression of hatred, not justice and peace. Not surprisingly, they included right-wingers who have crossed swords with Said in the past.
Among these was Justus Reid Weiner, an Israeli scholar who inspired an outbreak of tendentious rhetorical cross-fire earlier this year with an article in Commentary magazine. The 17,000-word article, adorned with 141 footnotes, suggested that Said had exaggerated the extent of his youth spent physically in Palestine.
Critics dismissed Weiner's article as the work of an ideologue bent on discrediting Said. Undeterred, Weiner seized on Said's stone toss as another opportunity to attack his target.
"He often speaks in terms of reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis," Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said in an interview. "How could this possibly benefit reconciliation? What if the stone he threw hit someone on the other side?"
As it turned out, Said's stone hit no one. Despite the account in the Lebanese newspaper, Said insists he saw no Israeli soldiers in the vicinity. But Weiner was insistent.
"I don't think it should be glossed over," he said. "You sometimes capture the essence of what a person stands for in a momentary gesture they may not have thought out in advance."
On the telephone, Said sounded uncomfortable when asked what meaning could be gleaned from his gesture.
"It's not hatred for Israel," he said. "It was an anti-occupation gesture. I have many Israeli friends. I've lectured in Israel and I continue to have contacts there. It's certainly very much against military occupation of any kind, whether by Israel of Arab countries, Iraq of Kuwait or whatever. I've opposed occupation of any kind."