Hisham Matar's New Introduction to Edward Said's "Out Of Place"

As I write this, Gaza continues to be under attack. Over the past two years, Israel has used each day to systematically bomb, starve and deny the more than two million Palestinians who live in the Strip the basic requirements for life. Libraries have been burned, historical buildings demolished, farms scorched, livestock wiped out. The Israeli state has murdered children, assassinating them with sniper bullets to the head and chest. It has destroyed nearly all schools and universities, and it has targeted hospitals and healthcare facilities, murdering nurses and doctors, or abducting them to be tortured and imprisoned. More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, plus the wars in Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined. At the time of writing, a tentative ceasefire has been agreed, brokered by Israel’s main sponsor, the United States of America, which, in this tragic saga, is the party that behaves like a deity, deciding the fates of all involved. It speaks of the future of Gaza while hardly mentioning Palestinians.

This is both extraordinary and not new. Although the scale of Israel’s crimes since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 is extreme, it is part of an old pattern. For decades now, Israel has condemned Gaza to a state of siege, punctuated by periodic air bombardment campaigns every few years and various methods of daily harassment and policies of curtailment. All this has been possible in large part due to the fictions perpetuated by Israel and its allies: that it is a reasonable, law-abiding, democratic and modern state surrounded by uncivilized, dangerous and hateful barbarians. Israel’s ability to conduct the mass murder of Palestinians on such an unprecedented scale is, in part at least, the harvest of those lies. Not in all of the seventy-seven years since the creation of Israel has the Zionist narrative, and the cultural and political arsenal that it requires, been at once more cynically employed and yet more nakedly exposed for what it is: propaganda used to justify the subjugation of a people and the theft of their land and resources.

Edward Said, a Palestinian by birth, culture and upbringing, who spent the overwhelming majority of his life in the United States, was particularly sensitive to this campaign of erasure. He grappled with it as a child. At one point in this memoir he recounts how in 1947, just as he was about to turn twelve, he heard his older cousins from Jerusalem refer to the Balfour Declaration as “the blackest day in our history”. He could not understand what they meant, precisely. In exile, knowledge of the Israeli occupation came in obliquely, through the “sadness and destitution in the faces and lives of people I had formerly known as ordinary middle-class people in Palestine”. Eventually, “all of us seemed to have given up on Palestine as a place, never to be returned to, barely mentioned, missed silently and pathetically”.

His mother never spoke about what happened. And the boy “had no available vocabulary for the question”. All he got from his father by way of an explanation was, “We lost everything…” And when young Edward expressed his confusion, for clearly the family had not lost everything and was living a prosperous and privileged life in exile, the father simply offered one word: “Palestine.”

“It seems inexplicable to me now,” Said writes, “that having dominated our lives for generations, the problem of Palestine and its tragic loss, which affected virtually everyone we knew… should have been so relatively repressed, undiscussed, or even remarked on by my parents.”