Author: Justus Reid
Weiner
Publication: MEF Wire
Date: December 22, 2000
In September 1999, Commentary
magazine published an article by Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar-in-residence
with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which demonstrated that the
autobiography of Edward Said, a University Professor at Columbia University,
was fundamentally inaccurate. In a September 20, 2000 discussion
at the Middle East Forum in New York, Mr. Weiner spoke about repercussions
of his widely publicized exposé.
The Article
In my article, I showed
that contrary to his depiction, Said was in fact not exiled from Jerusalem
by the Haganah in December 1947. Nor was there any basis to his claim
that he "spent most of his formative years" in Jerusalem and that he "left
with [his] family for Cairo" by "the end of 1947." Similarly, Said's assertion
that he lost his "beautiful old house" in the Talbieh neighborhood was
revealed to be false. Actually, this avatar of the Palestinian refugees
was the scion of a wealthy Cairene family. His father was an American
citizen who moved to Cairo from Jerusalem a decade before Edward was born.
Living in Cairo until his departure to attend prep school in America in
1951, Edward Said resided with his family in luxurious apartment buildings
in the exclusive Zamalek neighborhood where he was attended by maids and
a butler. He played with childhood friends in the manicured private
gardens of the Aquarium Grotto and attended private English and American
schools. He was driven around in his father's large black American
cars by a chauffeur and enjoyed the facilities at the exclusive Gezira
Sporting Club as the son of one of its only Arab members.
In 1952, a revolutionary
mob burned Said's father's flagship store (and a branch) to the ground,
and within a decade the nationalization program instituted by Egyptian
president Nasser ultimately forced Said's father out of the country.
Thus, the truly devastating financial losses suffered by Said's father
were in no way connected to Israel, the country from which Edward Said
demands reparations.
My Interest in Edward
Said
Early on in the Oslo
peace process, I was researching an article dealing with those who opposed
it, among whom Edward Said was an intellectual leader. In the course
of my inquiry, I became fascinated with the way Said employed his childhood
travails to advance his political argument, especially as I had lived in
the Talbieh neighborhood of Jerusalem, a two-minute walk from the building
Said had described as "my beautiful old house." Further, my former office
overlooked the playground of Saint George's School in eastern Jerusalem,
the very school Said said he attended before being driven out by Haganah
forces in 1947.
Inquiring about Said's
Past
To better understand
Said's background, I began to conduct on-site research into his childhood.
First, I went to St. George's School to inquire about Said's days
as a pupil there. The headmaster showed me the pre-1948 student enrollment
records, and I spent hours going through three leather-bound enrollment
ledgers, page by page. To my astonishment, I found no mention of
Edward Said. A second time page-by-page through the same records,
and I found no evidence he was ever enrolled there.
This got me hooked.
I located and interviewed six former residents of the "beautiful old house,"
none of whom had any recollection of Edward Said or his parents ever having
lived there. Going through nine newspapers over a six-month period
(November 1947-May 1948) I found that Said's claim of being driven out
by a Haganah sound van in mid-December 1947 was without any support in
these contemporaneous records.
I then located scores
of who's who books, telephone directories, and business directories for
Jerusalem and Cairo during the relevant years, which enabled me to ascertain
that Edward Said and his parents had lived in Cairo and also where his
father's business was located. I consulted the Jerusalem registry
of deeds, sent Arabic-speaking researchers to interview one of Said's relatives,
researched the declassified public records of the British Mandatory government
in Palestine and the map and aerial photographs department at Hebrew University.
I located Said's birth and baptismal certificates. I interviewed
some eighty-five individuals. I discovered many interesting points:
that Said was in fact "born in Jerusalem," but only because his parents
feared hygienic conditions in Cairo hospitals after their previously born
son died of an infection within days of his delivery. Thus, Edward
Said's birth certificate bears no entry in the box marked "local address,"
but it does list a permanent address: "Cairo."
Several months of extensive
research made clear that there was something fundamentally wrong with the
picture Said presented of himself--that of a Palestinian exile/refugee
deserving of reparations from Israel. When I began discovering discrepancies
in Said's frequent autobiographic references, I telephoned his office at
Columbia University to request an interview, but Said did not return the
call.
Triggering a Media Controversy
The publication of my
exposé detonated "one of the nastiest rows of its kind to rend New
York's intelligentsia in years," according to the Observer of London.
More than 150 articles appeared about my research, from Finland to India.
A dichotomy emerged.
On the one side were
dedicated journalists who took the trouble to examine my evidence.
On the other side were pro-Said responses by him and his network of friends
(i.e., Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, and Alexander Cockburn); they
did not refute my evidence but attacked me and my work, often in similar
ways and even using the same words. But Said's supporters faced an
unenviable problem--a month after my article was published, Said's memoir
Out of Place arrived in the bookstores, confirming the essence of what
I had uncovered. Perhaps the 85 interviews I conducted alerted him
to the urgency of fixing the record about his Cairo childhood.
Repercussions of the
Exposé
Said's fraud continues
to be important a full year later because it raises larger questions than
simply the myth-making and selective memory of one person.
First, Said is a leading
intellectual light in left-wing and Palestinian circles. People who
never saw fit to scrape at Said's Teflon surface have now begun to question
his credibility. In just the last two months, for example, six major
articles appeared in the Columbia Spectator, the university newspaper,
dealing critically with Said's shenanigans. One article, "Said's
Shameful Summer: Rocks and Terrorists," noted Said's having met with Hizbullah
leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah the same day he was photographed heaving
a stone at the Israeli side of the Lebanon-Israel border. The Columbia
Spectator's criticism of Said included a staff editorial entitled "Said's
Affinity for Fiction."
Second, Said's Palestinian
supporters remain in complete denial. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee (ADC) and other groups have only hugged Said tighter after his
exposure. This suggests that such groups take a rather callous attitude
towards truth when it concerns matters close to their hearts.
Third, Palestinians and
the Israeli Left have urged Israelis to reevaluate their country's formative
experiences. Said has been touting Israeli post-Zionists, or New
Historians, and tries to make it seem as though they are all in full agreement
with him, which is not true. Why, I wonder, as Israelis give up their
historical myths in the interest of moving closer to the Palestinians,
do the latter clutch their myths ever tighter?
The Intellectual and
the Truth
Edward Said writes in
his book Representations of the Intellectual that the goal of the intellectual
is to speak truth to power. Although in some ways a postmodern figure,
in matters of truth--at least with regard to himself--Said insists on holding
to a traditional standard of truth. This is particularly ironic because
Said conspicuously does not live up to his own standard. Worse, even
when he does use actual facts, Said deploys them in a way intended to deceive
the reader.
Thus, he mentions a number
of occasions when he was present in Palestine between his birth in 1935
and 1947, then repeats them endlessly, suggesting to the listener or reader
that he was continuously in Palestine during this twelve-year period.
As it turned out, however, Said spent his entire childhood--except for
a few summers and other visits abroad--living in a prestigious neighborhood
in Cairo, surrounded by butlers, maids, and the like. This was his
life, and it had almost nothing to do with Palestine.
Summary account by Assaf
Moghadam, a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,
Tufts University. The "Middle East Forum Wires" are a series of summary
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