From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map - Essays

Zusatztext “These searing essays refract the reality of terrible years through a mind with extraordinary understanding! compassion! insight! and deep knowledge.” —Noam Chomsky “Probably the best-known intellectual in the world. . . . [In these essays] Said writes copiously and urgently about the alarming state of affairs in the Middle East.” — The Nation “Said is a brilliant! complex man who confounds one’s expectations at every turn.” — Rocky Mountain News Informationen zum Autor Edward W. Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism (both available in paperback from Vintage Books), and his essays and reviews appeared in newspapers and periodicals throughout the world. Said died in September 2003. Klappentext In his final book, completed just before his death, Edward W. Said offers impassioned pleas for the beleaguered Palestinian cause from one of its most eloquent spokesmen. These essays, which originally appeared in Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly , London's Al-Hayat , and the London Review of Books , take us from the Oslo Accords through the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, and present information and perspectives too rarely visible in America.Said is unyielding in his call for truth and justice. He insists on truth about Israel's role as occupier and its treatment of the Palestinians. He pleads for new avenues of communication between progressive elements in Israel and Palestine. And he is equally forceful in his condemnation of Arab failures and the need for real leadership in the Arab world. Leseprobe Chapter One Palestinians Under Siege Since September 29, 2000, the day after Ariel Sharon, guarded by about a thousand Israeli police and/or soldiers, visited Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) in a gesture designed explicitly to assert his right as an Israeli to visit the Muslim holy place, a conflagration has erupted that continues as I write in mid-November. Sharon himself is unrepentant, blaming the Palestinian Authority for "deliberate incitement" against Israel "as a strong democracy" whose "Jewish and democratic character" the Palestinians wish to change. He says that he went there "to inspect and ascertain that freedom of worship and free access to the Temple Mount is granted to everyone," although he mentions neither the huge swarm of guards he took with him nor that the area was sealed off before, during, and after his visit, which scarcely assures freedom of access (Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2000). He also neglects to say that on the twenty-ninth the Israeli army shot eight Palestinians dead, or that Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in June 1967 and that it is therefore under military occupation, which according to international law its natives are entitled to resist by any means possible: it was this truth that triggered the new intifada. Besides, the Temple Mount is supposed by archaeologists to lie beneath two of the oldest and greatest Muslim shrines in the world going back a millennium and a half, a convergence of religious topoi that it would take more than a heavy-booted visit by a notoriously brutal and right-wing Israeli general with Palestinian blood on his hands from, among other massacres that began during the 1950s, Sabra, Shatila, Qibya, and Gaza, to sort out. The Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees says that as of November 7, 170 people have been killed, 6,000 wounded: this does not include 14 Israeli deaths (8 of them soldiers) and a slightly larger number of wounded. (A few days later the figure for the dead climbed to over 200.) The earlier figures come from the Israeli organization B'tselem. The Palestinian deaths include at least 22 boys under the age of fifteen and, says B...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Edward W Said, Edward W. Said
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 09.08.2005
• EAN: 9781400076710
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7671-0
• Pagine: 319
• Dimensioni: 133 mm x 204 mm x 23 mm
• Categorie: Saggistica; Scienze umane, arte, musica > Storia > Storia contemporanea (dal 1945 al 1989)