TOWARD THE END of his life, Edward Said liked to call himself the last Jewish intellectual. It is an excellent and, I’m tempted to say, quintessentially Jewish joke. I have thought of it often since October 7, 2023, as I’ve watched the unfolding of the most intense and urgent propaganda war over the question of Palestine to take place in my lifetime, commensurate with the scale of the terrorist attack that took place on that day and that of the genocidal slaughter in Gaza that has followed during the subsequent nine hundred.
According to his biographer, Timothy Brennan, what Said meant by it is this: For almost two millennia Jews were the paradigm of the stateless, diasporic people. As such, they were in a special position to perceive the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the societies in which they lived, to be skeptical of official justifications for unequal distributions of power and resources, to articulate their critiques of them in universalist terms, and to extend solidarity to other persons and peoples based on their shared experience of exile and persecution, from the Jewish-Roman Wars to the Holocaust. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this social position helped produce the intellectual flowering in Europe and North America that Enzo Traverso has called “Jewish modernity,” which included a number of philosophers and literary critics who would influence Said. Following the establishment of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland, however, exile, and the perspective that often goes along with it, was forcibly transferred to the 750,000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias between 1947 and 1949, among them Said’s family, who fled Jerusalem for Cairo.
The 1967 War—in which Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula—saw opinion among the Jewish diaspora swing overwhelmingly in favor of the occupying power; in the case of the largely Jewish New York intellectuals, with whom Said was then associated, it often occasioned a drift toward neoconservatism as well. For the next thirty-six years, until his death on September 30, 2003, Said was a tireless and, at first, lonely advocate in the United States for Palestinian rights and self-determination. Aside from “the workers should seize the means of production,” it is difficult to think of a less popular position. “Ironclad” support for Israel, as the cliché has it, was shared by Democratic and Republican politicians in all branches of federal, state, and local government; by progressive Jews in coastal cities and Christian fundamentalists in the heartland; by the national security state and Hollywood; by the Federalist Society and the Anti-Defamation League; by the news media and significant parts of the professoriat. With assists from AIPAC and the International Media Branch of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, this extraordinary degree of elite consensus translated into an extraordinary degree of popular consensus, which, in turn, was maintained with deliberate distortions of both the historical and contemporary record that would have impressed Big Brother. Said called criticism of Israel “America’s last taboo.”
In such an atmosphere, it was not only difficult to get a hearing for a factual account of Israel’s state-formation or its decades-long occupation, it could be dangerous to try. Throughout his career, Said was smeared as an “anti-Semite” and a “terrorist.” The details of his personal biography were called into question. He regularly received death threats, and was monitored by the FBI and groups like Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch. His colleagues at Columbia tried to get him fired. Pro-Israel donors to The Nation complained to his editors about his bylines. Attempts were made to cancel and disrupt his speaking engagements. Aside from that of the president of the university, Said’s office at Columbia, which was broken into and firebombed, was the only one with bulletproof windows and a security button. It’s a good reminder that Zionism was an earlier crucible of deplatforming and cancel culture than wokeness, and was practiced by some of the same cynics who would go on to make media careers out of denouncing the “campus left” for its supposed hostility to free speech. Said never tired of observing how curious it was that the “politically correct” label always seemed to be stuck on those who objected to being called racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs, but never on those who complained, say, about having to hear a system in which people were accorded different rights to political participation, fair trials, property ownership, and travel on the basis of their ethnicity called “apartheid.”
All that has changed, changed utterly. According to a recent Gallup poll, support for Palestine in the United States is at a historic high; a University of Maryland poll conducted last September found that for the first time Americans are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. Most of this change has taken place on the American center-left, but skepticism toward Israel has also sparked an ideological civil war on the far right. Axios has reported that the DNC’s election autopsy is currently being suppressed because it concluded that the Biden administration’s financial and diplomatic backing of the genocide in Gaza was a major factor in the party’s defeat in 2024. Meanwhile, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s principled stance on the issue was one of the reasons he was elected the first Muslim mayor of New York City in 2025. The ideologemes of Israeli hasbara—“a land without a people for a people without a land,” “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “the most moral army in the world,” “there is no partner for peace,” “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”—no longer compel the same measure of unthinking belief that they once did.
In part, this is due to the savagery of the Israeli bombing campaign on hospitals, schools, refugee camps, newsrooms, and other civilian infrastructure in Gaza, which has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, many of them children, a figure that does not include the thousands who have starved to death because of Israel’s blockade, or the civilians who have been killed in concurrent Israeli operations in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran. In part, it is because of the heavy-handed responses of both the Biden and Trump administrations to global and domestic dissent, which has included blocking UN resolutions, sanctioning members of the UN and the International Criminal Court, introducing unconstitutional resolutions on anti-Semitism, withdrawing federal funds from universities and putting the Middle Eastern studies department at Columbia under state receivership, allowing pro-Israel moguls to take over media platforms where people could see what was happening in Gaza, and deploying riot police and federal agents to brutalize, disappear, or deport protesters. But most of all, it is due to work done by journalists, poets, novelists, comedians, filmmakers, and historians in Palestine and the diaspora, and their allies, all of whom have risked their safety and livelihoods, and hundreds of whom have lost their lives, to press the Palestinian case with the intelligence, wit, skepticism, moral clarity, and physical courage that over thirty years ago Said argued were the hallmarks of genuine intellectuals. Given the horrific scale of destruction and suffering in Gaza, it is scant consolation, but they have definitively won the argument.
SHORTLY AFTER FINISHING his doctoral dissertation on Joseph Conrad in 1966, Said planned two major books he would never complete. The first was a study of Jonathan Swift; the second was a study of intellectuals. Two chapters on Swift would find their way into The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), but the figure of the intellectual would function as a leitmotif in nearly everything he would go on to write, from his paradigm-setting bestseller Orientalism (1978) and its sequel Culture and Imperialism (1993), to Covering Islam (1981) and several of the essays collected in Reflections on Exile (2000). His most sustained treatment of the topic would appear in a somewhat unusual venue: “Representations of the Intellectual,” the six Reith Lectures he gave for the BBC in 1993.
Said later told a friend that “it was crazy to accept” the BBC’s invitation to participate in its prestigious annual lecture series, inaugurated by Bertrand Russell in 1948, and not just because he only had a little over a month to prepare. It was a tumultuous period in Said’s life, starting with his chronic lymphocytic leukemia diagnosis in 1991. Along with teaching at Columbia, filing essays for the London Review of Books, and overseeing the publication of his collection The Politics of Dispossession, he was putting the finishing touches on Culture and Imperialism and writing the first pages of his childhood memoir Out of Place. It was also the period of Operation Desert Storm and the Madrid Conference. Despite his unquestionable talents as a global advocate for the Palestinian cause, Said found himself increasingly marginalized at the Palestinian National Council, the legislative branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, on which he had served as an independent member aligned with the left-wing Democratic Front since 1977. Around the same time the lectures were being broadcast in London, Yasser Arafat was conducting meetings in Oslo, on the verge of making one of the worst diplomatic blunders in recent history. When the terms of the Oslo Accords were revealed to the public in September 1993, Said did not hold his tongue. He said that they represented nothing less than “the end of the peace process” and compared the Palestinian Authority that had been created by the agreement to Vichy.
Published in book form a year later, Representations of the Intellectual has now been rereleased by Fitzcarraldo, with a new foreword by the British-Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad. Representations is an excellent introduction to the rest of Said’s work, especially for those who know it only through the syllabus staple Orientalism, where he is at his most polemical, or only by reputation, which has always been subject to bad-faith distortions, caricatures, and simplification. Those who think of Said as the American representative of French theory may be surprised to discover that his prose in Representations is impeccably clear and free from specialist jargon, the constraints of the radio format requiring him to be “precise, accessible, and as economical as possible.” Others, who are aware that one of his important accomplishments was to help introduce political context—particularly the imperial context—into the study of nineteenth-century European literature then dominated by apolitical, formalist methods, may be surprised to hear him say that although his readings are “spurred by commitments that go beyond his professional career,” he never introduces these “in the classroom.” Yet others, who associate postcolonial studies, the discipline he helped found, with cultural relativism, may be surprised to find him arguing in Representations for a far more subtle position, in which attention to “the local, the subjective, the here and now” is balanced against the need to “uphold a single and universal standard” for judgments of human behavior, especially where these concerned “freedom and justice.”
Orientalism was instrumental in showing how the discourses of universality and objectivity were constructed by European intellectuals as justifications for their nations’ subjugation of Africa and Asia. But Said’s insistence on a single standard for freedom and justice makes perfect sense in a world in which there is a de facto “Palestine exception” to human rights. He was also, it should be mentioned, a critic of identity politics on these grounds in Representations and in essays like “The Politics of Knowledge.” As a good reader of Frantz Fanon, Said understood that identity politics was a kind of “defensive nationalism”—a reasonable if, in his view, counterproductive response to oppression. Whether in the inter-national context of imperial conquest, or in the intra-national context of structural racism and patriarchy, the blame for the existence of identity politics ought to fall on those who subordinate people on the basis of their identity—in other words, as with political correctness and cancel culture, with many of the same people who complain most loudly about it. Whether they were movements of national self-determination, racial justice, or gender equality and sexual freedom, the best strategy, as Said argued in Representations, was not to retreat into particularism, but to “universalize the crisis, to give greater scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others.”
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE INTELLECTUAL is a group portrait of “everyone who works in any field either connected with the production or distribution of knowledge.” It discusses their self-conceptions as members of a class, caste, cause, or guild; their social function and the social conditions of their formation; their relationship to states, professional institutions, national communities, and media apparatuses; their literary and performance styles; and their assumptions about truth. But the titular phrase has two other meanings. Representation, first of all, is simply what intellectuals do. Thinking, writing, speaking, debating, doubting, giving reasons, making judgments: these are all activities that involve representing ideas in language. Second, like a congressperson or a member of parliament, the question for everyone who engages in these activities is what constituency and whose concerns they represent with them. This choice of constituency, in turn, goes a long way toward defining what kind of intellectual they are.
On one side Said places the group Julien Benda called “clerics,” Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals,” and I will simply call the intelligentsia. These are the professional knowledge workers—analysts, managers, technicians, consultants, lobbyists, pundits, and academics—whose functions, size, and social status have expanded significantly in all advanced industrial nations following World War II. Employed by institutions like political parties, NGOs, think tanks, corporate firms, foundations, and universities, the audience the intelligentsia produces and distributes knowledge for is a relatively narrow one, consisting largely of colleagues and bosses, or the “special interests” that the institutions with which they are affiliated represent.
The ethos of the intelligentsia is “professionalism,” which Said describes as “thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior—not rocking the boat, not straying outside accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and ‘objective.’” The intelligentsia values expertise, a process of institutional socialization and credentialization that enables members to control who is allowed to speak on a given topic, and specialization, which involves the cultivation of highly technical methods and sociolects that are often used to distinguish members from nonmembers, and to forestall scrutiny and criticism of the former by the latter. The “accommodating” and “fawning” attitude shown by certain members of the intelligentsia toward the wealthy and the powerful is matched only by their condescension toward the general public, not to mention the vicious and often petty competitiveness frequently on display in their interactions with their fellow knowledge workers. For their services—which range from conferring “authority” to making public opinion more “conformist” to “spew[ing] propaganda against official enemies”—they stand to be handsomely rewarded with promotions, publishing contracts, prizes, fellowships, sabbatical leaves, and further access to the wealthy and powerful.
Public intellectuals, by contrast, are incorrigible amateurs, in the original sense of the word. These knowledge workers are “concerned members of society” whose activities are “fueled by care and affection” for ideas, and a “love for the larger picture” rather than by “profit or by narrow, selfish specialization.” Just as every public intellectual is necessarily embedded in a national and a linguistic community with its own traditions, Said acknowledges that independence from institutions like the university or the media, the two with which he was most closely affiliated, could only ever be relative; after all, the price of total independence is no audience. Whether they are an academic or a “bohemian essayist,” he thought that the intellectual’s autonomy would be best preserved by trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible in the “uncertain” terrain of the public sphere, whose venues in Said’s time were newspapers, magazines, lecture halls, and television studios, and have come in the past decade to include a broad range of new digitally networked textual and audiovisual media.
Public intellectuals are also resolutely “secular” as opposed to “religious” thinkers, a distinction Said introduced in The World, the Text, and the Critic. When dealing with social and political questions—the Late Latin saecularis means “worldly”—universal principles cannot be grounded in scientific objectivity or a totalizing philosophical system, to say nothing of the revealed truths of a sacred text, “which brook no disagreement.” Nor is there any a priori “rule” to determine when one should apply a universal principle to a situation, and when one should instead emphasize historical and cultural context. Secularism entails an awareness that judgments are always “fallible,” and making them is simply one of the “risks” of being a public intellectual. Others he mentions include selling out, co-optation, and choosing to be silent on political matters that might affect one’s career, but also “hardening into an institution” oneself and becoming an “automaton acting at the behest” of one’s own methodologies, positions, or alliances. Consequently, public intellectuals should always approach their tasks with “a space in the mind open for doubt,” a good dose of “alert, skeptical irony (preferably also self-irony),” and an “uncompromising” support for “freedom of opinion and expression.” For the genuine public intellectual, Said says, there ought to be “no solidarity before criticism.” This primary loyalty to thinking itself is surely one reason, as Raymond Williams observed, that the word “intellectual” connoted negatively in English until well into the twentieth century, and why the gadfly-like figure has been a source of irritation to people of all political stripes ever since Socrates squared off with the sophists.
Said was allergic to the notion of the critic-as-artist that was fashionable during the theory craze of the ’70s and ’80s. “I am not an artist!” he emphatically told Brennan. Yet he often describes the public intellectual in aesthetic terms. Public intellectuals have the sense of the “dramatic” and the “insurgent” in their “social performances,” whose effectiveness rests, in no small part, on their “wit,” “image,” and “mannerisms” as well as on their “sense of an important personal stake” in their arguments, their “will to say things,” and their “quite peculiar, even abrasive style of life.” (He may have been thinking of Sartre and to a lesser extent Adorno, but he could have just as easily been describing James Baldwin or Susan Sontag.) He goes on to quote C. Wright Mills, who sounds not unlike Viktor Shklovsky when he says that intellectuals and artists were two of “the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things” with the weapons of fresh modes of perception and expression. Many of the public intellectuals Said admired acquired these capacities through their experience of exile, but “even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one,” by adopting the “metaphorical condition” of exile as an outsider to the dominant structures of thought in and received opinions of one’s own society. Just as immigrants and expatriates cross the territorial borders set up by the nation-state, the public intellectual should cross the borders of thought set up by experts and specialists. Unlike the “professional supplicants” in the intelligentsia, Said says, their ethos can be summed up in the motto James Joyce borrows from Milton’s Satan to give to Stephen Dedalus: Non Serviam, I Will Not Serve.
ONE CRITICISM LEVELED at Said’s Reith Lectures was that he did not devote enough consideration to right-wing intellectuals. In his introduction to Representations, he protested that he had opened them with a discussion of Julien Benda, but Benda’s appearance, along with stray references to Wyndham Lewis, William F. Buckley Jr., and the “extreme right-wing” magazine The New Criterion, are the exceptions that prove the rule. Like his view that the university was a “quasi-utopian space” for reflection and research, Said could take for granted in the early ’90s that the public intellectual was primarily a left-wing figure. Regrettably, this is no longer the case. For some time now, on nearly every issue, with the notable and somewhat ironic exception of Palestine, the intellectual and even countercultural energy in the United States seems to be on the right. (This, I hope it goes without saying, is not a judgment on the quality of the thought generated by this energy, which often makes the right-wing thought of Said’s day seem profound by comparison.)
A brief survey of the current American intellectual landscape would include ivory-tower post-liberals and Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries who want to turn the republic into a corporation or a monarchy, downtown Manhattan edgelords, effective altruists and accelerationists, exitarians and transhumanists, Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists, tradwife and manosphere influencers, so-called race realists and gender-critical feminists, and all those classical-education ideologues whose fealty to the “Westernness” of the canon exceeds their familiarity with its contents. Their podcasts, videos, online manifestos, little magazines, and coverage in legacy media have allowed them to achieve impressive degrees of cultural diffusion, in many instances with the material support of the tech oligarchs whose businesses are increasingly integrated into the state and who have also come over the past decade to own large swaths of what in Said’s time could still be called the “public” sphere.
What ultimately distinguishes right-wing intellectuals (RWIs) from left-wing intellectuals (LWIs) are their respective attitudes toward distributions of political power, economic resources, and social status within and between nations. Simply put, RWIs believe these should be distributed according to a particular hierarchy, whereas LWIs believe that they should be distributed equally. If an RWI’s favored hierarchy is currently in place, their task is to legitimate its continued existence, and they are conservatives; if, however, their favored hierarchy has been displaced, their task is to argue for its restoration, and they are reactionaries. Reactionary intellectuals are, in other words, always an incipient intelligentsia, which just happens to find itself on the wrong side of elite circulation. One of their cleverest tactics has been to stoke popular resentment against the egalitarian projects of the left by conflating them with the bureaucratic procedures or the discursive shibboleths of the liberal intelligentsia, whose position in the cultural hierarchy they would like to reclaim. After all, universities and the media establishment—where, until recently, many members of the liberal intelligentsia have enjoyed a rather complacent hegemony, having deluded themselves into believing that their personal ascent up these hierarchies is tantamount to dismantling them—are institutions with large amounts of symbolic capital, but very little material power. Making such institutions their primary targets for critique has allowed RWIs to pass themselves off to the credulous as daring insurgents against the status quo, when they are in fact nothing more than servants of a more powerful sector of it. To give a concrete example, you will almost never hear an RWI who considers DEI initiatives in university admissions, corporate hiring, or federal appointments to be unacceptable affronts to real meritocracy criticize legacy preferences, nepotism, or cronyism.
Whatever their theological commitments, RWIs are almost always “religious” in Said’s sense. Generally, they attempt to argue that their preferred hierarchy is divinely ordained or natural. The purpose of this, according to Said, is to convince people that the hierarchy is “unchangeable, permanent, irreversible”—hence RWIs’ insistence on such things as the existence of God, racial distributions of IQ, biological sex difference, essential national character, and/or the propensity of human beings to resource competition, profit-maximization, and the formation of nuclear families. (Ironically, an extremely popular variant of this point—since power is what constitutes the subject, resistance to power always turns into a new regime of control—originates with the left-wing historian Michel Foucault, which is why Said, who was as responsible as anyone for introducing his work to American audiences, broke with him in the ’80s.) A more sophisticated version does attempt to justify the hierarchy by arguing that it makes people who are subordinate to it happy, or at least happier than they would be if equality prevailed. Historicizing—showing how hierarchies and ideologies have “come to be that way” as the “result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings”—is positively fatal to both lines of argument. If hierarchy made all people genuinely happy, no one would have wanted to change it in the first place; and if it was natural, they wouldn’t have been able to. Needless to say, when RWIs argue that contingent social norms are objective truths, they are also trying to place them beyond the reach of critique, challenge, and doubt. This is what makes so many of them, in the words of Said’s friend Fredric Jameson, “anti-intellectual intellectuals.”
WHO, THEN, FORMS THE CONSTITUENCY that the public intellectual represents? Said’s answer: “the under-represented” and “the unrepresented.” The public intellectual’s main task is to “speak truth to power” on behalf of “all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten and swept under the rug.” Said’s use of the famous slogan is interesting, and not merely because in Representations he criticizes sloganeering. The point of speaking truth to power is not immediately obvious to me. The story we often tell ourselves is that in a democratic society, the point is to change the “hearts and minds” of citizens, who can then apply electoral pressure on politicians to change policy, or to hold their colleagues responsible for gross violations of the law, morality, or the public trust. Despite the fact that this has sometimes occurred, the United States is not a democratic society, and has not been one for some time; in the domain of foreign policy, with a few exceptions, it has never been one. Should the intelligentsia fail to manufacture consent for the state, the state can always dispense with justification altogether, in favor of brute force and distraction. The latter has been a particularly effective tool: since the US-brokered ceasefire between Hamas and the Netanyahu government went into effect last October, Israel has violated it more than 1,500 times, killing more than six hundred people, but this, along with the aid that is still blocked from entering Gaza and escalating settler violence in the de facto annexed West Bank, no longer makes front-page headlines in the international press.
Speaking truth to power cannot therefore simply mean the process of exposing lies, debunking falsehoods, or bringing suppressed facts to public attention—though these are critical components of an intellectual’s task. Sometimes Said comes perilously close to suggesting that it is an end in itself, or primarily beneficial to the person doing the speaking—both of which would be legitimate if still somewhat unsatisfying outcomes. “The goal,” he writes in Representations, “is mainly to project a better state of affairs and . . . trying to induce a change in the moral climate.” Elsewhere, in his essay “Permission to Narrate,” a review of Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle, Said argued that truth must be situated in a larger narrative framework for speaking it to be effective, giving intellectuals whose training in the production or analysis of storytelling a special role to play. The Israel-Palestine conflict is fundamentally a conflict about land, but as he wrote in Culture and Imperialism, the right to live, work, and travel in a space is “reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.”
Narrative, at least, gives us our best clue as to why so many people around the world are so deeply invested in events that take place in a territory the size of New Jersey, with a total population the size of Buenos Aires. Understandably, the investment expresses itself differently depending on where you are viewing it from. Many in Ireland and South Africa, for example, symbolically identify with Palestinians on the basis of their respective experiences with colonialism and apartheid. By contrast, in the particularly pathological case of Germany, identification with Israel has become something like a semi-official state religion, serving various interested parties as an ideological salve for Holocaust guilt, as a means of maintaining the centrality of German history to current events, as an opportunistic screen for expressing Islamophobia, or as a model for once-taboo forms of militarism and ethno-nationalism.
Before we get to the United States, it is worth remembering that the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 took place between two other important events, the independence of India and Pakistan from the British Empire and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, an event known in US foreign policy circles as “the loss of China.” Israel thus represents the reassertion of European-style settler colonialism at the very moment the global tide seemed to be definitively turning against it, and the longest-standing exception to the legal principle, enshrined in Article 2 of the UN Charter, that forbids states to acquire territory by force. In addition to Israel’s function as a garrison state for American power projection in West Asia, to the financial influence AIPAC exercises over political campaigns and media, and to the staggering 30 percent of Americans who believe that a Jewish state is the domino that will knock into Armageddon and the Second Coming, among them the candidly titled Secretary of War, there is the question of who gets permission to narrate the story of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Is it a latitudinal narrative about the triumph of liberal-democratic capitalism over fascism and communism, as Francis Fukuyama thought, or the triumph of that composite fiction known as “Western civilization” under the financial, military, and cultural hegemony of the United States over putative competitors like the “Islamic World” or the “Sinosphere,” as Samuel Huntington argued? Or is it a longitudinal narrative about the self-determination of peoples of the Global South from their five-hundred-year-long domination by the nation-states of the Global North? These latitudinal and longitudinal narratives cross at the Null Island of Jerusalem.
Said was as aware as he was wary of the parallels between the Jewish and Palestinian narratives of displacement, exile, persecution, and return. But he astutely observed that whereas Zionist thought mirrors its origins in late-nineteenth-century European ethno-nationalism, state idolatry, and colonialism, the Palestinian experience is informed by a different cultural milieu—the former Ottoman Empire—and a different historical moment: mid-twentieth century decolonization. That is why he hoped it would be possible for Palestinians to “universalize the crisis” of the Nakba and tell a different story of group belonging that is inclusive, fluid, pluralist, and egalitarian. The name he gave to this story is Palestinianism, and he never lost faith in that it would one day, against all odds, be realized. When he was asked whether he thought the situation in Palestine was hopeless, he was blunt: “Where cruelty and injustice are concerned hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”
Ryan Ruby is the author of Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry (7 Stories Press, 2024). He lives in Berlin.