When Francis Fukuyama’s End of History was published a few years ago, it received some well-merited drubbings for its many theoretical shortcomings. It did, however, contain a piece of argument which was overlooked. Drawing on Hegel and Nietzsche, Fukuyama maintained that a prime motive for human struggle and political sacrifice was the need for recognition. Though it was obviously true that people would risk their lives for meat and potatoes, or for rights or territory, it was no less true that they would fight and die just for dignity and respect.

Pervading all the work of Edward Said on the Palestinian question (here assembled between two covers in the form of lectures, essays, reviews and polemics) is this essential element of pride. For him, the low standing of the Palestinian people – whether in exile, under occupation or scattered in diaspora – is not so much an injustice as a profound insult. Driven out of their homes in 1948, which was injury enough, they then had to hear that they had ‘really’ run away on the orders of their own leaders, which was more insult than they could bear. Peripheral to the great contest of the Second World War, they then had to hear that their national claims were an extension of European and Christian anti-Semitism, to be endlessly defamed as genocidal and fanatical. Bombed and blitzed in their refugee camps, and endlessly bullied and humiliated in the occupied territories, they were further degraded by being written off as ‘terrorists’. Caricatures of the Arab in the West oscillated between cartoons of the swarthy, twisted subversive and portraits of the bloated, hook-nosed plutocrat; precisely the stock in trade of the anti-Jewish pamphleteers, who if they couldn’t get the Jew as a Bolshevik, would get him as a banker.

In these collected rebuttals, Said does not take the part of a mere patriot. He writes with energy about the wrongness and the stupidity of bombings and hijackings. He argued, well before the Algiers Declaration and the later Oslo accords, for a programme of ‘mutual recognition’ between the two peoples of the Holy Land. He understands, too, why not even a Spartan superstate like Israel, armed and financed by the world’s only superpower, can overcome historic Jewish feelings of insecurity. (His lapidary phrase for the Palestinian condition is that his people are ‘the victims of the victims’.) And, both as an intellectual and scholar and as a secular Christian, he has inveighed against the gruesome regimes, sometimes clerical and sometimes ‘nationalist’, which have loaded the Arab world with military juntas, police systems and demagogic restraints on the circulation of people and ideas. In the Jerusalem and Cairo of his boyhood, he enjoyed a cosmopolitan contact with Jews, Greeks, Armenians and others. In his lifetime, he has had to endure the reghettoisation not just of his beloved Beirut but of the entire region. Many of the best articles in the book deal with the cultural famine and its consequences; the stunted universities and muzzled newspapers that are sure signs of underdevelopment. And in the Rushdie affair, Said has taken more risks than most of his fellow New York intellectuals, publicly defending the author at stormy meetings in Egypt and on the West Bank, where more is at stake than a bad review.

Said’s main statement of the case for intellectual freedom in what used to be called the ‘Third World’ was delivered in the form of a lecture he was invited to give in South Africa. And, meeting Nelson Mandela in the course of his visit, he could not but notice the contrast between the leaderships of the ANC and the PLO. Having for many years been inclined to forgive or excuse Arafat’s ramshackle and capricious style, Said has begun, in both the Arab and the Western press, to denounce the spendthrift, posturing, cynical way in which the Palestinian ‘government in exile’ is actually run. It’s no secret now that Said is quite seriously ill, and his consciousness of the fact seems to have had an emancipating effect upon him.

This explains the apparent paradox that a man so long associated with the reconciliation wing of the PLO should have written so sulphurously against the Gaza-Jericho accord. Again, the question of pride is to the fore. At the famous White House photo op, which Said refused many invitations to attend, Arafat looked like a grinning servitor and the Israelis made all the best speeches. What an embarrassment! Why, to save the face of this man, should the Palestinians have to end decades of struggle and resistance by accepting a banana-republic solution? Did they go through all this agony to be packed into a sweltering Bantustan in one of the world’s most notorious hellholes? Existence is not a matter of ‘concessions’ but of rights, which ought to be inalienable. I have disagreed with him in public and in private about this, but I must say that if it was my country that was being bargained over in this way, I too would feel a keen sense of shame. Anyone who wants to engage with an author who has lived the contradictions of an intellectual in politics, or who wishes to understand the deep motivations of the Palestinian national movement, has a duty to read this book and will incur a debt to the brave man who wrote it.