The Question of Palestine

Edward W. Said

Saree Makdisi

A major work by one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century, The Question of Palestine was the first book to narrate the modern Palestinian experience in English. Edward Said’s project to ‘bring Palestine into history’ was unquestionably a success – there is no longer a question of whether Palestine had a history before colonization – and yet Palestinian self-determination is as distant as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and shaped by his own life in exile in New York, Said’s account of the traumatic national encounter of the Palestinian people with Zionism is still as pertinent and incisive today as it was on first publication in 1979.