Summary
Israeli-American employee of a Jerusalem think tank whose 1999 Commentary article attacking Edward Said’s Palestinian credentials is treated by Anna Bernard as the controversy that skewed critical discussion of Said’s memoir Out of Place (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.55).
Details
- Several weeks before Out of Place came out, Commentary, described by Bernard as an American Zionist magazine, ran Weiner’s ‘exposé’, ‘“My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’ (1999), which ‘revealed’ that Said had spent his childhood in Cairo rather than Palestine (PDF p.55).
- Weiner connected his findings directly to the credibility of the Palestinian cause: ‘For Edward Said in this scenario, now substitute the Palestinian people – as his readers and listeners are meant to do – and one begins to gain some apprehension of the myth-driven passions that have animated the revanchist program of so many Palestinian nationalists’ (1999, 31, quoted PDF p.55).
- Bernard calls the attack’s intentions deplorable and hardly worth a response, but argues it set the parameters of discussion: critics took their responses to the memoir as an opportunity to prove Weiner wrong, endlessly affirming Said’s status as Palestinian instead of addressing the memoir’s anti-identitarian account of belonging (PDF p.55).
- Said’s retort, quoted by Bernard: ‘I have been moved to defend the refugees’ plight precisely because I did not suffer and therefore feel obligated to relieve the sufferings of my people, less fortunate than myself’ (1999b, quoted PDF p.60).