Edward Said and the Task of the Intellectual

On Palestine, epistemicide, and the obligations of intellectual life

Mural honoring Edward Said at San Francisco State University, with his major works in the foreground.

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Edward Said After Gaza

In selecting Representations of the Intellectual (1994) and The Question of Palestine (1979) among the oeuvre of Edward Said as books requiring new editions, UK-based publisher Fitzcarraldo has chosen wisely. Said’s landmark The Question of Palestine was the first book by a mainstream US publisher to put Palestine in the centre of public debate. Fifteen years later, Representations of the Intellectual was the first book to reflect in general terms on the task of the intellectual from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Both books were landmark works in the context of their time, and both have much to teach us today.

In his introduction, Said reflects on the hostility he faced merely for being Palestinian. The book itself is based on Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures, a BBC series established in 1948. As soon as he was announced by the BBC as the Reith Lecturer, Said’s suitability began to be questioned by pundits and mainstream media. As a Palestinian, he was seen as biased and not fit to address the public on matters of shared concern. Palestinian intellectuals continue to be sidelined, marginalised, and silenced in mainstream spaces, but there is more pushback against it now. From Noura Erakat to Mohammed el-Kurd, there is no shortage of Palestinian voices to shape public discourse.

Although the space for diversity in the public sphere has expanded in the three decades since Said delivered his lectures, other aspects of the world Said critiqued have remained stubbornly static or have further deteriorated. Among the continuities between Said’s world and our own is the ongoing cowardice of the managerial class that governs elite institutions. British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad addresses the current betrayal of intellectuals in her introduction to this new edition, and it is a recurring theme of Said’s reflections.

Intellectuals regularly fail to mobilize public sentiment against injustice. Yet no one who has lived through over two years of genocide in Gaza is likely to disagree with either Hammad or Said that the intellectual class has utterly failed to fulfil its social function.

Without offering programmatic solutions, Said presents a vision of an intellectual who is suspicious of state-based power and shaped by the experience of exile. These qualities give us insight into how Said saw himself. He celebrates figures such as Gramsci, Sartre, and Bertrand Russell whose “specific individual voice and presence” makes an impression “over and above their arguments.” For Said, intellectuals matter not just because of what they say but because of how they say it.

The extent to which intellectuals manage to connect their stance with their own unique personalities as well as—often oppositionally—with the times in which they live is a gauge of how they have fulfilled their vocation. Intellectuals are “constitutively unfinished” for Said: they are perpetually balancing the “problems of one’s own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere.”

An Inventory of the Self

Representations of the Intellectual can easily be read autobiographically. To frame such a reading in distinctively Saidian terms, we can call it, borrowing from Gramsci, “an inventory of the self.” Read in this way, the book becomes a reflection on Said’s own role as an intellectual and his account of the heavy price he paid for his outspoken criticism of the Oslo Accords. As an implicit reinforcement of partition and occupation, the ongoing normalization of Oslo marks the betrayal of the intellectuals at a world-historical scale.

The Accords were signed at the White House between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat the same year Said delivered his Reith Lectures. Although widely celebrated at the time as a major achievement of US diplomacy, the accords functioned, in practice, to dismember Palestine and accelerate Israel’s development as an apartheid state. Said’s criticisms of Oslo were prophetic, but at the time his scepticism simply isolated him. The result was a rift between Said and Arafat, with whom he had previously worked closely, and his exclusion from the formal institutions that were tasked with negotiating a Palestinian state.

Since 1977 (one year before the publication of Orientalism and two years before The Question of Palestine), Said had served as a central member of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Said was during this time an ‘organic intellectual’ in Gramsci’s sense: not merely a critic, but someone embedded in a collective political project whose ideas helped shape the PLO’s agenda. After Oslo, Said no longer had a central role inside Palestinian leadership circles; he became an oppositional intellectual. The so-called peace negotiations of Oslo transformed Said’s position from insider-critic to outspoken dissident.

This experience clarifies what was at stake in Said’s argument that “the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers, or – the more difficult path – to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction.” Said was willing to forgo the fake stability promised by Oslo in order to continue calling for genuine freedom for the Palestinian people, no matter how unpopular it made him.

Said takes this insistence on the independence of the intellectual even further when he draws on the example of Franz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist who became one of the most important allies for the Algerian resistance. “It is inadequate,” Said says, “only to affirm that a people was dispossessed, oppressed or slaughtered, denied its rights and its political existence, without at the same time doing what Fanon did during the Algerian war, affiliating those horrors with the similar afflictions of other people.”

This call for a comparative—or in Saidian terms, a contrapuntal—approach is the high-water mark of this conception of the cosmopolitan intellectual. It is a vision that few of us will be able to achieve. But Said makes clear why contrapuntal thinking is a moral imperative and an intellectual responsibility: “just because you represent the sufferings that your people lived through which you yourself might have lived through also, you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims.” This warning applies broadly, but it also works precisely as a diagnosis of Zionism and its historical amnesia. That makes it difficult for liberal Zionists and their allies to conceptualise how the state of Israel, the homeland established for the Jewish people after their genocide, could perpetrate genocide against the people whose homes and lands they had stolen.

Epistemicide

Many intellectuals fail to meet the ethical demands of their vocation as articulated by Said. More troubling, however, is the radically uneven way in which intellectual work is evaluated: certain truths incur severe punishment, while others are rewarded or ignored. Critiques of certain genocides pose risks that critiques of other genocides do not. Since 2023, intellectuals across Europe and North America have been imprisoned, fired or suspended from their jobs, subjected to debilitating legal campaigns, censured, and cancelled simply for speaking out about Palestine. The persecution is ongoing. In the UK, mere support for the non-violent direct action group Palestine Action has led to over three thousand arrests.

Universities, museums, and other institutions that provide intellectuals with their livelihood have shown themselves to be reliable allies of the state in the suppression of free speech on Palestine. State suppression of intellectuals who speak out against genocide correlates with a government’s investment in the global arms trade and in the imperial system that underwrites the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

The Gaza genocide has shown how an entire class of intellectuals, along with the institutions that make their work possible, can be obliterated in real time, while the states that fund and arm this destruction decide to look away. Between 2023 and 2025, Israeli forces used weapons manufactured in North America and Europe to destroy all universities in Gaza, including Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University in Gaza, Al-Quds Open University, Gaza University, Islamic University of Gaza, Israa University, Palestine Technical College, University College of Applied Sciences, University of Palestine, the Palestine College of Nursing, and Hassan University. Even after their physical infrastructures have been hollowed out, education in Palestine continues. Said does not directly address what it means to be an intellectual in Palestine, but Israel’s targeting of intellectuals over the past two years has shown the centrality of their role in resisting genocide.

While all universities were attacked in the name of fighting Hamas, 90% of school buildings in Gaza were destroyed or damaged during the genocide. Collectively, Israeli attacks murdered over one thousand teachers and many more students. The destruction of Palestinian education has given new currency to scholasticide, a term which was initially used by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi to describe Israel’s methods of offensive warfare in 2009. Taking the concept even further, Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a form of genocidal epistemicide that aims, not just at the eradication of an educational system in the present, but at the destruction of its very possibility in the future.

What is the task of the intellectual in an age that Said partly anticipated but did not inhabit, where, at the heart of liberal democracies, genocide is normalised and protest against it is suppressed? How can we heed the voices of intellectuals such as Refaat Alareer, martyred in a targeted Israeli air strike on 6 December 2023, and Gazan poet Saleem Al-Naffar, killed the following day? How do we continue the work of Omar Harb, who died of starvation during the Gaza famine on 4 September 2025? Before she was targeted and killed in an Israeli strike on 16 April 2025, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna articulated a demand addressed to the living: “If I die, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.” If being an intellectual means, in part, carrying forward the legacy of those who died in pursuit of our vocation, what obligations does their systematic annihilation impose on us now? What does Said’s book, written in the last decade of the 20^th century, tell us about how intellectuals ought to go about their work today?

The Task Now

First, the intellectual must be willing to speak as part of a collective, especially when that collective stands up for minority rights and the voices of the oppressed. The intellectual must be willing to immerse themselves in the spirit of a movement larger than themselves. This means standing in solidarity with prison hunger strikers in the UK, who have been incarcerated for over a year without charge. They await trial for actions they took in coordination with Palestine Action to stop the genocide, and now risk their lives and damage their health to expose their government’s complicity.

While intellectuals must be willing to speak as part of a collective, they must also be willing to act alone, without reward or recognition, their only satisfaction being the knowledge that what they are doing is right. Said writes movingly about the isolation of figures like Adorno and Vico, who wrote, not to change the world, but in the hope “that someday, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it.” The intellectual must be ready for the moment when, precisely due to their radical commitment to the cause of truth, they are isolated, unpopular, and reviled on all sides. The intellectual’s being, Said writes, is “staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do.”

This position is not easy to occupy, certainly not with any kind of consistency. There is no template and no guarantee that the intellectual’s willingness to put themselves on the line will make a difference in the short term. Because they cannot trust institutions, states, or religions, conscience must be their guide.

The Reith Lectures, which provided the occasion for this book, have since been discredited by the BBC’s use of censorship to placate those in power. Given how thoroughly the BBC has already disgraced itself by its coverage of the genocide in Gaza, one wonders whether Said would have accepted the offer to deliver the Reith lectures had it been made to him now. Has the role of the intellectual as someone who can meaningfully navigate hegemonic institutions and still do good been entirely eviscerated by complicity in genocide?

Said insists that the intellectual’s task is not reconciliation with power but friction against it. Gaza names the moment when the mandate of the oppositional intellectual can no longer be deferred, aestheticised, or selectively applied. The annihilation of an entire intellectual class, the destruction of Palestinian education, the targeting of teachers, students, archives, and universities, and the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity expose not only the brutality of the settler-colonial state, but the bankruptcy of the liberal institutions that claim to safeguard knowledge while facilitating its erasure. At this historical juncture, the question is no longer whether the intellectual can afford to speak out, but whether silence is itself complicity.

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This essay was first published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and is republished here with minor updates.