Forever an Exile : As war rages, Edward Said finds himself adrift between East and West. But, as he says, ‘a Palestinian is almost always out of place.’

NEW YORK —  Last November, after Rabbi Meir Kahane was killed by an assassin’s bullets, Edward Said learned that he too was a marked man.

Jewish extremists linked to the militant rabbi issued a “hit list” of 10 victims they claimed would be killed in reprisal. High up on the list sent to police was Said, a Columbia University professor who is the most prominent Palestinian spokesman in America and a respected figure in the Arab world.

It was an unsettling experience for a scholar who is also one of the nation’s premier experts on comparative literature. A talkative, outgoing man, Said had to take security precautions, tone down his lifestyle--and wait.

“Was I concerned? Of course; who wouldn’t be?” he says, sifting nervously through a pile of phone messages in his book-lined office. “It’s the kind of thing you don’t forget. It follows you around. Constantly.”

But that was before Jan. 17, when war erupted in the Middle East. Suddenly, the death threat and every other concern in Edward W. Said’s life seemed to pale in significance. In an instant, his world had turned upside down.

A Palestinian who fled Israel, grew up in Cairo and was schooled in the United States, the 55-year-old professor has lived the life of an international exile, cut off from his homeland. Today, he finds himself adrift between East and West, aghast at what he sees on both sides.

“It’s a very conflicted thing for me because I’m an American and I’m also an Arab,” says Said, a ruggedly handsome man who speaks in elegant English sentences, only to break off into Arabic when a friend telephones with news from the Mideast.

“You can only imagine what this is like. But then I remember once again that a Palestinian is almost always out of place.”

So it has been with Said (pronounced sy-EED). In the months before the war, he condemned the U.S. military intervention, calling it imperialist. But he also criticized Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a thug and blasted the incendiary rhetoric of other Arab nationalists, accusing them of escalating the gulf crisis.

After the war began, Said was besieged with requests for television interviews, most of which he turned down. He is angered by the portrayal of the conflict as a clash between American virtue and “the mad Muslim” of Iraq. He castigates the media for focusing attention on Hussein and his bunker, as if 18 million other Iraqis don’t exist.

But mostly, Said fears for his people. As Scud missiles rain down on Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, he says the Gulf War may have dealt a major blow to the Palestinian cause. The alliance between Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Hussein is a “blunder, a terrible mistake” that has angered many in the West and the Arab world.

To be sure, the PLO may have had no choice but to cast its lot with Hussein, who has traditionally offered the group aid, Said says. But he suggests it is just one more example of a cynical Arab leader using the volatile issue for short-term gain--and offering no permanent guarantees to Palestinians.

It adds up to a crushing disappointment for Said, who still insists that Arafat is a leader seeking peace. The Columbia professor has played a key role in the PLO’s policy debates, urging it to seek a political accommodation with the Jewish state. Now, he says, all that groundbreaking work may have been in vain.

“Arafat has always said, and we believe, that no invasion, no acquisition of territory by force, should be allowed,” Said says glumly during an interview in his faculty office on a cold winter afternoon.

“But in the last five, six months, he spent a lot of time in Baghdad and was identified with him (Hussein). It’s earned us the hatred of the Kuwaitis, (and) the anger and the revenge of the Saudis, the Egyptians and all the other powers in the region who are, of course, clients of the United States.”

As the war continues, Said reminds a listener that 1.7 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been living under a 24-hour Israeli curfew. Even before the conflict broke out, he says, the Palestinians’ battle against the occupation, known as the intifada, seemed to be sputtering, as did their larger battle to establish a separate nation.

“I’ve been talking to many Palestinians on the phone in recent days, and the mood is one of defiant helplessness,” he says, shaking his head. “The real moral question which is so important to us, that we are struggling for freedom and self-determination, has never really been grasped.”

Palestine. The Homeland. It’s a cause to which Said has devoted himself for the past 25 years, with books, lectures, television appearances, public debates and a profusion of political essays. More than any other Palestinian activist, he has made a career of telling Americans the other side of the Arab-Israeli conflict and challenging long-held views about the Middle East.

In particular, Said has campaigned against the stereotypes of Palestinians as terrorists, portraying them instead as victims of Israeli brutality. These actions have antagonized many Jews, who believe his arguments are dangerously simplistic and self-serving. But even his toughest critics give him grudging praise.

Martin Peretz, publisher of the New Republic and a staunch supporter of Israel, acknowledges with some irony that Said has been “a very effective spokesman for his people. . . . He’s been a brooding countenance, something like the Elie Weisel of the Palestinians,” referring to the well-known Jewish writer.

To those who know Said, he’s also a jumble of contradictions.

Although he is identified with a Palestinian struggle 8,000 miles away, Said is a cosmopolitan New Yorker who seems very much at home in the cultural ferment of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. An expert on Arab culture and Islam, he is an Episcopalian married to a Quaker and has many Jewish friends.

A well-known authority on Palestinian literature, he also claims to have an encyclopedic knowledge of MGM musicals from the 1940s and ‘50s. For years, Said has been a member of the Palestine National Council, a parliament-in-exile. He also is chairman of the doctoral program in comparative literature at Columbia and is a classical music critic for the Nation magazine.

Whenever he can, Said spends hours at home playing one of his two grand pianos. At times, he seems more interested in discussing Mozart’s operas than his Zionist critics. He is a tennis fanatic and confessed clotheshorse who shops for suits when traveling--as a hobby. Said and his wife, Mariam, have two children.

“Edward has many facets to him, and you can never say he’s just one person or one type of person,” says Michael Rosenthal, an English professor at Columbia who is one of Said’s closest friends. “Most people know him as an activist, but he’s first and foremost a thinker, and very independent.”

In “Orientalism,” his most famous work, Said attacked what he said was a disturbing tendency in Western scholarship to view Arabs and Islamic culture through patronizing, racist eyes. Later, he focused on the Arab-Israeli issue in “The Question of Palestine,” “After the Last Sky” and “Blaming the Victim.” In his books, Said tells a story that few Americans ever hear.

Contrary to the Israeli version of events--which holds that Palestinians voluntarily left Israel in 1948 and are now trying to take it back with force--Said presents a history of cruelty and arrogance by Jews toward people who inhabited Israel long before they arrived and who are now without a homeland.

Using the tools of a historian, a literary critic and a moralist, Said calls for fair play. If a Jewish Holocaust victim can freely emigrate from Chicago to Israel, he asks, shouldn’t a Palestinian in Egypt be able to do the same?

To his admirers, Said performs an invaluable service. Stanley Sheinbaum, a Los Angeles activist, economist and publisher who was one of five American Jews to meet privately with Arafat in 1988, says Said offers a Middle Eastern world view radically at odds with the Israeli and American party line.

“He’s the most prominent person I know of telling the Palestinian side of a conflict,” Sheinbaum says. “An image has been created of the Palestinians as uncouth, crazy terrorists, and they’re not. They’re some of the most highly educated and thoughtful people in the Arab world.”

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian professor of political science at Northwestern University, adds that Said has been the single most articulate spokesman in this country for the cause. Like other allies, he can’t imagine where the Arab-Israeli debate would be in America without Said.

“For years, the Israelis framed the terms of the debate, presenting themselves as human beings and the Palestinians as abstractions,” says James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington. “But Edward shattered that forever. He showed that the Palestinians are human beings too, caught up in a terrible, violent conflict, just like the Jews.”

Said’s nastiest fights have been with pro-Israeli American Jews, whose feelings about him range from bitter hostility to wary respect. Although Said says he deplores violence, he argues that most terrorism in Israel has been carried out by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians.

The response to such statements has been swift and angry. Several years ago, Commentary magazine ran a scathing piece on Said, calling him the “Professor of Terror.” Asked about Said, editor Norman Podhoretz minces no words:

“He’s a spokesman for a terrorist organization which has shown its true colors once again in the course of this war. The PLO has sided with Saddam Hussein and called on him to gas the Israelis.”

Podhoretz, one of the more outspoken voices on the Jewish right, adds: “I don’t know whether Said is lying to himself or others, and I don’t much care. But I think that the idea that the PLO is a moderate organization is preposterous. It’s a tactic aimed at deceiving people in the United States.”

On the Jewish left, there is a more charitable view. Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, says Said “has had a tremendous impact in America, because he’s one of their (Palestinians’) most effective speakers. He’s more sensitive than the majority of the people who speak for them.”

Yet Lerner criticizes Said for failing to acknowledge the depths of Jewish distrust of Arabs. He also suggests the professor is more interested in being “right” on the Palestinian issue than in finding solutions, adding that “there’s an old saying about Palestinians . . . they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

As he returns phone calls in his office, Said dismisses his Jewish critics with an almost impatient air. He seems weary as he repeats the belief that Israelis and Palestinians should be able to live in peace. Yes, he understands the roots of Jewish suffering. No, he does not support terrorism. It makes him angry, he says, that the Palestinian issue always seems to get lost in the debate.

In a rising voice, Said claims his people are being forgotten: “We are, after all, the weakest ones, and we get blamed for everything the way Jews used to get blamed. We have no passports, no nationality. We are truly without a home.”

It’s a familiar quandary for Said. Born in West Jerusalem, which was then part of Palestine, his parents fled to Cairo in 1947, just before the Israeli war for independence. Later, they moved to Beirut. His father was a prosperous businessman, and Said went to elite private schools before attending Princeton as an undergraduate and later earning a doctorate from Harvard.

Despite his academic success, the young Said never seemed to fit in completely. Throughout his life, he says, he has played the role of an outsider, a man few people can understand. As a Palestinian living in the United States, for example, he professes amazement at the cultural abuse he has experienced.

It’s not that Americans are malicious, Said says, but many of them seem truly ignorant. On occasion, students and other people have asked to visit his apartment near Columbia, just to see for themselves that he lives like they do and is not some creature--or terrorist--from another planet.

“Can you imagine that?” he says, with wonder. “It’s extraordinary .”

In the days since the Gulf War broke out, Said has tried to keep in touch as best he can with friends and relatives throughout the Arab world. The uncertainty of the conflict leads to an inevitable question: If a Palestinian homeland was finally established, would Said return?

“I don’t think so,” he says with a shrug. “It’s a matter of uprooting. My life is here; my work is here. I belong in New York.”

Yet Said’s longing for resolution--and return--seems equally strong. With great sadness, he tells the story of his mother, who died last year of cancer. A brave woman, she lived through the siege of Beirut in the early 1980s, leaving only when her illness required urgent medical care in the United States.

In the last days of her life, she began to drift in and out of consciousness, Said says. But she was still able to communicate with her son. When he leaned forward, he heard her whisper several times that she wanted to go home.

“She was Palestinian, so where was home for her?” he recalls. “Was it Nazareth, where she was born? Was it Cairo? Was it Beirut?”

In their last conversation, Said remembers that his mother made one final request. “I’m so restless,” she said. “Please, teach me how to sleep.”