Edward Said Essay

The forcible eviction of the Palestinians and the denial of their right of return, has led to them becoming refugees, this has translated into the adoption of aggressive tactics and strategies to achieve their goal of a sovereign nation. Palestinian society is territorially disjointed by the divisions of the West Bank (administered by Fatah) and the Gaza area (administered by Hamas) creating a disharmony in interest articulation towards the goal of

In my opinion, I don’t know if any other approach would have been this effective. This allows we as readers to see more into the lives of Palestinians, rather than just read about it.

The essay States, by Edward Said, describes the trouble for Palestinians to find their identity due to the loss of their homeland. He also describes the situation of the Palestinians and the isolation that they feel through photographs that he had taken. Said has many different pictures throughout this essay and each of them play a part in supporting the main point of this essay. Said believes that, without a homeland, the Palestinians cannot have an identity and the Palestinians should not be content with being exiles forever. So the purpose of the pictures is to support and further strengthen this idea. The photographer wants the viewer to understand the struggle that the Palestinians are going through.

‘Wild Thorns’ by Sahar Khalifeh is an insightful commentary that brings to life the Palestinian struggle under the Israeli Occupation and embodies this conflict through the different perspectives brought forth by the contrasting characters. We are primarily shown this strife through the eyes of the principal character, the expatriate Usama, as well as the foil character of his cousin, Adil. Khalifeh skillfully uses literary devices such as emotive language, allusions and positive and negative connotations to highlight life under the Occupation. As the audience, these techniques help encourage us to consider the struggle more in depth, and due to the wide variety of characters, invite us to relate to them.

As of recent years, with the rise of right-wing, nationalistic politicians in Israel, the hunger for settlement of Palestine has increased. Seeing the land as theirs to take, more and more Jewish settlements have been improved and expanded on in the West Bank, culminating and high profile confrontations between the new Jewish settlers and the Palestinian

Growing up in Palestine, I had contradicting Feelings towards my identity as a Palestinian. I often felt the euphoria and nationalism hearing the word Palestine, revolution, Israel, Yasser Arafat, and resistance. The ecstatic feeling of belonging to a glorious nation and dedicated countrymen equipped me with sufficient mental and emotional dosage to enjoy living in a war zone and ultimately a honourable goal worth sacrificing my life for- freedom.

Ever since, Palestinians have had to adapt to new places and cultures in order to survive, which makes it more difficult for them to preserve their own. Said presents several examples of transculturation throughout the essay. For instance, the use of the Mercedes, even though Said describes it in negative terms, the use of the Mercedes has come in handy for Palestinians. Enduring one disaster after another, Palestinian identity is arduous to preserve in exile. It is a struggle of having no country. Our country is a big part of who we are. As we are born, we are destined to become a part of it. It becomes part of our identity. Things that we grew up with meant something to us. We usually treasure things that became part of our lives. Even unconsciously, we take hold of it. Home brings us memories, memories that we want to hold on up to our last breath.

This is a devastating reality many are facing in the Middle East every day, some more grim than others. It is through a writer’s words, written or oral, or a photographer’s lens where we see our news, our history being captured. In this

Edward Said’s “States” features an insightful, in depth analysis of “Orientalism” as it applies to Palestinians and Israelis. He begins with a description of Palestine and the Palestinian condition using photographs to demonstrate a more humanized perspective of these transient people. Said reflects on his childhood in Palestine and draws from personal experience to paint a picture of a people without a home, or to be more accurate, people without an identity. A rhetorical analysis reveals the levels to which Said’s persuasion actually manages to persuade the audience. Said’s use of pathos is strong and well developed due to his use of anecdotal evidence and his insistence on humanizing the issue, while his ethos is considerably boosted by his personal experiences in Palestine, with Israelis, and his comprehensive study of

Said starts his essay "States" off with an attention grabber and sets the scene. He is reeling his readers in, making the reader feel sympathetic towards the lifestyle of the people outside Arab City by using words and phrases such as "meager", "surprised", "sad", and "slightly uncomfortable". He lays out the setting in a refugee camp during a disastrous time. I feel he does this in hopes of readers wanting to find out more about the Palestinian people and the lives they have led. His test is not arranged in the general arrangement of essays. Instead, Said talks about the history of the Palestinians while putting some of his own past of him and his family in. He uses pictures to help the reader grasp how times were for them, which is a feature

Furthermore, the Israeli occupation of Palestine that the film depicts is a part of the 2000-2005 second intifada between the two nations (Manekin, 2013). Nablus, in Palestine is where Said and Khaled are based, and the mission is to take place in Tel Aviv across the border. A noticeable feature of the movie is the concept of deadness, the two main characters are not suicidal but the life they are trapped in has created a sense of them being dead already (Nashef, 2016) this is represented by the oppression and the lack of opportunity that is present. This theme can be further seen in their town – Nablus. Due to the conflict, the landscape and infrastructure is bleak, destroyed and very much discarded. The depiction of the lifestyle experienced during that period of conflict, highlighted to me potential motivations.

Reading the book, whose title translates to The Northern Path, cemented the idea of Palestine as my homeland. I visited my grandfather in New York, where he was having a reading as part of his book tour, and talked to him about growing up in Palestine. My grandfather’s stories from his childhood mesmerized me. He told me about growing up in the small village of Suhmata, helping his parents in the fields, and playing with his friends on the farm. His stories inspired images in my mind of Palestine as a paradise with endless rows of olive and fig trees. Before I left, he gifted me with a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf and symbol of Palestinian solidarity. The keffiyeh was made in a textile factory in Hebron, so it has a physical connection to the land. It also has sentimental value coming from my grandfather. To this day, the keffiyeh is one of the most treasured objects I

She thought that the Israeli state used its power to take more and more land of her origin country. Growing up in Palestine she faced this issue daily. In the West Bank, she owns the house that she grew up in. She doesn’t visit it regularly because she feels unsafe visiting due to the problems they are currently facing. When asked what it means to be Palestinian, she said “Being Palestinian is an accident.” and believes her culture’s history shares yet a sad one. Having an identity is not necessarily real, the question “you do not exist”, always is there. The first time she visited the United States was in 1980 as a tourist visiting her dad during the summer. In 1986, she received a scholarship for literature and went to the US

The film points to the West Bank settlement-colonies that Israel propagated as the main challenge to peace. The film argues that colonization takes place through these settlements without regard to Palestinians’ desires. This process has gone on through decades before Israel was established. The daily growth of the settlements is an indication that the policy is active. The film claims that

The graphic novel combines the ability of the image to elicit an emotional response and pull the audience in with the flexibility to allow the audience to go through the piece at their own pace. This allows Sacco to take more risks and gives him time to depict moments that do not have the shock value necessary to become the subject of traditional journalism, and these mundane daily moments are often the most powerful. One such moment occurs when Sacco goes to see the Egyptian boarder. He sees a woman yelling through the boarder fences and his companion informs him that she is having a conversation with someone in Egypt. The boarder, Sacco informs us, “was bulldozed right through Rafah, a Palestinian town,” leaving “a few thousand,” of the towns former inhabitants “stranded in Egypt,” (244). As he is leaving, Sacco sees two women “sitting on rocks waiting for a friend or relative on the Egyptian side to show up…”(244). In the next panel the women are seen through a matrix of the chain-link boarder fence and Sacco is visible behind them, following his companion away, under the caption, “we leave them to their waiting…” (244). These two panels contain no graphic images and minimal action, and yet they give such a haunting imagery to the plight of the Palestinians, a people forced to wait, eternally staring through fences at what was once home. Another simple but loaded moment that gives the reader a powerful sense of