The Question of Palestine was published by Times Books in 1979, a year after Orientalism and at a moment when the Palestinian cause was almost entirely absent from American public discourse. The Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel (1978) had been celebrated in the West as a peace breakthrough, but the Palestinians — who were not consulted — saw the agreement as a betrayal that isolated their movement and legitimized Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Said, the most prominent Palestinian intellectual in the United States, wrote this book to give the Palestinian perspective to an American audience that had rarely heard it.
The book is both a political history and a personal statement. Said traces the Palestinian experience from the late Ottoman period through the British Mandate, the Nakba of 1948 (when approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes), the 1967 war and subsequent occupation, and the emergence of the PLO as the Palestinian national movement. He argues that the Palestinian question is not a refugee problem or a humanitarian issue but a political question — a question of national rights, self-determination, and justice — and that its resolution requires the recognition of Palestinian nationhood.
Said’s analysis is rooted in his broader intellectual framework. Just as Orientalism showed how Western knowledge of the East served imperial interests, The Question of Palestine shows how the Zionist narrative — in which Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land” — erased the existence of the Palestinian population to justify colonization. Said does not deny the legitimacy of Jewish claims to the land or the reality of the Holocaust; he argues that the creation of Israel cannot justify the dispossession of another people, and that a just settlement requires the recognition of both narratives.
The book was controversial in the United States, where public sympathy for Israel was overwhelming and Palestinian voices were marginalized or silenced. Said received death threats and was vilified in the press. But the book gradually found its audience, and its argument — that the Palestinians have a legitimate national claim that must be addressed — has been substantially vindicated by subsequent history, even as the political situation has grown more intractable.
Collecting The Question of Palestine
First edition (Times Books, New York, 1979): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15