Ai, hommie, you brake my heart; you find more common ground with people who state that Palestinians are dumb animals that need to be ruled over, than me? I ran out of tissues by the third sentence.
But maybe this should be a good start for a quest into your predefine “us” and “they”. So who is the “we” and who is the “they”? If civilians who are being daily targeted by missiles constitute the “us”, then why people who are living a couple of miles away who are being targeted by much higher technologically weapons constitute the “they”? How would you separate between the “us” and “they”? Who would be the rational democratic progressive “us” and who would be the reactionary-religious-racist “they”? You are drawing your lines according to some utopian understanding of society. Furthermore, how would interfering in other countries politics by arming corrupt and sellout leaders who would increase oppression and misery, would stop the just resistance of the Palestinians? Ess’e, if there was a way to define “human nature” it would be the basic law that “oppression breeds resistance”.
Although not a communist, Edward Said have written important things….. But seriously, I have to admit that Said was the one to first draw my attention to the importance of intellectuals speaking truth to power, and to a better understanding of humanism. In other words, I would urge you to take Said in his totality through his brilliant cutting edge theories, and not to concentrate too much on this or that theory that doesn’t correspond to your political outlook.
So in his memory and as an obligation to my responsibilities, I will have to disagree with your understanding of his theories. Said, never argued that the world is some perfect place, but that through human reason, and not through superstition as a lot of Zionist argue (“the biblical ownership of Jews over Israel”), one could better humanity. Said humanism was a complex process in which the intellectuals have the obligation to bring forward in any situation the ideas and aims of people in the margins of society. For him, real intellectuals should not relate to their jobs as something that one concentrate on only at the university, but as an obligation to truth and any moment (something that I think is important to converse when discussing the propose boycott of Israeli academy.) Said, I feel, most importantly, gave a better understanding to people in post-colonial countries in understanding their culture and relation to the west, and in the west, of the complexity and often very racist, of what is supposed to be objective secular research. In short, body, don’t be dissi’n Said around me….