Zionism Without Zionism: The Jacqueline Rose--Edward Said Exchange (Edward W. Said) (Report‪)‬

In a gesture that is certain to infuriate some and confuse others, the Jewish literary critic Jacqueline Rose dedicates her recent book, The Question of Zion, to the late Palestinian-American critic Edward W. Said. (1) Said himself never had the opportunity to comment on Rose's book, Rose informs her readers in an essay titled 'The Question of Zionism: Continuing the Dialogue', (recently published in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (2)), as Said died a mere four days after she delivered a copy of the manuscript to him. Thus Rose never learned of his reaction to her work, which was dedicated to him and written as a response to his now classic text The Question of Palestine. (3) Apart from these sources, the relation between Rose and Said is documented in an interview that Rose conducted with Said, titled 'Returning to Ourselves' (republished in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews With Edward W. Said (4)), and in Said's Freud and the Non-European, (5) which includes Rose's response to Said's controversial public lecture at the Freud House in London. (6) In this article, I explore the complex relation between Rose and Said as documented in these various texts. They offer a privileged glimpse into current problems in dialogues between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, as well as Diaspora Jews like Rose. Not unlike the late French theorist Jacques Derrida, Rose attempts to rethink, or 'deconstruct', Zionism from within Zionist ideology. However, whereas Derrida in curmudgeonly fashion informs his readers that they are free to take or leave his mostly undemocratic views about Zionism, (7) Rose more apologetically seeks to recover forgotten auto-critiques of Zionism articulated by influential Jewish figures such as Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and others. Although we will never know in precise terms how Said might have responded to Rose's The Question of Zion, the many texts produced by Said over the years, especially his recent interviews and various journalistic essays, give us a fairly good indication of how he might have reacted.