Poetry, incidentally, may have turned the trick for me that first time I interviewed him. As soon as I mentioned a couplet by Mahmoud Darwish, the great contemporary Palestinian poet, we began to hit it off. In the ensuing years, I've had a series of interviews with Said, which resulted in The Pen and the Sword, a collection published by Common Courage Press in 1994.

Over the last few years, Said has been battling leukemia. I interviewed him in February, and we discussed his health, his current idea for a binational state, and his cultural collaborations with the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.

Q: In late 1998, you had occasion to speak in your mother's birthplace, Nazareth, which is now in Israel. I hear you spoke in an unlikely venue called Frank Sinatra Hall. What was that like?

Edward W. Said: Frank Sinatra was a great supporter of Israel. In the 1970s, he was prevailed upon to give money for a facility in Nazareth, which is a predominantly Arab town. It has some Jews living in it, particularly in Upper Nazareth. The idea was that this should be a kind of sports facility where young Arabs and young Jews could get together and play basketball. Over time, it evolved into a facility you could rent for the evening. Azmi Bishara, the Palestinian Israeli who is a member of the Knesset, arranged my visit. It was my first public encounter with Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

I was asked to talk about the history of my political opinions and how I arrived at the positions I now hold. Then it was basically a free-for-all. They could ask any questions they wanted. I was very impressed. There was a kind of independent tone, an independent language, which reflected the fact that these people had had a different experience from all the other Arabs. They lived as Palestinians, as members of the Palestinian minority, within the Jewish state. So they're much more familiar with Israel than any other Arab group I've ever faced. Most of the questions were about the peace process. And, of course, everybody wants to know what's the alternative to the peace process, which is a difficult question to answer. But the main idea was to engage.

Everywhere I go, I notice a qualitative difference when it comes to generations. There's no question at all in my mind of a new courage and skepticism--an intellectual curiosity--to be found across the board in people who are at the most in their upper twenties. It's quite different from anything that I've experienced in people of my generation and the one that came right after it.

Q: You recently wrote an article in The New York Times Magazine calling for a binational state. Why have your views moved in this direction?

Said: I went to the West Bank and Gaza and Israel five times in the last year--the most since I left Palestine at the end of 1947. The more I go, the more impressed I am with the fact that Israeli Jews and Palestinians are irrevocably intertwined. The place is so small that you can't possibly completely avoid the other side.

Palestinians are employed by Israelis to build and expand West Bank and Gaza settlements. It's one of the greatest ironies of all. And the Palestinians are workers in restaurants inside Israel in places like Tel Aviv and Haifa. Of course, on the West Bank, the settlers and Palestinians interact, through antipathy and hostility, but physically they're in the same place.

This is something that can't be changed by pulling people back to separate boundaries or separate states. The involvement of each in the other--largely, I think, due to the aggressivity with which the Israelis have entered the Palestinian territory, and from the very beginning have invaded Palestinian space--suggests to me that some mode of arrangement has to be established that allows them to live together in some peaceable form.

And it's not going to be through separation. It's not going to be the way the Oslo process has forecasted, nor will it be the way I and many others used to talk about--namely partition, that there should be two states.

There is another factor which I think is very important: There is a younger generation--beginning with the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens--who are extremely aware of the difficulty that they face as an oppressed minority and are beginning to struggle in terms of civil and citizens' rights.

Interestingly, they are supported, implicitly, by secular Israelis who are extremely worried about the increased power of the clerics and the whole question of defining the laws of the state by religious means in this debate about "Who is a Jew?" A fairly important body of opinion that is secular has begun to talk about things like a constitution--since Israel doesn't have a constitution--and the notion of citizenship, which defines people not by ethnic but by national criteria. This would then have to include Arabs. That's very impressive to me. I've talked to groups from both sides, independently and together. The trajectory is unmistakable.

Then there is the demographic reality: By the year 2010, there will be demographic parity between the two, Palestinians and Israelis. The South Africans in a country twenty times bigger than Israel couldn't for long maintain apartheid. And it's unlikely that a place like Israel--which is surrounded on all sides by Arab states--is going to be able to maintain what, in effect, is a system of apartheid for Palestinians.

So although a binational state now seems like a totally long shot and completely utopian, not to say to many people a crazy idea, it is the one idea that will allow people to live with--and not exterminate--each other.

Q: Your vision of inclusion and the one-state solution actually follows one of the old streams of Zionism.

Said: As many Palestinians have, I've read the history of debates within the Zionist settlers' movement. There were people of a fairly important caliber, like Martin Buber, like Judah Magnes, who was the first president of Hebrew University, like Hannah Arendt, who realized that there was going to be a clash if the aggressive settlement policies and the ignoring of the Arabs pressed ahead. David Ben-Gurion actually said, "There's no case in history where a people simply gives up and allows another people to take their territory over."

So they knew that there would be a conflict, especially Magnes, who really was an idealist. He was a man way ahead of his time, and a remarkable spirit also. He said, "Let's try to think in terms quite morally and profoundly about the Arabs. Let's think in terms of their presence, not their absence."

That spirit is to be found in the work of the new Israeli historians, who have gone back over the national narrative of Israel and reexamined the myth of Israel's independence and discovered how much of it was based on the denial, or the effacement, or the willful avoidance of the Arabs. All that Israel has been able to do for the last fifty years is not, of course, to get security for itself. There is no security of that sort. But it has been maintaining a kind of holding operation by which the Arabs are simply kept out. Over time that can't work because of demographics and the fact that people don't give up if they're beaten down. They hold on even more resolutely and more stubbornly.

So there's a new climate of opinion. I think you could see it as coming out of Zionism. I don't want to appear negative or critical of it. A lot of it is an inter-Jewish debate, not something that's taking place between Palestinians and Israelis. It's taking place within--as it did in the case of Magnes and Arendt and Buber--the Zionist or Jewish camp.

People like myself, who luckily don't have to face the daily pressures of living in either Israel or Palestine, but have time to reflect at some distance, can play a role in terms of seeking out discussion and debate with their opposite numbers in the other camp. That's beginning to happen, more or less systematically. There are frequent dialogues, frequent conferences between Palestinians and Israeli intellectuals, not with an eye towards--as there have been for so many years--settling the problem in a governmental way, as an adjunct to the peace process. That's led nowhere.

This is a new kind of discussion, one that is based upon patient scholarship and scrupulous archival work. It's not carried out by people with political ambitions. It's mostly people who have a certain standing in their community as academics and intellectuals. It's quite a new phenomenon. I don't think it's been too focused on by the media, which is completely obsessed with the failing peace process.

Q: It is clear that Yasir Arafat is not well. He shakes and looks drawn. What reports do you get on his health?

Said: His loyal supporters--one of whom I saw last week quite by chance, we were on the same plane--say that he's in perfect health. He just has this little shake, this little tremor. Others, including a physician who lives in Gaza and has seen him, are convinced that he has Parkinson's disease. But everyone I've spoken to in the last year who's seen Arafat says he's considerably slowed down and he's not as alert or as perky as he once was. So I suppose that's true. The fact is, however, that he still is in command of everything. He signs every little piece of paper, including employees' vacation requests. Everything has to go past his desk. He's still a micro-manager. He shows no sign of delegating authority in any serious way. Most of his employees bad-mouth him, including his ministers. But they're powerless to do anything.

I think it's important to note something that people may not be aware of: He is the largest single employer in the entire area. I include in that the Israeli government. His bureaucracy is now set by the World Bank at 77,000 people. That doesn't include the security apparatus, which is numbered at roughly 50,000. He employs more than 125,000 people--which, if you multiply by six or seven, roughly the number of dependents per head of household, you're talking about almost a million people. This is a very unproductive segment of the economy, but it accounts for the largest payroll. There is no serious investment in infrastructure. It's only about 3 percent. The situation is, in my opinion, getting worse every day, largely due to his methods, which are essentially to retain control and to make sure that there are no opponents or changes in the structure that is largely dictated to him by the Israelis and the U.S.

Q: Your books were banned in Arafat's realm. Is that still the case?

Said: It's very difficult to know, actually. You can buy them. They're available surreptitiously. To make matters even more ironic and peculiar, a year after the books were banned by order of the minister of information, whose name was affixed to the order, this same man sent me a letter asking me if they could enter into an arrangement with me whereby they could publish my books on the West Bank. You figure it out. I can't.

Q: What about in Israel?

Said: They're available.

Q: And other Arab countries?

Said: It depends. I haven't made a survey. They're mostly available in Egypt and Lebanon. I've heard reports that some of my books have been banned in Jordan and in various other countries of the Gulf. In Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Culture and Imperialism is forbidden in Arabic. But that's the fate of everyone. We're talking about autocracies and despotisms. Somebody sees something that's offensive and they say, "We can't have this." So they ban it. Or they'll ban an issue of a newspaper or magazine. It's all very erratic.

Q: After you visited Israel, you went to Egypt. Is there much interaction between Egyptians and Palestinians?

Said: What you notice amongst Palestinians, whether inside Israel or on the West Bank and Gaza, is a sense of isolation. There's no question that they live under the shadow of Israeli power. What is missing is easy contact, natural contact, with the rest of the Arab world. You can't get to any place in the Arab world from Israel or the West Bank and Gaza without going through a fairly complicated procedure, which causes you to think three or four times before you do it: To cross the border, you need permits, and you go through endless customs. This is also true of me, and I have an American passport, but the fact that it says on it that I was born in Jerusalem means that I'm always put to one side. You're automatically suspect. So traveling and being in contact with Arabs in the Arab world is very, very difficult.

Hardly any Arabs who are not Palestinians come into the Palestinian territories, and hardly any at all, practically none, go to Israel. One of the themes of the nationalist and radical intellectuals of most Arab countries has been the opposition to what they call "normalization"(tatbeea in Arabic), the normalization of life with Israel and with the Arab states that have made formal peace with it. As an act of solidarity with Palestinians, these intellectuals have refused to have anything to do with Israel. The problem is that Palestinians--who are trying to build institutions, universities, newspapers, hospitals--are cut off from the kind of help they need from like-minded or counterpart Arabs. Arab physicians from Egypt or Syria or Lebanon or Jordan could quite easily come and help Palestinians set up hospitals and clinics. They don't because of this stance against normalization.

The peace with Egypt and Jordan is a cold peace: Ordinary citizens, Jordanians or Egyptians, don't go to Israel, and they have nothing to do with Israelis. Israeli tourists go to Egypt and visit the pyramids. But beyond that, there's very little in the way of the kinds of intercourse--exchanges between universities, learned societies, businesses, and so on--that obtain between neighboring countries otherwise at peace in any other part of the world.

Q: How do Arabs react when you urge them to go to Palestine?

Said: When I now encounter Arabs and go to these Arab countries, I say to them, especially to the Egyptians, "You can go to Palestine. You can go through Israel because Israel and Egypt are at peace. You can take advantage of that and go help them, speaking, being there for some time, training them."

"No, they say, we can't possibly allow our passports to be stamped. We won't go to the Israeli embassy and get visas. We won't submit to the humiliation of being examined by Israeli policemen at the border."

I find this argument vaguely plausible on one level but really quite cowardly on the other. It would seem to me that if they took their pride out of it, if they did go through an Israeli checkpoint or barricade or border, they would be doing what other Palestinians do every day and would see what it's like.

Second, they wouldn't be recognizing Israel or giving it any credit. On the contrary, they would be demonstrating solidarity with Palestinians. For example, as Israeli bulldozers destroy houses for settlements, it would be great if there were a large number of Egyptians and Jordanians and others who could be there with Palestinians confronting this daily, minute-by-minute threat.

Q: Are there other reasons Arabs are not coming to Palestine?

Said: It's not only parochialism. There is also a kind of laziness, a kind of sitting back and expecting somebody else to do it. I think that's our greatest enemy, the absence of initiative. They could be helping Palestinians and actually dealing with Israel, not as a fictional entity but as a real power that is in many ways negatively affecting Arab life.

In no university that I know of in the Arab world is there a department of Israeli studies, nor do people study Hebrew. And this is true even of Palestinian universities--where again, you can understand it as a kind of defense against this great power that has intervened in all of our lives, that we don't want to have anything to do with it. But for me, I think the only salvation is to encounter it head-on, learn the language, as so many Israeli political scientists and sociologists and Orientalists and intelligence people spend time studying Arab society. Why shouldn't we study them? It's a way of getting to know your neighbor, your enemy, if that's what it is, and it's a way of breaking out of the prison which suits the Israelis perfectly to have Arabs in.

Alas, this passivity, this provincialism, extends not just to Israel. There is very little attention paid to India, Japan, China, to the great civilizations of the rest of the world. You go to a university like that of Amman. I can guarantee you won't find anybody studying Africa or Latin America or Japan. And it's a sign of delinquency, our weakness, our state of intellectual quiescence, that we are so uncurious about these other parts of the world. We have to break out of our self-constructed, mind-forged manacles and look at the rest of the world--deal with it as equals. There's too much defensiveness, too much sense of the aggrieved. This, in part, accounts for the absence of democracy. It's not just the despotism of the rulers, not just the plots of imperialism, not just the corrupt regimes, not just the secret police. It's our intellectuals' lack of citizenship, in the end. The only way to change a situation is oneself doing it, reading, asking, encountering, breaking out of the prison.

Q: One of the things you stress is the need for Israelis to acknowledge what they did to your people, the Palestinians. Why is that so important?

Said: Because so much of our history has been occluded. We are invisible people. The strength and power of the Israeli narrative is such that it depends almost entirely on a kind of heroic vision of pioneers who came to a desert and dealt not with native people who had a settled existence and lived in towns and had their own society, but rather with nomads who could be driven away. The construction of the figure of the nomad was a very complex procedure, but it was certainly used by the Zionists to deal with us as a people.

Wherever you go in Israel, the road signs are written in English and Hebrew. There's no Arabic. So if you're an Arab and you can't read Hebrew or English, you're lost. That's by design. That's a way to shut out 20 percent of the population.

The formation and education of Israeli citizens in the 1950s and the 1960s was precisely to construct this shutting out of the Palestinians. It's a very difficult thought to accept--that you are there not because you're a great, heroic figure escaping the Holocaust, but you are there largely at the expense of another person whom you've displaced or killed or driven away.

It seems to me therefore absolutely crucial that to achieve any kind of real normalization--where Israelis can become part of the Middle East and not an isolated sanctuary connected to the West exclusively and denying, and contemptuous of, and ignorant of the Palestinians--Israelis must be forced intellectually and morally to confront the realities of their own history.

There is a part to be played by the new Israeli historians, but I think it's also important that Palestinians do it directly to Israelis and say, "This is the reality." At this late date, we can begin to talk about Palestinian and Israeli history together--separate histories that can be seen as intertwined and counterpointed with each other. Without that, the Other is always going to be dehumanized, demonized, invisible. We must find a way.

That's where the role of the mind, the role of the intellectual, the moral consciousness is crucial. There has to be a way properly to deal with the Other and render that Other a place, as opposed to no place. So it's very far from utopian. A utopia means no place. So this is a placing of the Other in a concrete history and space.

Moshe Dayan made a famous remark in the middle 1970s. He said every Israeli town and village had a former Arab occupant. He was able to see it, and he said it. But subsequent generations--partly through the effects of the closeness of the U.S. and the diaspora American Jewish community--have eroded the possibility of that sensibility.

I think it's important for those of us who have freed ourselves from the constraints of dogma and orthodoxy and authority to take those steps and to show those places as they really are. And it's important for Arabs to understand, too, that Israeli Jews are not like Crusaders or imperialists who can be sent back somewhere. It's very important for us also to insist, as I often do, that the Israelis are Israelis. They are citizens of a society called Israel. They're not "Jews," quite simply, who can be thought of once again as wanderers, who can go back to Europe. That vocabulary of transitory and provisional existence is one that you have to completely refuse.

Q: Daniel Barenboim is a world-famous pianist and conductor who was born in Argentina and grew up as an Israeli. You've had some interesting interactions with him. How did you get to know him?

Said: We met seven or eight years ago and quite surprisingly we've become very close friends. He travels a great deal, as do I. Sometimes our paths have crossed. We've tried to do things together. We've had public discussions, not political ones so much, because he's not a politician any more than I am, but we talk about things like music and culture and history. He's very interested, as a Jewish Israeli musician, in the work of people like Wagner, who is, you might say, the total negation of Jews but was a great musician. So he's interested in the process whereby culture and music work in parallel and contradictory ways at the same time. We're doing a book together based on that theme.

But he's also very dissatisfied, as am I, with the prevailing orthodoxy in his own community. He hasn't lived in Israel recently, and last year he refused to do anything with the Israeli Philharmonic for the fiftieth anniversary of Israel. He is very much opposed to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He speaks openly about a Palestinian state. He's a man of courage.

Music connects us, but also the facts of biography. He arrived in Tel Aviv roughly about the time that my family was evicted from Palestine. I arranged recently for him, for the first time ever, to play a recital at the leading West Bank university, Bir Zeit, which he did. It was a great gesture on his part.

The concert was a fantastic success, one of the great events of my life. This was a humane act of solidarity and friendship. Barenboim was offering his services, which God knows in any concert hall in the world would be in tremendous demand and are very costly. He's at the very top of the musical profession as a great pianist and a conductor. But he was there simply as an individual to play.

All of that gave the evening a very high emotional cultural resonance that was lost on absolutely no one there. Zubin Mehta came, a great friend of Daniel's. He's the conductor of the Israeli Philharmonic. He's an Indian, but he's fantastically, fanatically pro-Israeli. He'd never been to the West Bank. But he came. Tears were streaming down his face. It was an event of considerable importance precisely because it wasn't political in the overt sense. Nobody was trying to make a killing, score a point.

Barenboim's position is that if Israel is going to continue to exist, it has to exist in relations of friendship and equality with Arabs and Muslims. He's desperately anxious to learn Arabic. He's a very remarkable man. There aren't too many of them around.

Perhaps I should also mention that he and Yo-Yo Ma are doing something in Weimar this summer. We have this idea where we would bring gifted, mostly Arab, but some Israeli musicians between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to Weimar for about ten days. Weimar, interestingly, is about an hour away from Buchenwald. So there's that history. Plus, of course, it's the city of Goethe and Schiller and Wagner, the summit of German culture. So the idea is to have master classes with Daniel and Yo-Yo and musicians from the Berlin State Opera, which Daniel is the conductor of, and in the evening have discussions led by me on the relationships between culture, politics, history, and especially music. We've accepted some wonderful young musicians. It promises to be quite an exhilarating experience for all of us. The good thing about it, for me, at any rate, is that there is no program. Nobody is going to sign a declaration at the end. What we are interested in is the power of music and discussion and culture to create a sense of equality and fellowship otherwise unavailable to us in the anguish and tension of the polarized life of the Middle East.

Q: Your critique of what is called popularly the "peace process" has been unrelenting since Oslo, September 1993. For years, the mainstream media, at least in the United States, pretty much studiously ignored you. However, recently there's been a surge in terms of your visibility--articles in Newsweek and The New York Times, appearances on NPR, PBS, and other venues. What accounts for that?

Said: It's difficult for me to tell. There's a form of censorship here in the U.S., which is that you're marginalized. You can't appear in the mainstream media. But my stuff is published in the Arab countries, and then it appears on the Internet. It's picked up and people read it. When I got a request to write an article for The New York Times Magazine about my idea of a solution, a binational state for Palestinians and Israelis, that was because an editor there had read me on the Internet. Plus, there's the fact that it was clear, he told me, that the peace process wasn't working, and neither, he said, was Zionism. For those reasons, they turn their attention.

But I don't think it's anything more than just a token kind of side look. "We want to be inclusive so we might as well include him." I think that's really what it is.

In general, the old discourse, the old clichés, the old stereotypes are absolutely in place, untouched by reality or fact. It's quite striking. I was on Charlie Rose on PBS, and he kept repeating the conventional wisdom and didn't let me finish my sentences. What I was saying was so outrageous that he couldn't allow it to be said.

Q: It's been about eight years now since, during a routine check on your cholesterol, you discovered that you had leukemia. People want to know about your health. How are you feeling?

Said: I have had bad periods of time. For the first three years, I didn't need any treatment. Suddenly, in early spring of 1994, I began treatment, first chemotherapy and later radiation. All of which led to various kinds of infections and debilitating consequences which, during 1997 and 1998, were very, very difficult for me. I was sick most of the time. I lost a lot of weight. I have a wonderful Indian doctor who is taking care of me. During the course of all of this, I discovered to my dismay that I have a very rare form of leukemia called refractory leukemia, which resists all the known chemotherapies. Last summer, I did a twelve-week experimental treatment, called a monoclonal antibody, which was incredibly difficult to go through. I was sick the whole time, for twelve weeks. I did it three or four times a week. Happily, I have what is now called a temporary remission. It's not a cure. The disease comes back, but at least it's been able to give me six months so far without major treatment and general good health. I'm feeling good about it.

Q: As they say in Arabic, inshallah, may you be with us for a long time to come.

David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. He interviewed Eqbal Ahmad in the November 1998 issue.