AN UNFORGETTABLE GESTURE: At the Fatma Gate, in 2000, on Lebanon's southern frontier with Palestine, Edward Said's arm stretched out, throwing a rock in a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which enters it fourth year this week, and the children of Palestine challenging the military might of Israel with rocks. This act of defiance, during a family visit to the Lebanese south in celebration of total Israeli withdrawal from the country, caused an uproar in Zionist circles, leading to the cancellation of a lecture he was to give at the Vienna Freud Society, and calls for his dismissal from Columbia University. Zionist campaigns against him notwithstanding, Said never succumbed to threats. Until his death last Thursday, he remained a Palestinian activist, focussed but always open-minded enough to distinguish between the Zionist enemy and the Jewish or Israeli human being -- and that is what unsettled his enemies most.
photo: AFP