Edward Said and the Task of the Intellectual Today

What does a new edition of Edward Said’s classic ‘Representations of the Intellectual’ reveal in the context of the crisis in Gaza?

By Rebecca Ruth GouldFebruary 2, 2026

• Philosophy & Religion

• Politics

THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA has revealed with brutal clarity how an entire class of intellectuals, along with the institutions that make their work possible, can be obliterated in real time while the states that fund and arm this destruction look away. Israeli forces used North American– and European-manufactured weapons to destroy all the universities in Gaza, including Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University–Gaza, Al-Quds Open University, Gaza University, Islamic University of Gaza, Israa University, Palestine Technical College, University College of Applied Sciences, University of Palestine, the Palestine College of Nursing, and Hassan II University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. Even after their physical infrastructures have been hollowed out, education in Palestine continues. Israel’s targeting of intellectuals over the past two years has shown the centrality of their role in resisting genocide.

While the Israel Defense Forces have claimed that universities were destroyed in order to fight Hamas, the real targets were the intellectuals who keep memory alive and show their people how to turn education into resistance. Between 2023 and 2025, Israeli attacks murdered over 1,000 teachers and many more students. The destruction of Palestinian education has given new currency to scholasticide, a term first used by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi to describe Israel’s methods of offensive warfare in 2009. Taking the concept even further, Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a form of genocidal epistemicide that aims not just at the eradication of an educational system in the present but also at the destruction of its very possibility in the future.

Faced with this onslaught, many intellectuals in the West have failed to meet the ethical demands of their vocation. More troubling, however, is the radically uneven way in which intellectual work is being evaluated: some truths incur severe punishment, while others are rewarded or ignored. Critiques of certain genocides pose risks that critiques of other genocides do not. Since 2023, intellectuals across Europe and North America have been imprisoned, fired, or suspended from their jobs; subjected to debilitating legal campaigns; censured; and canceled simply for speaking out about Palestine. The persecution is ongoing. In the United Kingdom, mere support for the nonviolent direct action group Palestine Action has led to thousands of arrests.

Universities, museums, and other institutions that provide intellectuals with their livelihood have shown themselves to be reliable allies of the state in the suppression of free speech about Palestine. State suppression of intellectuals who speak out against genocide correlates with a government’s investment in the global arms trade and in the imperial system that underwrites the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

What is the task of the intellectual at a time when, at the heart of liberal democracies, genocide is normalized and protest suppressed? How can we heed the voices of intellectuals such as Refaat Alareer, martyred in a targeted Israeli air strike on December 6, 2023, and Gazan poet Saleem Al-Naffar, killed the following day? How do we continue the work of Omar Harb, who died of starvation during the Gaza famine on September 4, 2025? Before she was targeted and killed in an Israeli strike on April 16, 2025, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna addressed a demand to the living: “If I die, […] I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.” If being an intellectual means, in part, carrying forward the legacy of those who died in pursuit of our vocation, what obligations does their systematic annihilation impose on us now?

To answer this question, it is instructive to turn to the work of one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the past half century: the late Edward Said, whose books are currently being reissued by the UK-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Said knew that intellectuals must be willing to immerse themselves in the spirit of a movement larger than themselves, must be willing to speak as part of a collective, especially when that collective stands up for the voices of the oppressed. Yet they must also be willing to act alone, without reward or recognition, their only satisfaction being the knowledge that they are speaking inconvenient truths. Intellectuals must be ready for the moment when their radical commitment to the cause of truth leads to isolation, unpopularity, and widespread condemnation. The intellectual’s being, Said wrote in his 1994 book Representations of the Intellectual, is “staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do.”

In selecting Representations of the Intellectual—along with Said’s 1979 book The Question of Palestine—to reissue in new critical editions, Fitzcarraldo has chosen wisely. The Question of Palestine was the first book by a mainstream US publisher to put Palestine at the center of public debate. Fifteen years later, Representations of the Intellectual was the first book to reflect in general terms on the task of the intellectual from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Both books were landmark works in the context of their times, and both have much to teach us today. The conditions Said diagnosed have never left us, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza has brought the relevance of his work into even sharper relief.

In his introduction to Representations, Said reflects on the hostility he faced merely for being Palestinian. The book is based on his 1993 Reith Lectures, a BBC series established in 1948. As soon as he was announced by the BBC as the featured speaker, the media began to question Said’s suitability. As a Palestinian, he was seen as biased and not best suited to address the public on matters of shared concern. Palestinian intellectuals continue to be marginalized and silenced in mainstream spaces, but there is more pushback against that now. From Noura Erakat to Mohammed el-Kurd, there is no shortage of Palestinian voices that, despite efforts to sideline them, actively shape public discourse.

Although the space for diversity in the public sphere has expanded in the three decades since Said delivered his lectures, other aspects of the world he critiqued have remained stubbornly static and have even deteriorated. Among the continuities between Said’s world and our own is the ongoing cowardice of the managerial class that governs the elite institutions where intellectuals work. British Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad addresses the current betrayal of intellectuals in her introduction to this new edition, and it is a recurring theme of Said’s work. Intellectuals regularly fail to mobilize public sentiment against injustice, and no one who has witnessed over two years of genocide in Gaza is likely to disagree with either Hammad or Said that the intellectual class has utterly failed to fulfill its social function.

Without offering programmatic solutions, Said presents a vision of the intellectual as a thinker suspicious of state-based power and shaped by the experience of exile. These qualities give us insight into how Said saw himself. He celebrates figures such as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell whose “specific, individual voice and presence […] mak[e] an impression […] over and above their arguments.” For Said, intellectuals matter not just because of what they say but because of how they say it.

The extent to which intellectuals manage to connect their stances with their own unique personalities as well as with the times in which they live—often oppositionally—is a gauge of how they have fulfilled their vocation. For Said, intellectuals are “constitutively unfinished”: they are perpetually balancing the “problems of one’s own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere.”

Representations of the Intellectual can be read autobiographically as, borrowing from Gramsci, “an inventory of the self.” Read in this way, the book becomes a reflection on Said’s own role as an intellectual, and an account of the heavy price he paid for his outspoken criticism of the Oslo Accords. For its explicit and ongoing reinforcement of partition and occupation, Oslo marked the betrayal of the intellectuals at a world-historical scale.

The Oslo Accords were signed at the White House by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat the same year Said delivered his Reith Lectures. Although widely celebrated at the time as a major achievement of US diplomacy, they functioned, in practice, to dismember Palestine and accelerate Israel’s development as an apartheid state. Said’s criticisms of Oslo were prophetic, but at the time his skepticism simply isolated him. The result was a rift between Said and Arafat, with whom he had previously worked closely, and Said’s exclusion from the formal institutions that were tasked with negotiating a Palestinian state.

Since 1977 (one year before the publication of his landmark study Orientalism and two years before The Question of Palestine), Said had served as a central member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the PLO. During this time, Said was an “organic intellectual” in Gramsci’s sense—not merely a critic but someone embedded in a collective political project whose ideas helped shape the PLO’s agenda. After Oslo, Said no longer had a central role inside Palestinian leadership circles; he became an oppositional intellectual. The so-called peace negotiations of Oslo transformed Said’s position from insider critic to outspoken dissident.

Said’s experience of isolation clarified what was at stake in his argument that “the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers or—the more difficult path—to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction.” Said rejected the fake stability promised by Oslo in order to continue calling for genuine freedom for the Palestinian people, no matter how unpopular it made him.

Said takes this insistence on the independence of the intellectual even further when he draws on the example of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who became a leading intellectual and political figure within the Algerian anti-colonial struggle. “It is inadequate,” Said says, “only to affirm that a people was dispossessed, oppressed or slaughtered, denied its rights and its political existence, without at the same time doing what Fanon did during the Algerian war, affiliating those horrors with the similar afflictions of other people.”

This call for a comparative—or, in Saidian terms, contrapuntal—approach is the high-water mark of his conception of the cosmopolitan intellectual. It is a vision that few of us will be able to achieve. Said makes clear why contrapuntal thinking is a moral imperative and an intellectual responsibility in an age of multiple genocides. “[J]ust because you represent the sufferings that your people lived through which you yourself might have lived through also,” he writes, “you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims.” Said’s directive applies broadly, but it also works precisely as a diagnosis of Zionism and its historical amnesia in the current moment. It explains why liberal Zionists and their allies refuse to conceive how the state of Israel could perpetrate genocide against the people whose homes and lands they had stolen.

Said understood that the intellectual’s position is not easy to occupy, certainly not with any kind of consistency. There is no template, and no guarantee that the intellectual’s willingness to put themselves on the line will make a difference in the short term. Because they cannot trust institutions, states, or religions, conscience must be their guide. But the resonance of Said’s books in our particular moment—the fact that they matter in certain respects now even more than they did at the time of their composition—shows that short-term calculus is not always the most relevant measure of their value. Sometimes, the intellectual must also look to the future.

The Reith Lectures, which provided the occasion for Said’s book in 1993, have since been discredited by their use of censorship to placate those in power. Given how thoroughly the BBC has already disgraced itself by its coverage of the genocide in Gaza, one wonders whether Said would have accepted the offer to deliver the Reith Lectures had it been extended to him today. Has the role of the intellectual as someone who can credibly navigate hegemonic institutions and still speak truth to power been entirely eviscerated by complicity in genocide?

Said insists that the intellectual’s task is not reconciliation with power but friction against it. Gaza names the moment when the mandate of the oppositional intellectual can no longer be deferred, aestheticized, or selectively applied. The annihilation of an entire intellectual class; the destruction of Palestinian education; the targeting of teachers, students, archives, and universities; and the criminalization of Palestine solidarity expose not only the brutality of the settler-colonial state but also the bankruptcy of the liberal institutions that claim to safeguard knowledge while facilitating its erasure. At this historical juncture, the question is no longer whether the intellectual can afford to speak out, but whether silence is itself complicity.