Quotes by Edward W. Very

“That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.””

“Yet an openly polemical and right-minded "progressive" scholarship can very easily degenerate into dogmatic slumber, a prospect that is not edifying either.””

“Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thought, and vision that I have been calling Orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism; anyone employing Orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality.””

“It was perfectly apparent to Western supporters of Zionism like Balfour that the colonization of Palestine was to be made a goal for the Western powers from the very beginning of Zionist planning: Herzl used the idea, Weizmann used it, every leading Israeli since has used it.””

“Enough!" Blays glared daggers at Dante, then turned them on Raxa. "You think some stupid sword is power? This man can annihilate you down to the burnt ends of your hair, steal a piece of your soul and turn it into a demon, then send that demon to devour everyone you've ever loved. And after that, he can travel into the afterlife to hunt you down and tell you all about it. "With power like that, I'm sure it must be very tempting to abuse it. Gods know everyone else seems to. But we try to use it to make the world just a slightly less horrible place. You're currently delaying us from achieving that. For the good of the land, we ought to smear you and get on with our business.””

“You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries”

“The River Between, by James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiongo), redoes Heart of Darkness by inducing life into Conrad’s river on the very first page. ‘The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.’51 Conrad’s images of river, exploration, and mysterious setting are never far from our awareness as we read, yet they are quite differently weighted, differently”

“In a very literal way the Palestinian predicament since 1948 is that to be a Palestinian at all has been to live in a utopia, a nonplace, of some sort. In an equally literal way, therefore, the Palestinian struggle today is profoundly topical, and it illustrates what I shall say later about the change in Palestinian politics, from fantasy to effectiveness. One redeeming feature of the cubistic form of Palestinian life is that it is focused on the goal of getting a place, a territory, on which to be located nationally. The mere retrospective fact of having been in such a place once, or the contemporary fact of being nonpersons in that place now, no longer supply Palestinians with righteousness or wrath enough to go on fighting. The 1967 war and, ironically, the additional acquisition of Palestinian territory by Zionism put the exiled and dispersed Palestinians in touch with their place. From an esoteric policy of dealing with Palestinians as if they were not there, utopian beings whose brutish presence could be distributed and made to disappear in a maze of regulations forbidding their national presence””