SOURCE: "The Broken Promised Land," in The Observer, No. 10578, July 10, 1994, p. 16.

Below, Gilmour sympathizes with Said's attitude about the Palestinian issues discussed in The Politics of Dispossession.

The most remarkable feature of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been not the great military and political success of the state of Israel or the hardship and misery imposed on the Palestinian people, but the West's heaping of praise and reward on the oppressors, and blame and penalty on the victims—a stark contrast to South Africa. Europe has for some time been more even-handed; not so the United States.

The struggle for Palestine is often thought to be one between two rights: both Arabs and Jews have a right to the land, But, initially at least, that was far from true. As late as 1917, Palestine was 90 per cent Arab. There had long been a small Jewish presence there, but by no...