Short answer: No. As of August 2026, the historical record is clear and has not changed: Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary scholar who died in 2003, was one of the most prominent academic critics of Zionism and Israeli policy of his generation. He never supported Israel as a Jewish state.
Said died on September 24, 2003, in New York City, of chronic lymphocytic leukemia he had battled for roughly 12 years, according to the Washington Post. He was 67. What follows is a look at what he actually said and did on the subject of Israel during his lifetime.
What Edward Said has actually said and done
November 1, 1935: Said was born in Jerusalem's Talbiyya neighborhood to Wadie Said and Hilda Musa, an Arab Christian (Protestant) family. The family left Jerusalem for Cairo amid the 1947-49 war, with accounts differing on the exact timing, as documented by Wikipedia and corroborated by Jerusalem Story.
1978: Said published "Orientalism," the book that made him internationally influential. It argued that Western scholarship about the Middle East and Asia had served imperialist and political ends rather than objective inquiry, a framework, per Wikipedia, that underlies his later description of Israel's founding as a form of Western colonial imposition on the Palestinian population.
1977 to 1991: Said served as an independent member of the Palestinian National Council, the PLO's parliament-in-exile, then resigned in 1991 to protest Yasser Arafat's negotiating direction with Israel, as reported by Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy.
September 1993: After the Oslo Accords were signed, Said called the agreement "an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles," arguing it left Israeli occupation intact under a framework of limited self-rule rather than ending it, a position discussed by the Palestine Return Centre in its review of his published essays.
1999: Said wrote in the New York Times that it was time to question whether the Oslo process could deliver peace at all. He argued instead for a single binational state in which Israelis and Palestinians would hold equal citizenship, rather than a two-state partition, as summarized by the Jerusalem Post.
July 3, 2000: During a visit to the Israel-Lebanon border after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Said picked up a stone and threw it across the border fence toward an empty Israeli watchtower roughly a half-mile away, an act he described as symbolic. A photo of the moment ran in newspapers worldwide. The Zionist Organization of America asked Columbia University, where Said was a longtime professor of literature, to sanction him. Columbia declined to discipline him, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator, a report echoed in a later CounterPunch retrospective.
September 24, 2003: Said died in New York City at age 67 of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a disease he had lived with since a 1991 diagnosis, per the Washington Post.
The bigger picture
Edward Said was a Columbia University professor of literature and one of the most consequential Palestinian intellectuals of the 20th century. On Israel specifically, his record is consistent and public. He did not recognize Israel's founding as legitimate on the terms Israel itself uses, describing it instead as an act of Western-backed colonization that displaced the Palestinian Arab population his own family belonged to. He spent decades arguing against a two-state partition and for a single binational state with equal citizenship for Jews and Arabs, a position that put him at odds with both official Israeli policy and, eventually, the PLO's own Oslo-era leadership, whose strategy he resigned his parliamentary seat and later publicly denounced. He was not Jewish; his family were Arab Christians, and by his own later account he described himself as agnostic. There is no record of him supporting Israel, praising Israeli institutions, or backing pro-Israel causes.
The bottom line
Edward Said did not support Israel. He was a leading intellectual voice against Zionism and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, resigned from the PLO's parliament in 1991 over what he saw as excessive compromise with Israel, denounced the Oslo Accords, symbolically threw a stone across the Israel-Lebanon border in 2000, and spent his career advocating for a single binational state rather than a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one. He died in 2003 and had no Jewish ancestry or identity.
Wear where you actually stand
Not everyone in this conversation stood where Said did. If you want a plain, everyday way to show you're on Israel's side, our I Stand With Israel bracelet or the wider I Stand With Israel collection is a simple, wearable statement, no debate required.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
