Radicalism is nothing more than understanding the root of a problem. Time and again, the late Palestinian and American thinker Edward Said struck at the self-deceptions, the shortcomings, and the prejudices underlying U.S. foreign policy. Throughout the 1990s—when the “end of history” seemed at hand, to be ushered in by a global peace brokered by U.S. supremacy—Said forewarned of the “charade” of the U.S. peace process in the Middle East. He despaired toward the end of his life of any change in the Palestinians’ disastrous position, whose leadership had signed away any gains made in the national struggle for self-determination with the Oslo Accords, which he called “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.”
