Ms. Said’s play revisits a 2000 international incident over a widely published photograph of her father at the Lebanese border, about to throw a stone at an abandoned Israeli guardhouse.
Ms. Said casts his action as part of a stone-throwing competition with her older brother, Wadie, with little political significance. Her father at the time called it “a symbolic gesture of joy” that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had ended. His detractors urged Columbia to reprimand him or to repudiate his action, but university officials decided that no action was needed.
Actually, Said was throwing a rock at an Israel army post across the border.
Let's be exact about that.
He could have mooned the soldiers, or used his middle-finger, but a rock is violence, not just a symbol but the actual act of violence in of itself.
And that's what roiled us all at the time.
But Najla redeems herself, to an extent, when she is quoted:
“When I hear the word Palestine, I hear my dad’s voice saying it. But I don’t know what it is, because it’s not a place for me...I don’t know it; I have no connection to it. Even my dad was not really connected to the actual, geographical place — for him it was an idea, a struggle for equality and human rights.”
Najla, I, too, don't know what it is.
P.S.
And who is that breaking bread with Said?
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