Said's "States"

I found the piece written by Said to be really interesting and thought provoking. After reading the little bit of information about his life, the article took a turn and started to give you an insight into the Middle East. Coming from a man who did undergraduate studies at Princeton and received a PhD at Harvard, I knew I was about to read something completely intriguing. The way he described the Arab refugee camps painted such a picture in my head, and even if you couldn’t get a sense of these camps from the article, plenty of pictures were provided, which made it even more interesting. Seeing how much destruction there was gave so much insight into the Palestinian exile. What these people went through is nothing anyone of the modern age could even imagine. Camps were raided and ravaged for supplies. The Arabs were treated as commodities, not as individuals. Said pointed out that the Palestinians were subject to special laws, status and violence, all of which was just furthering the unfair treatment. Reading the article almost gave me a sense of the Holocaust. These people were exiled and even given unique cards to identify them as refugees. Even in their own homeland, they would always be considered aliens. Successful or not, I felt like they couldn’t win either way. It seemed as if they had lost all sense of identity with themselves. After time, it was like the violence they encountered and experienced just became normal. Even among fellow Palestinians, war was breaking out and children’s minds were being corrupted. The author himself even fled the country at a very young age and has yet to return for fear of death and growing violence. Like I mentioned before, these people lost who they were. There wasn’t even proof that they existed anymore, Said states. There has been no census kept for years. He also says that it is definitely near impossible to maintain any sort of identity while in exile. Their whole existence has just been put into ruins.