Said’s Palestinian identity was formed in exile from an Anglican colonial elite

Evidence

Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935. This seems to have been because his parents preferred Jerusalem’s hospitals to those of Cairo. However, his parents, who were Christian Protestants, came from the Lebanon and Said, who was mostly educated in Egypt and then in the United States, had Egyptian and American citizenship. His family usually summered in Lebanon. In his memoir, Out of Place, Said wrote about his childhood and his life in Egypt with an overbearing father and an indulgent mother. He spent only a few months in a school in Jerusalem. So his self-presentation as a Palestinian is questionable. But perhaps the matter is not important. He certainly thought of himself as a Palestinian and passionately identified with their sufferings. He grew up in a wealthy household in which Arabic was used only to speak to the servants. (He only mastered literary Arabic much later in life after taking lessons.) Most of his schooling was at the smart Victoria College in Cairo, ‘a school designed to be the Eton of the Middle East’. The school houses were named after the heroes of British exploration and imperialism: Kitchener, Cromer, Frobisher and Drake. It was forbidden to speak Arabic within the grounds. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 501