Edward Said sounds like a Palestinian nationalist and writes like a professor of English literature, and in fact he is both. His book is an eloquent defense of the Palestinian Arab people and their right to self-determination. If he over-argues the case and paints Israel and Zionism without redeeming features, it may be because of the intensity of his conviction, which is not without basis in fact, that the Palestinian Arabs have been ill used by others and ignored or dismissed by the Western world.