No doubt the British prime minister is genuinely concerned to push for a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet one may wonder just how even-handed Blair’s approach to that conflict really is. No more than Bush himself has Blair taken conspicuous steps to consult Arab opinion. When he came to power in 1997, he appointed as his adviser on the Middle East the wealthy businessman Lord Levy — a British Jew about whose intimate ties with Israel there has never been any secret. What has stopped him from recruiting a counterbalancing Arab adviser on the region’s affairs?

The fact is that exponents of the Palestinian point of view are kept at arms length by the political establishments of both London and Washington. It is hard to imagine Blair or Bush extending the hand of friendship to so forthright an advocate of the Palestinian cause as the US-based academic and political intellectual Edward Said — let alone exposing themselves to the influence of such an individual.

Admittedly, none of this has stopped Said from becoming renowned for his incisive contributions to the debate on the Middle East — even if his status remains that of a somewhat suspect, if not positively subversive, figure. Indeed, Tony Blair would almost certainly be loath to be seen in Said’s company for fear of sending out what, in present-day mediaspeak, is known as the “wrong signal.” Not that Britain’s philistine, big business-fixated leader is often seen in the company of writers and intellectuals of any description.

When he comes to London, as he not infrequently does, Said is at least welcome at the BBC. Last week, he took part in BBC Radio Four’s popular discussion program Start the Week. Several million listeners in Britain and beyond heard the prolific Palestinian critic talk about his latest publication, “Freud and the Non-European”. Originally a lecture delivered at the behest of London’s Freud Museum, this brief but characteristically polemical work represents the latest installment in Said’s long-running campaign to radicalize public perceptions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In the course of it, he seeks to lay bare the primordial roots of the Middle East crisis, raising challenging questions about the nature of Jewish identity and the very rationale underlying the state of Israel.

An exemplary citizen of the world, the Jerusalem-born Said feels a natural sense of affinity with Freud, the cosmopolitan intellectual who, in his late work “Moses and Monotheism” cast doubt on conventional Jewish wisdom about the historic exclusiveness of the Judaic identity. As Said points out, Freud maintained that Moses was not in fact a Jew but an Egyptian and therefore, in a strict sense, inadmissible as the legislative progenitor of the Jewish race. Said’s contention is that, if Freud’s skepticism had been heeded, the evolution of the Jews and of Jewish thinking (and of the world) could have taken another course altogether. How different things might have been, he suggests, had Israel’s ideological founders not “canceled” Freud’s deliberate “opening out of Jewish identity toward its non-Jewish background.”

“Freud and the Non-European” is especially fascinating for its observations on the Israeli preoccupation with archaeology. Archaeology, Said remarks, became the “privileged Israeli science par excellence” because it was seen as a means of dispelling the alienation experienced by European Jews in newly established Israel; it was felt to be a “royal road” to Jewish-Israeli identity, a means of literalizing the Bible and of giving flesh and bones to the history of a long-scattered people. Riddled with nationalist preconceptions, Israeli archaeology has, on this reckoning, been deployed to underline the historic pre-eminence of the Jewish claim to the “Holy Land”, to rationalize what amounts to a colonial settlement.

By contrast, Freud, according to Said, was convinced that even so seemingly certain a thing as the racial identity of the Jews was simply not susceptible to being incorporated into one great definitive identity. And he saw Moses, the non-European Egyptian, as the great symbol of the futility of any such project. In the quixotic closing pages of his lecture, Said proposes that the questions thrown up by the founder of psychoanalysis about the essentially unresolved nature of Judaism could yet, in the fullness of time, form the basis of a “binational” state, with Jews and Palestinians figuring as integral parts, rather than antagonists, of each others’ history.

Given the great population shifts and proliferating “hyphenated” identities of the present era, Said is surely right to say that there are very general lessons to be derived from Freud’s discussion of the problematic nature of racial self-definition. Yet it hardly needs emphasizing how far removed his philosophical speculations are from the actual everyday agony of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Said, the urbane cosmopolitan, is liable to the charge that he is a mere dreamer, blind to the difficulties ordinary people face in breaking free from old tribal behavior patterns.

The highbrow inter-racial friendship he enjoys with the similarly cosmopolitan Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim is one which, in today’s bitterly polarized world, few seem capable of emulating.

Still, there is surely too little dreaming in contemporary public life, too little of the utopian spirit of the 1960s, as embodied in idealistic radicals of that time like Martin Luther King. Edward Said’s achievement is not just to have articulated the claims of the dispossessed but to have tirelessly projected a vision of what might be. It is an achievement that is all the more impressive considering his uncertain health in recent years — not to mention the entrenched institutional opposition that he has had to overcome.