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PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN HISTORIAN RASHID KHALIDI: ‘ISRAEL HAS CREATED
A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO FOR ITSELF. THE CLOCK IS TICKING’  
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Interview with Rashid Khalidi by Itay Mashiach
November 30, 2024
Haaretz
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_ The story isn't Hamas, religion or terrorism. Rashid Khalidi, the
preeminent Palestinian intellectual of our time, is convinced that the
Israelis simply don't understand the conflict - living in a 'bubble of
false consciousness' _

Rashid Khalidi. "There are still the elites who will support anything
Israel does. But the clock is ticking.", Credit: Javier Barbancho / El
Mundo, Madrid // Haaretz

 

On May 1 this year, the day after the New York police, with the aid of
stun grenades, burst into the building where pro-Palestinian
protesters had barricaded themselves on the campus of Columbia
University, Prof. Rashid Khalidi went to one of the gates of the
university to talk to demonstrators. In aviator sunglasses and
wielding a megaphone, the historian looked to be in his element.

"When I was a student back in the 1960s, we were told we were led by
'a bunch of outside agitators,' by politicians whose names nobody
remembers today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed
the Vietnam War and racism," he told the crowd, adding that, "today we
honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful
war… And one day what our students have done here will be
commemorated in the same way. They are – and they were – on the
right side of history."

Khalidi has been described as the most significant Palestinian
intellectual of his generation, as the successor to Edward Said, and
as the preeminent living historian of Palestine. Last month he retired
from Columbia after 22 years, during which he also edited or co-edited
the Journal of Palestinian Studies. In his 2020 book "The Hundred
Years' War on Palestine," he summed up the conflict by way of six
"declarations of war" on the Palestinians. Israeli readers would not
consider some of the events described to be wars – the Balfour
Declaration and the Oslo Accords, for example.

The declarers of the wars – Britain, the United States and, above
all, Israel – are described as powerful oppressors who have
repeatedly run roughshod over the Palestinians and quashed their
rights. Are we again talking about Palestinians "wallowing in their
own victimization" (in the words of Khalidi, who is well aware of this
criticism, in the book), or about a different perspective on the
subject? Judging by the book's sales, his message is falling on
receptive ears. After October 7
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it catapulted onto the New York Times best-seller list and stayed
there almost consecutively for a total of 39 weeks.

Khalidi argues that the present war is not the "Israeli September 11,"
nor is it a new Nakba
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While each of those events marked a historical rupture, this war is
part of a continuum. Despite its anomalous level of violence, the war
does not stand outside history, he believes. On the contrary: The only
way to understand it is within the context of the war that has been
ongoing here for the past century.

Khalidi, 76, is a scion of one of the oldest and most respected
Palestinian families in Jerusalem. Its members have included
politicians, judges and scholars, and it can trace its genealogy back
to the 14th century. The family's famed library, which was established
by his grandfather in 1900 and resides in a 13th-century Mamluk
building in Jerusalem's Old City abutting the Haram al-Sharif (Temple
Mount), constitutes the largest private collection of Arabic
manuscripts in Palestine – the oldest of them goes back about a
thousand years. On the same street, Chain Gate Street, is another
building, which also belongs to the family and was intended to house
an expansion of the library. Earlier this year, Jewish settlers burst
into it and briefly occupied the site.

Khalidi integrates family members into the history he writes, in some
cases attributing extensive influence to their actions (the Israeli
historian Benny Morris has characterized this "a species of
intellectual nepotism"). His uncle Husayn al-Khalidi was mayor of
Jerusalem briefly during the period of the British Mandate, and was
exiled to the Seychelles in the wake of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939.
In 1948 his grandfather refused initially to leave his home in Tel
a-Rish; the house is still standing, on the outskirts of the Neve Ofer
neighborhood in Tel Aviv, thanks to the fact that members of the
proto-Zionist group Bilu rented rooms in the building in 1882, making
it a historic landmark for Israelis.

During the War of Independence, Ismail Khalidi, Rashid's father, was a
student of political science in New York, where Khalidi was born in
1948. It is not the only juncture at which his biography intersects
with the history of the conflict, the subject of his research. He was
teaching at the American University of Beirut when the Israel Defense
Forces besieged the city in 1982. Because of his connections with the
Palestine Liberation Organization, foreign correspondents covering
the Lebanon war
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quoted him anonymously as "an informed source."

By mid-September, long after an American-brokered cease-fire and the
departure of the PLO from Beirut, Khalidi looked with bewilderment at
"a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in
complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of
Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity," he writes in the book. The
next day it turned out that the flares were intended to light up the
way to the Sabra and Shatila
[[link removed]] refugee
camps for the Christian Phalanges.

 
According to Khalidi, "If the Israelis say 'security,' the Americans
bow down."  (Photo credit: Evan Vucci/AP  //  Haaretz)
From 1991 to 1993, Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian
delegation to the peace talks in Madrid and Washington. He elaborated
on his criticism of the role played by the United States in the
negotiations in an earlier book, "Brokers of Deceit," in 2013. The
American diplomatic effort in the Middle East had only made the
possibility of peace more remote, he maintained.

"The Americans were more Israeli than the Israelis," he says now. "If
the Israelis say 'security,' the Americans bow down and bang their
heads on the ground. And the most extreme form of this is Joe
'Hasbara' Biden, who talks as if he's [IDF Spokesperson Daniel]
Hagari," he adds, using the Hebrew word for Israeli public diplomacy
efforts.

However sharp his criticism of the U.S. and Israel may sound to
Israeli ears, Khalidi has riled members of the younger generation and
the more militant of pro-Palestinian activists in North America with
his nuanced responses to events since October 7, 2023,. "I think many
of them would disagree with all the distinctions I made about
violence," he says, adding, "I don't care."

At the beginning of the war last year, he was unequivocal in saying
that Hamas' attack on Israeli civilians was a war crime. "If a Native
American liberation movement came and fired an R.P.G. at my apartment
building because I'm living on stolen land, it wouldn't be justified,"
he told The New Yorker
[[link removed]] in
December last year. "You either accept international humanitarian law
or you don't."

Today Khalidi is angry. People who were in contact with him in the
days after October 7 said he was devastated. "It affected me like it
affects everybody who has personal connections," he told me. "I'm
affected on every level."

He has family in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Beirut,
as well as students and many friends in Israel. When I asked him
whether he was surprised by the level of violence, he paused for a
moment to think. "Yes, I was surprised on October 7," he said, and
added, "less by the Israeli response."

 
A Gazan man sits atop the rubble at the al-Bureij refugee camp,
earlier this month. "There's a degree of grief and pain that just
doesn't go away."  (Photo credit: Eyad Baba/AFP  //  Haaretz)
Throughout our conversation, conducted online in late October and
mid-November, the importance he attributes to keeping an open channel
with Israelis is apparent. Hence also his consent to be interviewed.
In his view, it's an integral element of the path to victory.

_What would you say Palestinian society is feeling at the moment?_

"There's a degree of grief and pain that just doesn't go away, when
contemplating the number of people who have been killed and the number
of people whose lives have been ruined forever: Even though they may
survive, they will have been traumatized in ways that can't be healed.
At the same time, it's happened before. I mean, 19,000 people were
killed in Lebanon in 1982 – Lebanese and Palestinians. It's horrible
to say this, but we're used to it; Palestinian society is inured to
suffering and loss. We've experienced it before, every generation.

"I don't think that mitigates the grief," he continues. "It certainly
doesn't mitigate the anger, the bitterness. Everyone I know wakes up
every morning and looks at the latest horrors, and again before going
to bed. It accompanies us in our lives every day, all the time, even
when we're trying to avoid thinking about it."
 

The shift in public opinion is a result of people seeing what's really
happening and reacting as normal people would to babies dying. You [in
Israel] don't see babies dying. You Israelis, you as a group, as a
collective, are not allowed to see that.

Rashid Khalidi

In Khalidi's view, "Israelis live in a little bubble of false
consciousness that their media and their politicians create for them,
and underestimate the degree to which the rest of the world knows
what's actually going on. The shift in public opinion is a result of
people seeing what's really happening and reacting as normal people
would to babies dying. You [in Israel] don't see babies dying. You
Israelis, you as a group, as a collective, are not allowed to see
that.

"Or it's framed in a way that says, it's their own fault or it's
because of Hamas or human shields or some other lying explanation," he
notes. "But most people in the world see it for what it is. They don't
need some lying Admiral Hagari to tell them that what you see is not
real."

_What surprised you about the level of violence on October 7?_

"Like Israeli intelligence, I didn't think such a huge attack could be
mounted. You know, it's like a pressure cooker. You put pressure on
and you put pressure on, not just for decades but over generations.
And sooner or later, it will explode. Any historian can tell you that
the Gaza Strip is where Palestinian nationalism was the most
developed, where movement after movement was created. The pressure
being put on those people who are squeezed into that area, seeing
their former villages right across the Green Line – any historian
should have been able to predict it. It's action and reaction. But I
didn't expect that level."
 
Gazans atop a Israeli tank at the border, on Oct. 7. "Any historian
should have been able to predict" the attack. "But I didn't expect
that level."  (Photo credit: AP  //  Haaretz)
_Has Israel ever had a real opportunity to break out of this cycle of
blood?_

"I think this has been increasingly the direction [taken by Israel]
for most of this century. The last Israeli attempt, the last sign of a
willingness by an Israeli government to do something other than to use
force, was under [former Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert. And I'm not
suggesting that was an off-ramp [from the conflict]. But with that
exception, it's been an 'iron wall' since Jabotinsky [Revisionist
leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who coined the term in 1923]. Force and more
force. Because you're trying to impose a reality on the region, trying
to force people to accept something that has sent shock waves
throughout the Middle East since the 1920s and 1930s. I mean, you read
the press in Syria and Egypt and Iraq in 1910, and people are worried
about Zionism."

_At the beginning of "The Hundred Years' War," you quote from a letter
sent by a member of your family, an accomplished Jerusalem scholar, to
Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, in 1899. Zionism was
natural and just, he wrote – "who could contest the right of Jews in
Palestine?" But it's inhabited by others, he added, who will never
accept being superseded. Therefore, "In the name of God, let Palestine
be left alone."_

"He saw it as clearly as I see you today. This reality has been
causing shock waves from the beginning. You had volunteers coming to
fight in Palestine in the 1930s from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt; and
again in 1948. I see it as a continuum, but I don't think it's
possible to see it otherwise, frankly. You have to pretend that
history started on October 7 or on June 7, 1967, or on May 15, 1948.
But that's not the way history works."

_In your book, you describe 2006 as a potential missed exit. You argue
that Hamas performed a surprising U-turn, participated in [Palestinian
Authority] elections with a moderate campaign, and accepted implicitly
the two-state solution. The "Prisoners' Document" from that period,
calling on Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join the PLO and focus the
struggle in the territories across the Green Line, expressed a similar
spirit. Do you believe Hamas was going through a genuine
transformation that could have, down the road, led to an end of the
violence?_

"I have no personal insight into the hearts and minds of the Hamas
leadership. What I can tell you is that within the spectrum of
opinions, it had a resonance that I think is reflected in some Hamas
statements and among some of the leaders. This encompasses, I think,
the period before the Prisoners' Document and the coalition government
of 2007, and may even have included [Hamas founder] Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin, who talked about a hundred years' truce. Did they represent
everyone? I don't know. What was in their hearts? I don't know. But
there appears to have been something there that Israel rigorously
chose to squash."

_How do you account for that?_

"It's perfectly clear that across the entire Israeli political
spectrum, from end to end, there was no acceptance of the idea of a
completely sovereign, completely independent, Palestinian state that
represented self-determination. On the [Benjamin] Netanyahu end of the
spectrum, that's clear. But even [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin, in
his last speech in the Knesset, said, 'We are offering the
Palestinians less than a state, we will control the Jordan River
Valley.' What does that mean? It means a continuation [of the
occupation] in a modified form. That's also what [former Prime
Minister Ehud] Barak and Olmert were offering, with tinkering at the
edges."

_In the negotiations held in Taba [2001] and in Annapolis [2007],
there was talk of sovereignty._

"Excuse me. A sovereign state does not have its population registry,
its airspace and its water resources controlled by a foreign power.
That's not sovereignty. That's a Bantustan, it's an Indian
reservation. You can call it whatever you want, a mini-state, a
non-state, a partial state or 'less than a state.'"

 
Rabin, Arafat and Peres in 1994. "No Palestinian leadership should
have accepted any such agreements."  (Photo credit: Yaacov Saar, GPO
 //  Haaretz)
_Maybe the openness to a state would have developed further down the
line. Rabin's speech was delivered under tremendous political
pressure._

"Maybe. If you didn't have three-quarters of a million settlers, if
Rabin hadn't been assassinated, if the Palestinians had been much
tougher in the negotiations. In Washington [1991-1994], we said to the
Americans that we were negotiating about a pie while the Israelis are
eating the pie through ongoing settlement. 'You promised that the
status quo would be maintained, and they are stealing.' And the
Americans did nothing. At that point it should have been clear that if
we didn't take a stand, colonization would continue, Israeli security
control and occupation would continue in a different form. That's what
Oslo did.

"Part of the problem is that the Palestinians took the awful things
that were offered to us in Washington. They gave 60 percent of the
West Bank to Israel in the form of Area C. Those were concessions by
the PLO, it's not Israel's fault. No Palestinian leadership should
have accepted any such agreements."

_A colleague of yours, the Israeli historian Shlomo Ben Ami, explained
the collapse of the Camp David talks, in July 2000, as a Palestinian
leadership failure. In an interview in 2001, he said that the
Palestinians "couldn't free themselves from the need for vindication,
from their victimization"; that negotiating with Arafat was like
"negotiating with a myth"; and that "the Palestinians don't want a
solution as much as they want to place Israel in the dock." Is it
possible that the region missed a historic opportunity because of
Yasser Arafat's leadership?_

"You want to take me down into the weeds; I want to get up and look at
the rotting garden. [An American] president wasted seven and a half
years of his presidency – before bringing, a couple of months before
an election, when he's not a lame duck but a dead duck, people to Camp
David. You want to broker it? Then do it within the time limit set by
the [Oslo] agreement you signed on the White House lawn in 1993. [The
process] should have been completed by 1999. Barak had already lost
his majority in the Knesset – another dead, or dying, duck.

"As for Arafat, where is he in 2000? I lived in Jerusalem in the early
1990s. You could drive anywhere with green plates from the West Bank
– to the Golan Heights, to Eilat, to Gaza. You had 100,000
[Palestinian] workers in Israel, and Israelis shopping across the West
Bank. By 1999, the Palestinian economy had been stunted. Permits,
checkpoints, walls, blockades, separation. Arafat's popularity
collapsed."

_You're talking about the deteriorating Palestinian economy in the
1990s, but another important and traumatic episode for Israel in that
decade was the suicide bombings of 1994 to 1996, to which you devote
little space in your book._

"The separation began before the first suicide bombing. The idea of
separation was central to how Rabin and [Foreign Minister Shimon]
Peres understood this [process] from the beginning. And separation
means you wall off the Palestinians
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little enclaves and detach them from the Israeli economy. All these
developments were pre-planned. The excuse of the suicide bombings
explains the specifics, but it doesn't explain the idea."

_The suicide attacks were a significant factor in scuttling the
process._

"Remember what preceded the suicide bombings."

 
The wreckage of an Israeli bus, shown in this Oct. 19, 1994 file
photo, stands in the middle of one of Tel Aviv's busiest streets
following a suicide bomb explosion in which 22 people died and scores
were injured.  (Photo credit: Jerome Delay / Associated Press  //
 Haaretz)
_You're referring to Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Palestinian
worshippers in Hebron, in February 1994._

"Yes, and Rabin's response to the massacre. He did not uproot Kiryat
Arba [the urban settlement abutting Hebron], he did not pull the
settlers out of Hebron, he did not punish the guilty – he punished
the Palestinians. Then it became clear what Oslo was: an extension and
reinforcement of the occupation. And Hamas took advantage of this.
They saw that the whole edifice that Arafat tried to sell to the
Palestinians was not going to lead to what he had claimed. That, along
with everything else that was happening, gave them an enormous
opening. The situation of the Palestinians worsened throughout the
1990s, giving Hamas tremendous ammunition.

"Looking back, from the 1973 war until 1988, the PLO moved away from
[its declared goal of] the liberation of all of Palestine and from the
use of violence. That is summarized in the PLO's 1988 Palestinian
National Council declaration in Algiers. Those who objected ended up
in Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and so on.

"How could the first group have triumphed? They had to be able to
provide their supporters with tangible evidence that their approach
was succeeding. But they provided their base with nothing. Nothing. A
worse situation than in the early 1990s. So, of course, the people who
reject partition and insist on armed struggle and on full liberation
are going to find support.

"My point is that there's a dialectical process here, which on the
Israeli side is driven by a failure to understand that you have to let
go. And it seems impossible for Israel to let go: of land, of
population and population registries, of security, of bridges, of the
Shabak [Shin Bet security service] sticking its fingers up everybody's
nose. They wouldn't let go – and that's more important than myths
about whatever Arafat would or wouldn't let go."
 

The violence of the colonizer is three to 20 to 100 times more intense
than the violence of the colonized. So if we want to talk about
violence, let's talk about violence; if we want to focus on terrorism
and the violence of the Palestinians, we're not talking the same
language.

Rashid Khalidi

_The question is whether the Palestinian national movement in the
1990s was capable of understanding that this letting go required an
internal Israeli political evolution that would take a little time.
And when you blow yourself up in the middle of Tel Aviv, that option
of a shift of perspective loses in the elections._

"I know that the suicide bombings of the 1990s had an enormous impact
on Israeli public opinion, but that really is beside the point. If the
colonizer wants to decolonize, a decision is made to do so. There are
two ways to make the colonizer realize that: when the cost becomes too
heavy and public opinion at home changes; or when the colonized
devises a strategy that works on multiple levels.

"The Irish figured out a strategy, so did the Algerians and the
Vietnamese. The Palestinians, to my distress and sadness, did not.
Neither for approaching the Israeli public over the heads of their
leadership, nor for dealing with your metropole, namely the United
States and Europe, without which you don't exist as an independent
state and you don't have your bombs or your planes. The Irish, they're
brilliant; the Algerians, very smart; the Vietnamese, geniuses. The
Palestinians – not so smart. If you want my critique of the
Palestinian leadership, there it is."

_Your explanation for the rise of Hamas is essentially materialist:
The PLO's diplomatic alternative brought about worse living conditions
for the Palestinians and left a political vacuum in the militant
branch, which Hamas filled. But what about the role of religion and of
Islamic aspirations in Palestinian society?_

"Religion has been an important element in Palestinian nationalism
from the outset, but its popularity fluctuates. In the heyday of the
PLO, the Islamists were very weak – almost nonexistent, politically.
So to say that Palestinian society is deeply Muslim and deeply
Islamist, you have to explain several decades when that wasn't the
case. Hamas never won a majority among Palestinians. In 2006, they won
43 percent of the vote. I know Christians in Bethlehem who voted for
Hamas because they were fed up with Fatah. So I don't think even 43
percent represents their actual popularity at that time."

_You are critical of Israel for ignoring the possibility that Hamas
underwent a change in those years. But what many Israelis ask
themselves is why the Palestinians didn't use the opportunity of
Israel's disengagement from Gaza to develop their society and build a
peaceful alternative._

"Because the occupation never ended. That is a profoundly stupid
question, which is put forward by people who are trying to justify a
fundamentally false narrative. Gaza was never open; it was always
occupied. Airspace, sea space, every entry, every exit, every import,
every export – the f---ing population register remained in Israel's
hands. What changed? A few thousand settlers were removed. So instead
of being in small prisons within Gaza, the Palestinians were now in
one large prison in Gaza. That is not an end of occupation, it's a
modification of occupation. It's not an end to colonization.

"You leave Gaza in order to intensify [your hold] on the West Bank.
You have Sharon's aide, Dov Weissglas, saying [in an interview in
Haaretz in 2004, that Sharon's disengagement plan], 'supplies the
amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a
political process with the Palestinians.' You think we can't read
Hebrew, for God's sake? A state means sovereignty. And sovereignty
doesn't mean a foreign occupying military power controlling your
population register. Think about that for two minutes. I mean, it's
like the United States Census Bureau being controlled in Moscow.
Seriously? Imports and exports are decided by some corporal or some
bureaucrat in some ministry in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem? I mean,
seriously? And Palestinians are supposed to say, 'Oh, let's create a
nice little utopia inside the prison'? What kind of nonsense is that?"

 
Settlers from Kfar Darom clash with Israeli security forces during
the 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip.  (Photo credit: Yossi Zamir/GPO
 //  Haaretz)
_What do you think about armed struggle from a moral perspective?_

"Let's start with the fact that violence is violence; state violence
and non-state violence are both violence. If we don't accept those
principles, we can't talk. The violence of the colonizer is three to
20 to 100 times more intense than the violence of the colonized. So if
we want to talk about violence, let's talk about violence; if we want
to focus on terrorism and the violence of the Palestinians, we're not
talking the same language.

"The second starting point is that legally, since World War II, it has
been accepted that people under colonial rule are entitled to use all
means for their liberation, within the limits of international
humanitarian law. That means combatants and noncombatants, it means
proportionality. It's not morality, it's international law.

"But that applies to both sides, to both colonizer and colonized, if
they accept international humanitarian law. When you destroy a whole
building to kill one Hamas person in Jabalya, clearly proportionality
and discrimination have gone out the window.

"Who started it is not the point. Proportionality and discrimination
don't say that you don't have to worry about these rules if the other
guy is a bad guy and the other guy started it. And finally, you have
the political aspect [of violence], which relates to the wisest way to
achieve your aims."

_On this point, in your book you quote Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani
intellectual who worked with Franz Fanon and the FLN, the Algerian
liberation movement. In the early 1980s, the PLO tasked him with
assessing their military strategy. He argued that unlike in the
Algerian case, the use of force against Israelis "only strengthened a
preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it
[also] unified Israeli society."_

"Yes, and I think that is something extremely important. If you're
talking about the French [in Algeria], I would argue that placing a
bomb in a café violated both moral and legal sanctions, it's a
violation of international humanitarian law. Two heroines of the
Algerian revolution – Jamila Bouhired and Zahra Zarif – did that.
At the political level, I think it's debatable, because the colons
[French settlers in Algeria, also known as the pieds-noirs], in the
last analysis, have somewhere to go back to. They suffer what I call
'colonial fear.' They are terrified of the indigènes [indigenous
population], because the indigènes outnumber them and they know the
indigènes resent them.

"But they don't suffer from a hereditary fear of persecution. They
don't have a mobilized narrative whereby every attack on them is
placed within that context, rather than within the local context of
Algeria. And ultimately, that violence is successful. Morally, the
attitude toward indiscriminate violence is black and white. But it's
gray politically. What Eqbal Ahmed says about Israel is that because
of the nature of Jewish history, a strategy of indiscriminate violence
– which the PLO was then pursuing – is politically
counterproductive."

_How do you assess the effect of BDS – the boycott movement against
Israel – now, two decades on?_

"Twenty years ago, BDS resolutions [by student governments] couldn't
pass on any American campus; today they pass easily. But no boycotts
have been instituted, or very few; no sanctions have been imposed; and
there's been very little divestment."

_A failure, then._

"No! The point is that public opinion has changed. The point of BDS
was to open a topic that the other side doesn't want opened. Why are
they [the Israelis] calling everyone who dares to speak about this
genocide [in Gaza] an antisemite? Because they have no arguments, they
have nothing to say; so shut them up with the most toxic accusation
possible in the Western world. The point [of BDS], the way I looked at
it, was not to bring about actual boycotts, divestment or sanctions.
It was a lever to open up a subject that nobody wanted to discuss. And
it was, in my view, enormously successful in that regard.

"Now you are beginning to have the Dutch, the Germans, the Spanish,
the Canadians, restricting [certain] arms supplies to Israel. These
and other moves are the result of a change in opinion in the Western
metropole, and that's largely due to BDS."

 
Pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in October. "One day
what our students have done here will be commemorated in the same way
[as the protests against the Vietnam War]. They are – and they were
– on the right side of history."  (Photo credit: Mike Segar/Reuters
 //  Haaretz)
_And for you as a BDS supporter, it wasn't an issue to be interviewed
by an Israeli newspaper?_

"No. I've published books in Israel. I think it's important to reach
an Israeli public. I know it's a very diminished public, but the point
is that you don't win, you don't bring change without understanding
how to appeal to public opinion, over the heads of the governments and
over the heads of the propaganda machine, whether in the United States
or in Israel."

_In your book, you note that the Algerians and the Vietnamese did not
pass up the opportunity to influence public opinion in the home
societies of their enemies, and you argue that this was crucial for
their victories. What should Palestinians do that they are not doing
in order to reach Israelis, if that's at all possible?_

"The answer to that would have to come from a unified Palestinian
national movement with a clear strategy – it's not for Rashid
Khalidi to give. One of the problems we have today is disunity and the
absence of a unified national movement and of a clear, unified
strategy. Without that, you're not going to liberate anything. Public
diplomacy – which you can call hasbara, or you can call it
propaganda – is absolutely essential. Any liberation struggle
succeeds only thanks to that. If the South Africans hadn't had it,
they would still have apartheid."

_What is the role of the Palestinian diaspora in this current
leadership vacuum, and specifically the role of intellectuals like
yourself?_

"I think that the diaspora and a younger generation in the diaspora
who are assimilated and fully acculturated and understand the
political culture of the countries they're in, will have an important
role in the future. I think the role of my generation is pretty much
over, myself included. We can't benefit yet from the talent and the
understanding of Western politics that the young generation possesses.
That will come soon, I hope. But it requires an organized,
centralized, unified national movement. We don't have that now."
 

It's harder than any other liberation struggle, because it's not a
colonial project in which people can go home. There is no home. They
[the Jews] have been in Israel for three or four generations. They're
not going anywhere.

Rashid Khalidi

_What about the establishment of a government in exile?_

"Historically, the [Palestinian] leadership was always outside. One of
the many mistakes Arafat made was to take the whole PLO and bring it
into the cage of the occupation. Who does that? When you liberate, you
move part of your leadership, maybe – [but] he hadn't liberated
anything. They were so desperate to get out of Tunis and the other
places they were in because of the mistake they made in supporting
Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991, that they were willing to jump from the
frying pan into the fire. It was a fatal mistake. Who places the whole
leadership under the control of the Israeli military and security
services? It's mind-boggling. So, yes, you will need [leadership in]
the diaspora, and it will end up being partly outside and partly
inside in the future, one assumes. Like with Algeria."

_In the anti-apartheid movement, cooperation with white South Africans
was crucial. What can be done in order to expand the
Jewish-Palestinian alliance?_

"That's a tough question. Among many Palestinians, especially young
Palestinians, there is a resistance to what they call 'normalization.'
And that, to some extent, blinds some people to the need to find
allies on the other side. In the end, you're not going to win without
that happening. It's harder than any other liberation struggle,
because it's not a colonial project in which people can go home. There
is no home. They [the Jews] have been in Israel for three or four
generations. They're not going anywhere. It's not like you appeal to
the French and they bring their colons home. It's more like Ireland
and South Africa, where you have to come to terms with what you see as
a separate population, but which has now become enraciné, rooted, and
which has developed a collective identity."

_Nevertheless, you analyze this conflict as a case of settler
colonialism._

"You hear what the people in the right wing of the current government
are saying about Gaza, you see what they're doing in the West Bank,
how they stripped people of their land and restricted them in the
Galilee and in the Triangle [an area of dense Arab population in
central Israel] after 1948. If that's not settler colonialism, I don't
know what it is. Everything that was done from the beginning is
clearly within that paradigm.

"But Zionism starts as a national project, and then they find a
patron, and then they use settler colonial means. That is unique. None
of these other settler colonial cases start as national projects. The
settler colonial paradigm is useful only up to a point. And Israel is
the most unique case imaginable. No mother country, almost the entire
population is there out of persecution, and there is the link to the
Holy Land – to the Bible, for God's sake."

 
Rashid Khalidi.  (Photo credit: Danielle Amy  //  Haaretz)
_You've explored the transfer of knowledge on counterinsurgency
methods between Britain's colonies, and described how the Zionist
leaders adopted colonial practices from the British. What have you
found?_

"I'm actually working on that now. The British export [to Palestine]
the entire Royal Irish Constabulary, following Irish independence, and
form the Palestine Gendarmerie. When revolts break out, they bring in
experts from elsewhere. They bring in General [Bernard] Montgomery,
who commanded the brigade in Cork in 1921 [where reprisals were
carried out against the Irish rebels]; he commanded a division in
Palestine in 1938. They bring in Sir Charles Tegart, whom they had
sent from Ireland to India, to build 'Tegart Forts' [here] – torture
centers, which was his expertise. He comes to Palestine to impart this
knowledge. And a fellow by the name of Orde Wingate whom every Israeli
military expert knows intimately – the father of Israeli military
doctrine."

_In an interview with the New Left Review, you described Wingate as a
"cold-blooded colonial killer."_

"He served in the Sudan, God knows what he did there. I'd have to do
some more research to find out. In Palestine he formed the Special
Night Squads, consisting of chosen cadres from the Palmach and Haganah
[Jewish underground forces] who were matched with selected British
soldiers. He launched a campaign of night raids. Attacking villages.
Shooting prisoners. Torture. Blowing houses up over people's heads.
Horrific stuff. I mean, the accounts that you have, he's clearly a
murderous psychopath. Moshe Dayan was one of his trainees, along with
Yitzhak Sadeh [commander of the pre-IDF Palmach shock troops] and
Yigal Alon. There's probably a dozen senior officers of the Israeli
army, most of whom reach the rank of major general, who were trained
by this man. The Israeli army's doctrine originates with Wingate."

* * *

_You finish your book by saying that "settler-colonial confrontations
with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the
elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North
America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in
Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial
supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in
South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland." Which path are we going down?_

"The extermination of one side by the other is impossible. The
expulsion of one side by the other is – I would have said impossible
– I think now possible but unlikely. So, you have two peoples.
Either the war continues, or they come to an understanding that they
have to live on a basis of absolute equality. Not a very optimistic
answer, but the only answer. Let me add that this resolution [of the
conflict] is much closer as a result of the present war, because
Western public opinion has turned against Israel in a way that has
never happened, since the Balfour Declaration [by Britain, in 1917, in
favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine] until today.

"Western public opinion was always unanimously sympathetic to Israel,
with tiny exceptions. In 1982, when they saw too many buildings
destroyed and too many children killed [in Lebanon], and in the first
intifada [1987-1992], when there were too many tanks facing too many
children throwing stones. But otherwise, wall-to-wall support. Elites,
public opinion. Without exception, for a hundred and something years.
That's changed. This [shift] may not be irreversible, but the clock is
ticking. Israel has created for itself, by its behavior since October
7, a nightmare scenario globally.

_There are segments of the Israeli left that fantasize about an
imposed solution from outside. Is that possible?_

"It will be possible when and if American interests regarding
Palestine change. The United States has forced Israel to do many
things that the American strategic or national or economic interest
dictated."

_During the Cold War, for example._

"Right. [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger forced disengagement
agreements down the throat of the Israeli government. [Secretary of
State James] Baker forced [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir to
participate in Madrid [the 1991 peace conference]. Obama forced them
to accept the [nuclear] deal with Iran. [President Dwight] Eisenhower
forced them out of Sinai [in 1957]. It's been our misfortune that
Palestine doesn't represent an important American national interest.

"The dictatorships in the Arab world suppress public opinion and are
subservient to the United States; the oil regimes are dependent on the
United States for their defense against their peoples and external
enemies. If that changes, if things that Israel do harm the American
national interest, that might bring about external coercion. I'm not
holding my breath."

_The younger generation of pro-Palestine activists in the United
States criticized you over the distinctions you make about violence.
What do you say to them?_

"I have no love for violence, but it's very clear to me that violence
has been an essential element of every liberation struggle. Against
the overwhelming violence of the colonizer, there will be violence
whether I want it or not. The Israeli [perception is that] if force
doesn't work, use more force. This is the result. You chase the PLO
out of Lebanon and you get Hezbollah. You kill [Hezbollah leader
Abbas] Musawi, you get [Hassan] Nasrallah. You kill Nasrallah, good
luck with what you're going to get. You kill [Hamas leader Yahya]
Sinwar – wait and see what you get. That's the nature of colonial
violence. It engenders resistance. I would wish for the resistance to
be intelligent, strategic, ideally also moral and legal, but it's not
going to be, probably."

_What do you wish Israelis understood better about the conflict?_

"They need to understand something that's very hard for them to grasp:
how the Palestinians and the rest of the world see the situation. It's
seen from the beginning as an attempt to create a Jewish state in an
Arab country. This is not some innocent bunch of refugees arriving in
their ancestral homeland and suddenly being attacked by wild men and
women. They arrive and do things that generate everything that
follows; their very arrival and the structures with which they arrive
create the conflict.

"Was there ever a Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in the 18th
century, 17th century, 19th century, 15th century, 12th century? No.
This is not a conflict that's been going on from time immemorial. You
have to put that self-justifying version of history aside. I mean, to
understand that Palestinians, Arabs, the rest of the world, and now
also Western public opinion see it this way. There are still the
elites who will support anything Israel does. But the clock is
ticking. Underneath, something is seething."

* Rashid Khaliidi
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* West Bank
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* Hamas
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* Oct. 7
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* Hostages
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* Nakba
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* Oslo Accords
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* Occupied Territories
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* Jewish settlements
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* Two-state Solution
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* BDS
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* Boycott
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* Sanctions
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* U.S.-Israel military aid
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* Genocide
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* settler colonialism
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* zionism
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