Palestinian American Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He is also the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and other books. In the interview below, which appeared in the May 7 issue of Jacobin, he explains the causes of the current war in Gaza and outlines his views on how the conflict in Israel and Palestine can be resolved.

Khalidi points to the origin of the state of Israel as a settler-colonial project and offers an analysis that goes beyond that:

Zionism is not just settler colonialism. Zionism is not just a result of the European persecution of the Jewish people. Zionism is not just a reflection of an age-long longing for return to the land of Israel. Zionism is all those things — combined. And: it is a movement that consciously, explicitly, from the beginning, saw itself as a settler-colonial project. The land purchase agency for the Zionist project was called the Jewish Colonization Agency. That’s not some antisemitic fantasy by a bigoted historian trying to slander a purist national movement with biblical roots. This movement saw itself as a colonial project from the beginning: that’s what Herzl said, that’s what [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky said, and that’s what [David] Ben-Gurion said. I don’t really understand how historians can dispute this.

As he has done in the past, he spells out the existence of two peoples — Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Recognizing that fact is necessary for a solution, he argues:

As I quote at the beginning of my book, when an ancestor of mine once wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, he said: “You have an ancestral connection to this country.”

Christian and Muslim Palestinians believe in the Jewish people’s connection to this land. Does that give them a real estate deed? Do the Romans have the right to take over Libya and North Africa and Turkey because Rome controlled it once upon a time? Do the Muslims have the right to take back Spain because they controlled it once? Once upon a time, there was a Jewish minority in a part of Palestine. Does that give modern Israeli nationalists a real estate deed to the land? Of course not.

An October 24, 2023, interview with Khalidi can be found in ‘End Oppression of One People By Another.’

In the current interview, Khalidi explains further:

You need to ask yourself: Is there an Israeli people, and do they have rights? Well, you have an American people. The American people’s rights are exercised at the expense of the indigenous population to this day, as happens in New Zealand and Canada and Australia. Those terrible injustices should be remedied. But there is, without any doubt, an American people. Today there is an Israeli people. The terrible injustices that were inherent in the dispossession of the Palestinians and the denial of their national existence have to be remedied. There’s no way around it.

Khalidi responds clearly to the charges that protests by students against the Israeli aggression in Gaza, at Columbia and other universities, are antisemitic:

I’ve been following very closely what’s been happening since October 7, since our campus has been the scene of protests ever since. I don’t think the people who organize demonstrations are antisemites. In fact, a large proportion of them are Jews. So, we are talking about a conflation between Jew-hatred, ergo antisemitism, and a critique of Israel and Zionism in response to a political phenomenon carried out by a state. Off campus, some of the groups that demonstrated may have included slogans that were antisemitic. In fact, the pro-Israel right-wing demonstrations led by people like the Proud Boys and Christian-nationalist groups are quite antisemitic. But the attempt to argue that using a term like “intifada” is antisemitic is simply absurd.

Intifada simply means “uprising.” In the Palestinian case, an uprising against a fifty-six-year-old violent, illegal occupation. Now, if you believe that that Israeli occupation and control over the West Bank is God-given and that any opposition to it is antisemitic, that’s your problem. 

Khalidi’s response to a question about a perspective for the future deserves serious thought and discussion:

There has to be a fundamental reorganization of the Palestinian national movement. And there has to be a unified consensus among Palestinians. This is a Palestinian problem. Israel, on the other hand, has to overcome its obsession with force when dealing with the Palestinians. It has to overcome the idea that there’s only one people with a right to self-determination in Israel.

In 2018, the Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People law, passed by the Knesset with constitutional force, stated there is only one people in this land with a right to national self-determination, which is the Jewish people. If you do not deal with that, you will never have a resolution, simply more war and resistance.

Finally, there has to be change on the part of the West. American, Soviet, later French, British, as well as German support for Israel has been indispensable to the oppression of the Palestinian people. Without that support, none of the things we see today could happen.

Khalidi’s call for a “fundamental reorganization of the Palestinian movement” is echoed by others who have begun to question the role played by Hamas.

Among them is Bashir Abu-Manneh, a Jacobin contributing editor and faculty member at the University of Kent, who outlined his views in the article The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith.

“Since October 7, any critical evaluation of Hamas’s military operation — its method, rationality, and targets, or its role in ending the Israeli occupation — has been hard to voice within the Left,” Abu-Manneh wrote.

“This is so not only because an occupying power is ultimately responsible for the destructive status quo, but also because criticizing the tactics of a group acting in the name of the oppressed is seen as undermining their rightful cause.

“This situation is compounded,” he explained, “by numerous intellectuals on the Left who have voiced unconditional support — if not celebration — for Hamas’s attack. A recent post on the Verso Books blog places a socially regressive religious movement like Hamas into the universal emancipatory tradition of the Left, stating that ‘the paragliders who flew into Israel on October 7 continue the revolutionary association of liberation and flight.’”

Abu-Manneh is referring to an essay by Jodi Dean who has been “relieved” of all of her teaching duties at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the name of “defending student safety.”

Abu-Manneh continued, “In addition to individual voices, uncritical celebration of Hamas has also been witnessed in parts of the otherwise inspiring solidarity mobilizations in recent days. ‘We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,’ some are heard chanting in one video.”

“Such slogans, no matter how rare, undermine the Palestinian cause,” Abu-Manneh added. “Supporting Palestine is about ending an illegal occupation and holding Israel accountable for violating international law. It is not about supporting the killing of Israeli civilians or the destruction of Israeli cities.”

A similar argument is made by Ayça Çubukçu, Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in the Boston Review article Many Speak for Palestine.

Çubukçu also addressed the views presented by Dean. He made clear his defense of Dean’s free speech rights: “By now, more than 4,900 scholars, including myself, have petitioned the university to revoke Dean’s suspension from teaching. As Judith Butler asserts, Dean has the right to express her views without punishment from her employer,  ‘however intensely any of us may disagree with them.’

“And disagree with her views we must,” Çubukçu continued. “Take the thorny kernel of Dean’s argument: that the Palestine solidarity movement should follow Hamas as its leader. ‘The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas,’ she writes. Since ‘Palestine speaks for everyone,’ and since Hamas speaks for Palestine, her logic goes, Hamas should speak for everyone.

“This is a questionable argument,” Çubukçu wrote, “for the way it presumes (1) that Hamas is the singular leader of the Palestine liberation movement, (2) that the international movement in solidarity with Palestine needs a singular leader, and therefore (3) that the movement in solidarity with Palestine must ‘support’ Hamas and follow its leadership.”

Taken together, the views expressed by Khalidi, Abu-Manneh, and Çubukçu are a welcome contribution to a necessary discussion about the way forward in the fight for Palestinian self-determination.

We publish this interview with Khalidi for the information of our readers. Hanno Hauenstein — an independent journalist based in Berlin who has written for the Guardian, the Intercept, and several German outlets — conducted it. The headline, introduction, and text of the interview that follow are from the original. Photos and captions, as well as minor stylistic changes, are by World-Outlook.

—World-Outlook editors

Rashid Khalidi: Violent Settler Colonialism Caused This War

AN INTERVIEW WITH
RASHID KHALIDI

Rashid Khalidi is a leading historian of the Middle East. In an interview, he explains how the current war in Palestine is the product of decades of violent settler colonialism designed to drive the Palestinians from their land.

The terrible injustices that were inherent in the dispossession of the Palestinians and the denial of their national existence have to be remedied. There’s no way around it. Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian American historian at Columbia University — and an authority on the Middle East conflict. In his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, he explores the deeper roots of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, which is today reaching new heights of violence.

In late April, Khalidi participated in the Bard College Berlin conference “Witnessing Atrocities: Dissent in the Wake of Gaza,” held at the Spore Initiative. At it, he spoke to Hanno Hauenstein about the antiwar protests in the United States, Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the current political climate in Germany, where his book was recently released in translation. This text based on their conversation is lightly edited for clarity.

*

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: There are currently protests happening on campuses all over the United States, most notably at your own university, Columbia. Often, they are labeled “antisemitic.” How do you view those protests?

RASHID KHALIDI: I’ve been following very closely what’s been happening since October 7, since our campus has been the scene of protests ever since. I don’t think the people who organize demonstrations are antisemites. In fact, a large proportion of them are Jews. So we are talking about a conflation between Jew-hatred, ergo antisemitism, and a critique of Israel and Zionism in response to a political phenomenon carried out by a state. Off campus, some of the groups that demonstrated may have included slogans that were antisemitic. In fact, the pro-Israel right-wing demonstrations led by people like the Proud Boys and Christian-nationalist groups are quite antisemitic. But the attempt to argue that using a term like “intifada” is antisemitic is simply absurd.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: How so?

RASHID KHALIDI: Intifada simply means “uprising.” In the Palestinian case, an uprising against a fifty-six-year-old violent, illegal occupation. Now, if you believe that that Israeli occupation and control over the West Bank is God-given and that any opposition to it is antisemitic, that’s your problem. The occupier may as well be Danish, it really makes no difference. If persecuted, divinely inspired Danes were taking over Palestine, it certainly wouldn’t be anti-Christian to resist or to critique their settler-colonial project. But somehow it’s antisemitic to resist or to critique this settler-colonial project? This makes no sense.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Yet, the Danes don’t exactly have any ancestral connection to the land of Palestine — or Israel, for that matter. There is, however, a point to make as to why Jewish people would regard the land as a place of belonging, historically, religiously.

RASHID KHALIDI: That is, of course, correct. As I quote at the beginning of my book, when an ancestor of mine once wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, he said: “You have an ancestral connection to this country.”

Christian and Muslim Palestinians believe in the Jewish people’s connection to this land. Does that give them a real estate deed? Do the Romans have the right to take over Libya and North Africa and Turkey because Rome controlled it once upon a time? Do the Muslims have the right to take back Spain because they controlled it once? Once upon a time, there was a Jewish minority in a part of Palestine. Does that give modern Israeli nationalists a real estate deed to the land? Of course not.

It’s a belief shared only by Israelis and, sadly, some evangelical Christians. It has weight in religious terms. Unfortunately, because of people like Arthur James Balfour as well as many American politicians, it does have political weight, as well. That’s a tragedy because it involves a violation of the rights of the indigenous population.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Let’s talk about your book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. The account of Palestinian history you lay out in your book is one of colonization from the get-go, from the mandate period until today. Many will agree that what is happening in the West Bank is a process of settler colonialism. But defining the creation of the state of Israel in such terms is not exactly a consensus view. Given that you do, would you actually say that the creation of the Israeli state was historically legitimate?

RASHID KHALIDI: Zionism is not just settler colonialism. Zionism is not just a result of the European persecution of the Jewish people. Zionism is not just a reflection of an age-long longing for return to the land of Israel. Zionism is all those things — combined. And: it is a movement that consciously, explicitly, from the beginning, saw itself as a settler-colonial project. The land purchase agency for the Zionist project was called the Jewish Colonization Agency. That’s not some antisemitic fantasy by a bigoted historian trying to slander a purist national movement with biblical roots. This movement saw itself as a colonial project from the beginning: that’s what Herzl said, that’s what [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky said, and that’s what [David] Ben-Gurion said. I don’t really understand how historians can dispute this.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Critics might argue that Herzl’s state project wasn’t a settler-colonial project in the way that we understand it today.

RASHID KHALIDI: It was a national project. Herzl was a national founder of a national movement whose means were explicitly settler-colonial. There is historical precedent. We have the United States of America. We have Canada. We have Australia. We have New Zealand. These are all settler-colonial projects that have become national projects.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Encapsulated in this question is also a divide in how the so-called Global South has been looking at Palestinian history as opposed to people in the West. Who, in your eyes, mostly contends with the notion of Israeli settler colonialism?

RASHID KHALIDI: It’s been something that Palestinians have argued for from the beginning. Up until World War II, Zionists themselves never contended with this notion. Only after World War II did Israel start marketing itself as an anti-colonial project because for a couple of years they fought with the British. One of the reasons that the decolonial and pristine nature of Israel and Zionism was accepted in the West was a sense of guilt and a conviction that the Zionist understanding of the biblical narrative was correct. There’s a reading of the Bible by many Evangelicals and Protestants that lent credence to this argument. This covered up the secular colonial aspect for many Westerners.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: What role do Israelis play in your understanding of Palestinian history?

RASHID KHALIDI: You need to ask yourself: Is there an Israeli people, and do they have rights? Well, you have an American people. The American people’s rights are exercised at the expense of the indigenous population to this day, as happens in New Zealand and Canada and Australia. Those terrible injustices should be remedied. But there is, without any doubt, an American people. Today there is an Israeli people. The terrible injustices that were inherent in the dispossession of the Palestinians and the denial of their national existence have to be remedied. There’s no way around it.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, you divide the history of Palestine into six chapters — from the Mandate period and the Balfour Declaration over to the founding of Israel up to recent years. Does the assault on Gaza constitute a new chapter?

RASHID KHALIDI: I do think that there is something new and unprecedented. There has never been anything on this scale in terms of displacement and killing. The number of Palestinians killed in 1948 was around fifteen thousand. The number of Palestinians killed in Lebanon in 1982, Palestinians and Lebanese people, was under twenty thousand. In Gaza, we’re talking probably over forty thousand people who are dead by now. And it will go much higher when all the thousands of missing are counted and buried. In many respects, this is unprecedented.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: What’s your perspective for a future in Israel-Palestine?

RASHID KHALIDI: There has to be a fundamental reorganization of the Palestinian national movement. And there has to be a unified consensus among Palestinians. This is a Palestinian problem. Israel, on the other hand, has to overcome its obsession with force when dealing with the Palestinians. It has to overcome the idea that there’s only one people with a right to self-determination in Israel.

In 2018, the Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People law, passed by the Knesset with constitutional force, stated there is only one people in this land with a right to national self-determination, which is the Jewish people. If you do not deal with that, you will never have a resolution, simply more war and resistance.

Finally, there has to be change on the part of the West. American, Soviet, later French, British, as well as German support for Israel has been indispensable to the oppression of the Palestinian people. Without that support, none of the things we see today could happen.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: So, without international pressure, there will be no change?

RASHID KHALIDI: The United States is delivering weapons to bomb Palestinians. As long as the United States is making war on the Palestinians with its F-15s and its F-16s and F-35s, Apache helicopters and 155mm howitzers, there will be no change there, and the war on the Palestinians will continue. It’s not even a matter of pressure. It’s a matter of obeying US law and ceasing to give Israel the means to carry out this war on the Palestinians.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: The West Bank is on fire, settler violence is running high as we speak. Many Palestinians have been killed there, too, in recent weeks. Gaza is the spotlight of the ongoing Israeli onslaught on Gaza. To what degree are these different forms of violence interconnected?

RASHID KHALIDI: In fact, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. I think these things are very closely connected. The link can be found in the statements of senior ministers in the current Israeli government like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, but also many other ministers in Likud. They’ve made no bones about the fact that they hope to ethnically cleanse both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They’ve made no bones about the fact that they want to expand the land controlled by settlers and to restrict the land controlled by Palestinians. They’ve even talked about resettling the Gaza Strip.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Do you think that scenario — of resettling Gaza — is realistic?

RASHID KHALIDI: I’m not suggesting it’s a realistic scenario, but if you want to understand what they’re doing and why, this is the logic behind it. Changing the demographic balance in Palestine in favor of settlers, at the expense of Palestinians, has always been the intention of the Zionist project — from Herzl, through [Chaim] Weizmann, up to Ben-Gvir — not to create a bi-national state. The conviction of those early Zionists was that Europe would not let them live in safety. Their vision of a Judenstaat required a demographic transformation. A process of ethnic cleansing, of squeezing the indigenous population into smaller and smaller areas, similar to what happened in Ireland under Oliver Cromwell or with the Indian reservations in North America. That’s what’s attempted here.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Germany has a deep antisemitic history, culminating in the genocide that was the Holocaust. Today Germany derives from that history a deep commitment to Israel. In your view, what should German responsibility look like today?

RASHID KHALIDI: I think that Germany and Western countries obviously bear a huge responsibility for the Holocaust and for the suffering of the Jewish people. And not only Germany. Before the “final solution” was decided in 1942, people could have escaped, but were often not able to do so because Western countries closed their doors. The United States and Britain with its enormous empire could have saved hundreds of thousands of people. France, too. But many Jews could not get into those countries because of racist, antisemitic immigration laws. There’s no reason why the Palestinians should suffer for the sins of Germany. They’re not the authors of the Holocaust. Today Germany and Western European countries, in different ways, seem to transfer their historical responsibility to Palestinians.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: How do you see this play out in public?

RASHID KHALIDI: Mainly in the form of a virulently anti-Palestinian discourse. Germany is likely the most extreme example. But it’s essentially the same in the United States and many other Western countries. You hear this when mention is made of what happened on October 7 in connection to the Holocaust. It’s an invocation of the terrible suffering of the Jews in Germany and in Chişinău and the pogroms in the Russian empire as a comparison to what has happened in Palestine. But what happens in Palestine happens because of violent settler colonialism and because of resistance to it. That resistance was violent and created horrible atrocities. This is undebatable. But this is not a result of age-old European antisemitism.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: You’ve stated that the Israeli objective for its war in Gaza will not be met — Hamas will likely not be destroyed. Researchers like Tareq Baconi pointed to tendencies within Hamas. On the one hand, its 2017 charter indicates a readiness to make concessions of formerly Palestinian land, and to establish a Palestinian state within 1967 borders alongside Israel. On the other hand, there is talk of “liberation” — “from the river to the sea.” What does Hamas actually want?

RASHID KHALIDI: Hamas rose because the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] moved away from armed struggle when it formally renounced violence, recognized Israel, and accepted to negotiate with it on the basis of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 beginning in the late 1980s. Hamas took up, in other words, the torch of armed struggle. If the PLO had achieved what it was trying to achieve, which was a Palestinian state on a tiny fraction of about 20 percent of Palestine, Hamas would not be with us today.

Hamas opposed this process, and it was successful in doing so, partly because under no circumstances could a fully independent, sovereign Palestinian state be realized under the Oslo process. This process led to a strengthening of Israeli occupation and colonization, an immiseration of the Palestinian people, a chopping of the West Bank into tiny little Bantustans. That’s what turned Hamas into a popular movement.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Is Hamas as popular today among Palestinians as some polls suggest?

RASHID KHALIDI: To determine how popular a group is, you can look at elections, of which there were only a couple, in 2005–6. In 2005, Hamas lost the presidential election. In 2006, they won the parliamentary election, with about 44 percent of the vote. They didn’t get a majority of the vote, but they got a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Ever since, opinion polls have gone up and they’ve gone down.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: So, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that dealing with Hamas might be inevitable in the future?

RASHID KHALIDI: Continued occupation and continued colonization will inevitably produce continued resistance. Whether it’s armed and violent, whether it produces these kinds of atrocities that we’ve seen on October 7 or not, occupation and colonization will inevitably produce resistance. If this conflict is to be resolved, it will have to be resolved between whoever is in power on each side. I don’t get to say that I will not sit down with this Israeli government because this general or that minister have blood on their hands. This is the elected government of the state of Israel. Whoever the Palestinians end up deciding is their representative, hopefully democratically, are the ones that Israel and the world are going to have to deal with.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: Yet, Western countries like the U.S. and Germany define Hamas as a terrorist organization.

RASHID KHALIDI: The British and the Irish would never have come to terms if Britain had not agreed to negotiate with Sinn Féin in 1921, and with the Irish Republican Army [IRA] during the Good Friday peace process in the 1990s after the IRA killed hundreds of British soldiers and police and many civilians in Northern Ireland. The South African apartheid system would not have ended if South Africa had not negotiated with the African National Congress [ANC], an armed, violent group. The same is true of the French and the National Liberation Front [FLN] in Algeria. The Israelis and the Americans want to pick their own so-called representatives of the Palestinians and pretend that that’s a negotiation. That’s not a negotiation. That’s a diktat. And that’s not going to lead to a resolution.

HANNO HAUENSTEIN: When you look at the discourse around Israel-Palestine in recent years, it was dominated by terms such as peace building and stabilization. Today, in demonstrations on campuses, but to an extent also in newsrooms, there is more talk of terms such as “accountability.” Has the discourse shifted?

RASHID KHALIDI: There has been a discursive shift, absolutely. Today we are talking about apartheid, genocide, settler colonialism, and accountability. Never in the history of this conflict have you had such an open debate. Might that be reversed? Sure, it could. There was a similar shift in 1982 because of what Israel was doing in Lebanon. Israelis managed, with supporters in the United States, to repair that. There was another shift during the First Intifada. Can the current shift be reversed? I don’t know.

There is certainly a ferocious effort to reverse it on the part of the Western politicians and media. I hope that in spite of these rearguard efforts of an unjust status quo, this discursive shift will lead to serious accountability and reflection on part of those Western countries whose support is so indispensable to these atrocities, to this genocide in Gaza. It could not happen without you, Europeans, and us, Americans. We are responsible. Not just the Israelis.

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