World-Outlook is republishing below the interview Rashid Khalidi: “Israel Is Acting with Full U.S. Approval,” which first appeared on October 13, 2024, in Jacobin.

Khalidi has recently retired from his position as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He is also the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and other books. An October 8 article in The Guardian refers to Khalidi as “America’s foremost scholar of Palestine.”

World-Outlook calls readers’ attention to two key points — among other important ideas — Khalidi addresses. The first concerns the U.S. role in enabling Israel’s brutal war in the region that has now spread far beyond the Gaza Strip. The second is about the state of the Palestinian national movement.

In previous editorials and news analyses, World-Outlook has argued that the interests of the U.S. and Israeli governments, while allied, are not identical.

In Israel’s War on Gaza Grinds On, we explained, “For months prior to the Hamas-led October 7 attack, the U.S. government was working to secure a historic diplomatic agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal would lead to normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and cement a U.S. alliance with regimes in the Arab world that could serve as a bulwark against Iranian influence in the region. The October 7 attack and Israel’s genocidal response disrupted that prospect.”

However, we also noted, “Today that goal appears impossible without a change in Israel’s position; a change that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials insist they will never agree to.”

Israel’s ongoing, devastating invasion and aerial assault on Lebanon, its escalation of state terrorism against Palestinians on the West Bank, and its threat to expand its shadow war with Iran into a full conflagration have further changed the situation. As Israel has continued to seize the military initiative since October 7, 2023, the U.S. government has adapted to Israel’s strategy.

Washington has occasionally made largely empty verbal threats to — someday — reduce the aid that enables Israel’s wars, if the Israeli government does not follow U.S. advice. But the constant flow of arms and munitions has steadily increased and Washington has now dispatched U.S. troops and more advanced military hardware to Israel. These actions speak louder than any words.

U.S. is not pressing Israel to end war in Lebanon

In an article in the October 14 Israeli daily Haaretz, Amos Harel explained:

“Interestingly, America also doesn’t seem to be pressing Israel to hurry up and end the war in Lebanon anymore. Before Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s killing last month, the Biden administration had been trying to force the sides into an immediate cease-fire. But it seems to have concluded that it would be hard to dictate such a move now. Moreover, it sees an opportunity to shake up Lebanon’s political system in a way that would reduce the decisive influence Hezbollah acquired over the past decade thanks to its military wing.

“All this, of course, serves Netanyahu’s dream of perpetual war. Almost a month after the attack on Hezbollah pagers, the Israeli media appears to have completely normalized a situation in which one-third of the country is hit with missiles and rockets every day without anybody uttering a peep.”

When Harel states that Washington believes it cannot dictate to Israel’s leadership now, he points to an important reality.

It is a consequence of the weakened position of U.S. imperialism in the world today. The recognition that its 20-year Afghan war failed, leading to the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, was one among the recent signs of this decline.

Of course, Washington could end its political and military support for Israel. But that would leave it with no reliable ally in a part of the world it considers essential. Neither the Biden administration nor the next occupant of the White House — Kamala Harris or Donald Trump — will take such a step.

Discussing this, Khalidi asserts, “The tut-tutting, the pooh-poohing, and the crocodile tears about humanitarian issues and civilian casualties are pure hypocrisy. The United States has signed on to Israel’s approach to Lebanon — it wants Israel to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. It does not have any reservations about the basic approach of Israel, which is to attack the civilian population in order to force change in Lebanon and obviously in Gaza.

“Those shared objectives of the two powers have not yet been achieved in Lebanon and Gaza,” Khalidi continues, “so the United States has not reined in (and in my view will not rein in) Israel. On the contrary, the United States is a party to this war. It is fighting in Lebanon, even if American troops are not directly engaged in combat. It’s an illusion to assume otherwise.”

The Palestinian national movement

In the current interview Khalidi also returns to the challenges facing the Palestinian people, a theme he discussed in a May 7 Jacobin interview, also reposted by World-Outlook.

Today, “the situation of the Palestinian people is extraordinarily grim,” Khalidi says in the interview that follows.

Khalidi was born in 1948, the year Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land and into exile — now known as the Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic). “I don’t know that I can even make the comparison historically, but I would say it’s certainly the darkest day for Palestine and the Palestinians since then — no question of that,” he explains.

“On the political level, the Palestinians are facing the same dilemma that they were on October 5 or 6 last year. They’re still divided, and they’re still, in my view, leaderless.

“There is a powerful trend or faction that advocates an unrestricted form of violence,” Khalidi continues. “In my view, this trend does not have a strategic vision. It has achieved tactical victories and some catastrophic strategic defeats, and it has caused enormous suffering to Palestinians and also to Israelis. But there is no unified leadership or collective strategic vision…

“There’s no sense of how Palestinians want to live in the future and relate to the Israelis in Palestine in the future,” Khalidi points out. “Nor is there a sense of how they intend to get there. Those are strategic questions that are not being asked or answered by the people who currently claim to lead the Palestinian national movement, whether in Hamas or in what is laughably called the Palestinian Authority — an institution with no sovereignty, no authority, and no legitimacy among its own people.”

Looking ahead, Khalidi says, “I see the future as being very grim for the Palestinians into the foreseeable future, until they develop a consensus around a strategy and a leadership. Hopefully that will come soon, but there’s no way of telling when it will come.”

Khalidi’s observations and conclusions deserve close attention and discussion.

World-Outlook is reposting this interview for the information of our readers. We encourage others to share it with anyone thinking about events in the Middle East, which remain at the center of world politics today.

As Jacobin notes, “This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.”

The headline, brief introduction, and text of the interview below are from the original. Photos and endnotes are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are posting the interview in two parts, the first of which follows.

  — World-Outlook Editors

*

(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found here.)

Rashid Khalidi: “Israel Is Acting with Full US Approval”

(Part 1)

An interview with
RASHID KHALIDI

After 12 months, there’s no end in sight to Israel’s relentless onslaught against Gaza, now extended to Lebanon. Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how Israel and the US are working together to destroy all constraints on violence against civilians.

Interview by
DANIEL FINN

Israel’s onslaught against Gaza has now continued for more than a year; it shows no sign of ending, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has now expanded the war into Lebanon, resulting in more carnage. At time of writing, we are still waiting to see whether and in what way Israel will strike Iran, as it has promised to do.

Rashid Khalidi is one of the leading historians of modern Palestine. He spoke to Jacobin about the implications of the slaughter in Gaza for the world, and about his perspective on the US university system as he retires from his position teaching at Columbia. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

*

Daniel Finn: We spoke last October, during the opening weeks of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, and I think many people would have found it difficult to believe that twelve months later, we would be looking at this onslaught continuing at such a level of intensity, now also extending to the West Bank and Lebanon. Could you give us a sense, from a historian’s perspective, of how the death and destruction of the last year stands out, in particular when compared with the experience of the Nakba in the 1940s?

Rashid Khalidi: I couldn’t have imagined back in October of last year that we would be where we are a year later. It would have been inconceivable, I think, to most people. In terms of how it compares to the Nakba, in some ways it’s obviously not yet quite as extensive, while on another level, it’s infinitely more intensive.

What has been done to Gaza is far worse than what was done to any part of Palestine in 1948, and what is being done to Lebanon is far worse than what was done to Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. This is a war of extermination — it’s a genocide. I was reading a play by Marina Carr talking about the razing of Troy after the Trojan War. Quoting Hecuba, she says, “This is not war — in war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out.”

I think that’s what we’re seeing the United States and Israel do in Gaza and what has now been extended to Lebanon — the degree of suffering being inflicted; enormous civilian casualties purposely being caused. I think there is a threat to the entire international legal order if this is allowed to continue, as it has been by the United States.

If the United States continues doing this together with Israel, the barriers created since World War II against these kinds of atrocities will have been destroyed, and we will be in a situation where anyone can do anything. The targeting of civilians, the number of children going into hospitals with headshots from snipers, the destruction of water purification plants and sewage treatment plants — those kind of actions are designed to kill and to starve on a massive scale.

This is a new level insofar as what Israel has done to Palestine and to the region is concerned. Benjamin Netanyahu said this week, “We will do to Lebanon what we did to Gaza,” and they’re doing it. This is not just a threat — actions are being taken in Lebanon which will be expanded.

In some ways, obviously it is not yet as extensive as the Nakba. So far, it has only affected the Gaza Strip, where 2.2 million Palestinians live, and the West Bank to a lesser extent. But it’s expanding in its scope and now also reaching Lebanon, with over a million people made refugees.

Those numbers are actually far higher than the Nakba, when three-quarters of a million were driven from their homes. Between the two million people Israel has made homeless in Gaza and the one million people who have had to leave their homes in Lebanon, this is many times greater in sheer numbers than what was done during the Nakba.

Of course, that was permanent — most of those people never returned. We don’t yet know what’s going to happen here, obviously.

Daniel Finn: How does the record of the Biden administration over the last twelve months compare with previous US administrations, such as the Reagan administration and its response to the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, or George W. Bush and his response to the Second Intifada in the opening decade of this century? What do you think have been the main factors conditioning or determining Joe Biden’s support for Israel, from his own personal ideological worldview to questions of domestic political interests and blocs to the geopolitical interests of the United States?

Rashid Khalidi: The first thing we have to do is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the United States has any reservations about what Israel is doing. Israel is doing what it is doing in careful and close coordination with Washington, and with its full approval. The United States does not just arm and diplomatically protect what Israel does; it shares Israel’s goals and approves of Israel’s methods.

The tut-tutting, the pooh-poohing, and the crocodile tears about humanitarian issues and civilian casualties are pure hypocrisy. The United States has signed on to Israel’s approach to Lebanon — it wants Israel to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. It does not have any reservations about the basic approach of Israel, which is to attack the civilian population in order to force change in Lebanon and obviously in Gaza.

It is a category mistake to assume that there are any reservations on the part of American policymakers, whether we are talking about Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, or Samantha Power — all down the line. It is wrong to imagine that there are any reservations about the shared Israeli-American objectives.

We are living in a world of illusion if we believe anything that these people say. They have signed on to the slaughter of civilians in order to force changes, which include the elimination of Hamas from the Palestinian political map and the elimination of Hezbollah from the Lebanese political map. Those are shared objectives being carried out together in coordination.

The United States helps Israel in targeting Hezbollah and Hamas leaders — that is a fact. Anybody who ignores that and pretends that there’s any daylight between what Israel does and what the United States wants it to do is lying to themselves or is lying to us.

The second thing we have to recognize is that this is of a piece with previous American policies. In a book that I wrote a few years ago, I pointed out that the 1967 war^[1] was a joint endeavor. Washington agreed with what Israel was doing and gave its approval. The United States didn’t arm Israel on that occasion, but it did protect Israel at the United Nations Security Council and elsewhere during and after that war.

The same was true in 1982:^[2] the United States approved of what Israel was planning to do. Ariel Sharon came to Washington and met with Alexander Haig. Haig gave Sharon a green light as he told him, “We’re going to do this to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization); we’re going to do this to Syria; we’re going to do this to Lebanon.”

At a certain point, the United States reined in Israel because those objectives had been achieved. The Syrian army had been defeated in Lebanon, a puppet government was about to be installed, and the PLO had agreed to withdraw from Lebanon. Israel had achieved the objectives on which the two parties agreed — it was now simply bombarding Lebanon out of sheer sadism, and Ronald Reagan stopped it.

Those shared objectives of the two powers have not yet been achieved in Lebanon and Gaza, so the United States has not reined in (and in my view will not rein in) Israel. On the contrary, the United States is a party to this war. It is fighting in Lebanon, even if American troops are not directly engaged in combat. It’s an illusion to assume otherwise.

What is the motivation for Joe Biden’s blind loyalty to anything Israel says, does, and wants? Part of this has to do with the generation he comes from. Part of it has to do with the fact that he’s the largest recipient in US history of money from AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Part of it has to do with the fact that they have proselytized him ceaselessly since Golda Meir^[3] brainwashed him back in the 1970s.

Part of it has to do with a strategic calculation in relation to Iran and what are described as Iranian proxies. There is a vision of the Middle East — a skewed, distorted, perverted vision — that is shared by the United States and Israel, with an absolute devotion to force as the means to resolve issues. Every time a diplomatic solution has come up, Netanyahu has escalated to make that impossible. He has done so again and again and again, killing the people he was negotiating with in Lebanon or from Hamas, attacking the Iranian embassy in Damascus, and so forth.

The United States has been a party to this. It has approved of this approach and provided the weapons for it. There is a lengthy piece in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute about the American weapons that were used in the killing of Hassan Nasrallah. Those weapons could not have been used without American approval and without the lying American cover that this is an act of self-defense.

Biden is a particularly dedicated supporter of Israel, but he doesn’t differ from most of the US political elite. In that regard, he is quite isolated in terms of American public opinion. Most Americans don’t approve of US arms shipments to Israel, including large numbers of Republicans. Most Americans are in favor of the US stopping those arms shipments, and most Americans have an unfavorable view of Biden’s policies and of Netanyahu.

But all that and five cents won’t get you a cup of coffee in Washington. They do exactly as they please, whatever public opinion says — they don’t care. Biden is at the extreme end of a spectrum, all of which holds matters like public opinion, international humanitarian law, and the standing of the United States with the rest of the world in total contempt.

Daniel Finn: Even if the US political elite has shown itself not to be responsive to public opinion on questions regarding Israel, do you think there has been a significant shift over the last year in the way the American population as a whole perceives Israel and the US alliance with it? Are there likely to be consequences from that over the long run? What is the significance of the countermobilization that we’ve seen by pro-Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC — notably the effort that was put into taking out certain members of Congress who had been vocal in calling for a cease-fire?

Rashid Khalidi: There’s no question that public opinion has changed. Of the majorities that I have mentioned, possibly the only one that was in existence before the war started on October 7 might have been public disapproval of Netanyahu. There was no massive disapproval of Israel: indeed, at the beginning of the war, there was support for Israel’s war in public opinion.

But there has been an underlying shift in attitudes toward Israel driven by the entirely different view on the part of people under thirty or under thirty-five, in contrast with the view of their elders. That has been magnified by the barbaric atrocities that Israel is committing with American weapons and support. Those atrocities have further alienated people who might have had slightly critical views before but have now swung into much more vigorous opposition to US and Israeli policies.

I do think that there has been a major, consequential shift in public opinion; I don’t think there are likely to be consequences on the political level in the short term. Whoever’s elected in November and whatever government we have for the next several years in this country is likely to be as committed as previous ones were to unswerving support of Israel’s basic objectives, even if there are occasionally tactical differences.

That’s because the American elite hasn’t changed one bit. The people who own the politicians — the donor class, the people without whose millions and billions they would not be able to stay in office — haven’t changed. The same people own the big corporations, the media, the foundations, and the universities — who pays the piper, calls the tune. They tell the politicians what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

They own all of these things the way someone owns their home or a private business, and they haven’t changed one bit. There has been no shift among the political, media, corporate, and cultural elites, so I expect no change and no consequences in the short term. There is going to be a growing gap between elite opinion and grassroots opinion, but that has been the case in the past.

The Iraq War was fought by an elite that had lost the support of the public within a year of the war. The Vietnam War was fought for years and years after public opinion had shifted against it. It’s not unusual in American history for undemocratic leaders to act in opposition to the views of their constituents for years and years, and that will continue, I’m afraid.

As far as their counteroffensive is concerned and whether that will affect public opinion, I don’t think it will. I think it is actually going to exacerbate the gap between the people and their rulers. The repressive measures and the weaponization of antisemitism to shut down any discourse on Palestine, the attempt to use legal means to penalize universities if they don’t do the bidding of these two-bit politicians — all of that is going to escalate and it’s going to result in broader opposition and resistance among the general public to this approach on the part of the elites.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found here.)

NOTES

[1] The 1967 Arab Israeli war, also known as the Six-Day War, began with the Israeli invasion of Egypt on June 5, 1967. For more information on that important event and its aftermath see The Jewish Tragedy Finds in Israel a Dismal Sequel.

[2] In 1982 Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli regime sought to justify it as a response to Palestinian attacks launched from Lebanese soil. But the Israeli rulers’ designs on Lebanon predated the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) basing itself there. Israeli officials contemplated a possible attack on Lebanon as far back as 1955. From the end of Israel’s 1967 war to the onset of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israeli military strikes against Lebanon took 10,000 lives, while Israeli police claimed that 282 Israelis died as a result of attacks attributed to the PLO during the same period. Throughout the invasion, Washington backed the Israeli onslaught. “The PLO must withdraw from Lebanon,” insisted then vice-president George Bush. “This was essentially a U.S. war,” said PLO leader Yasser Arafat at a conference of Arab governments in September 1982. “It was directed not only against the PLO and its allies, but also against the entire Arab nation.” Israel, Arafat said, had been “supported militarily, economically, and diplomatically by the United States.”

The PLO was forced to withdraw its forces from Lebanon in August 1982. U.S. officials promised they would guarantee the safety of Palestinian civilians in Beirut. But as soon as the evacuation of the PLO fighters had been completed, U.S., French, and Italian troops in Lebanon were pulled out. On September 15, 1982, Israeli tanks surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Israeli forces worked hand-in-glove with rightist Lebanese militias to carry out a massacre of an estimated 3,000 Palestinians, out of a population of 20,000, in these camps. Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk, one of the first to visit Sabra and Shatila after the “operation,” reported: “Often the killers were not just content to kill. In very many cases, the assailants cut off the limbs of their victims before killing them. They smashed the heads of infants and babies against the walls. Women, and even young girls, were raped before being assassinated with hatchets.” 

[3] Golda Meir (1898 – 1978) was an Israeli politician who served as the fourth prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974.

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