World-Outlook is reposting this interview, which first appeared on October 13, 2024, in Jacobin, 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. (World-Outlook‘s full introduction to this interview can be found in part 1.)

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 second of which follows.

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

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

(Part 2)

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: There’s another sense in which a yawning gap has opened up over the last year concerning the whole discourse of human rights, international law, and a world order based on principles that are something more than cynical, state-centered realpolitik. That discourse has been used by the US political class and its allies to legitimate their actions and their role in the world, particularly over the last twenty-five years. Over the last twelve months, we’ve seen important legal moves against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and we’ve seen the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. What do you think is the significance of those moves and the fact that the United States and its allies have so openly disregarded them?

Rashid Khalidi: The United States has taken a sledgehammer to any idea of a rules-based international order. It has taken a sledgehammer to international humanitarian law, and to the rules of war. If you can kill hundreds of civilians to take out one leader, then the whole idea of international humanitarian law and the laws of war based on proportionality and discrimination goes right out the window.

That happened eleven months ago in Gaza when entire apartment blocks were turned into a vast, steaming crater in order to kill one person. We don’t know the exact number of those killed because the victims were vaporized. In many cases, this has been done with American weapons. It could not continue without those weapons and without American approval.

The United States has supplied two-thousand-pound bombs with guidance systems to Israel in their thousands. They have used these weapons to completely demolish any idea of a rules-based international order. If there’s no proportionality and no discrimination in the use of force, you can slaughter any number of people and claim that they were human shields for some monstrous, evil person who we had to kill. There are no limits.

That is one of the tragic, lasting effects of this war. It has nothing to do with Palestine or Israel or Lebanon or the Middle East in terms of its future importance. This is the template that every state will now be able to use in waging war on its enemies. All limits have now been removed. We’ve gone back to where things stood before World War II.

During World War II, things were done that led to the creation of the Genocide Convention and various aspects of international law that one would have hoped would last. They have now been demolished. We’ve gone back to permission for genocide and for the slaughter of untold numbers of civilians, if you can use as a pretext the claim that the target was individual X or individual Y.

On the one hand, you’re going to have people who will try to maintain or restore an international legal order — what the Americans keep calling a rules-based international order — while on the other hand, you have the greatest power on Earth and its client state busy demolishing that order and establishing the actual parameters in which they and others will be allowed to operate.

Daniel Finn: As we’re speaking, twelve months from the beginning of the Israeli offensive against Gaza, the situation appears to be chaotic and unpredictable, with the potential to escalate to a full-blown regional war that could manifest itself in several different ways. What do you think is likely to happen as a result of what we’ve seen over the past few weeks alone?

Rashid Khalidi: I can’t predict the future, and I won’t attempt to do so. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can tell you what the trends are right now. If they’re not reversed, they will bring us more of what we’ve already seen.

What started in Gaza is now extending to the West Bank on a more limited but expanding scale. It is now being implemented in full force in Lebanon, and one fears it may be extended to Iran if the Netanyahu government and its many allies, friends, and shills in the American elite have their way.

What has evolved has been a willingness to engage in mass slaughter and extensive war crimes as collective punishment of an entire population in order to force certain changes. That’s what the United States and Israel are doing in Gaza. The latest episode involves trying to move half a million people out of the northern part of Gaza and slaughtering as many of them as necessary as incitement for them to move, while continuing to kill fifty to a hundred people a day.

This is directed at bringing about regime change. I’m not talking here about the military aspect — I’m talking about what kind of regime they’re trying to impose in Gaza. It looks like they may do the same thing in the West Bank, and the United States and Israel have both proclaimed that they are doing the same thing in Lebanon.

The State Department has said that the United States is no longer trying to achieve a cease-fire in Lebanon. It adheres to Israel’s objectives, and Netanyahu made those objectives clear — he wants a complete change of regime in Lebanon. One fears that this may well be extended to Iran.

I would remind people that regime change in Lebanon has a history. The 1982 war was intended, among other things, to establish a regime friendly to Israel in Lebanon. We can see how that ended up: it gave us further instability, and it gave us Hezbollah.

It also gave us the attacks on the US Marines and the US embassy, because many Lebanese felt that the United States had participated in Israel’s butchery of nineteen thousand Palestinians during the 1982 war. They believed that the United States had promised to protect civilians who were left behind when the PLO left Beirut in August 1982, yet those people were then slaughtered in Sabra and Shatila.

What Haig and Sharon attempted to do in Lebanon did not turn out well. The attempt to carry out regime change in Iraq did not turn out well, either. Iraq is closer to being an Iranian client than it is to being an American client. In 2024, there are rockets being fired at American troops in Iraq, and rockets being fired at Israel from Iraq.

I have no idea what’s going to happen, but those seem to be the trends underway, with a normalization of genocide and mass slaughter as a policy in order to achieve certain political objectives. I can tell you that, based on past experience, these things do not turn out well — obviously not for the population subjected to mass slaughter, and not for the people trying to implement these changes, either.

Daniel Finn: It’s clear that this is one of the most difficult moments, if not the most difficult moment, that the Palestinian people have faced in the whole period since the Nakba. Obviously, it’s very difficult to talk under these circumstances about the prospects facing the Palestinians and what the way forward might be from this point, but could I ask if you have any general reflections that you might want to make about that question?

Rashid Khalidi: The situation of the Palestinian people is extraordinarily grim. I don’t remember the Nakba — I was born in November 1948, by which time it was pretty much over, and I wasn’t conscious of any of this, obviously. 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.

Whether it’s worse or not, only time will tell, because it’s not over. We’re not anywhere near the end — I wish that we were, but it doesn’t seem that we are. 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. 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. That was the situation before October 7, and it hasn’t really changed.

There’s no sense of how Palestinians want to live in the future and relate to the Israelis in Palestine in the future. 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.

I don’t think those leaderships have answers to the questions that I’ve just asked, so the Palestinians are rudderless as a people in terms of political leadership. On the other hand, it should be said that Israel and the United States have acted in ways that raise fundamental questions about the possibility of the continuation of Israel’s approach, and the approach of the Israeli people, since they now seem to approve in large measure of what their government is doing to their region.

I question how this can continue indefinitely into the future — how Israel can expect to continue dominating people in the way that it’s trying to do without the resistance becoming overwhelming. I think they’re sowing the wind in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. I know there are Cassandra voices in Israel who are saying, “This is suicide, this is insane — there’s no strategy here. How do you want this to end?”

There are no answers to those questions, because the people leading this enterprise have no answers, except to say that if force is insufficient, you should use more force. That’s the only thing they understand. That’s how they see politics, but that’s not politics — it’s as if Carl von Clausewitz^[1] never existed.

On the one hand, 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. But I think that there’s a message here in what Israel is doing. The policy of force, which would have worked in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, and even into the twentieth century, cannot possibly work in the twenty-first century.

It can’t work anywhere in the long run, but it can’t work in this case in particular because Israel as a project is entirely dependent on external support. It is now and always has been. This was never a totally independent project or an idea that was self-sustaining, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to Britain to get the Balfour Declaration or to the United Nations to get the partition resolution. The head of Mossad wouldn’t have gone to get Lyndon Johnson’s approval in 1967, and Sharon wouldn’t have gone to get Haig’s approval in 1982.

The project is dependent on the outside world and specifically on the West — that’s the metropole for this settler-colonial project. It’s also a national project — it has many other aspects — but it’s completely dependent on its metropole in the West. It has been alienating public opinion in the West, destroying its base of support in the countries upon which Israel depends, and without which it cannot do anything.

It still has the elites, the governments, and the military-industrial complex, which is perfectly happy to sell unlimited amounts of two-thousand-pound bombs, Apache helicopters, F-35 warplanes, and so forth. But it has lost the kind of wall-to-wall public support that the Zionist project and the state of Israel had in most of the Western world from the time of Balfour through to the 1990s or certainly through to the First Intifada of the late 1980s.

That trend could conceivably be halted or even reversed, but that would require changing this policy of force, more force, and nothing other than force. It would require stopping mass slaughter and collective punishment, and I don’t see that happening. I would say the future is quite grim for the Palestinians, but I don’t think it looks any better for Israel. In fact, in some respects, it may even be worse in the long term for Israel as it is currently configured.

Daniel Fin: You’re now retiring from Columbia. We’ve seen over the last year that US university campuses have become one of the most important, high-profile spaces of contestation. There was a backhanded tribute to the importance of the student encampments by the most right-wing elements in the US Congress, who held a series of hearings demanding action be taken against them. What do you think the experience of the last year has told us about the US university system, and where do you think it’s going?

Rashid Khalidi: What happened last year was a world-historical event. What started on American campuses spread worldwide and made it perfectly clear that overwhelming majorities of people in almost every country on the face of the Earth are opposed to what’s happening, in spite of the fact that their governments are perfectly happy allowing it to continue or are actually engaged in helping it to continue. The gap between the peoples and the governments was made perfectly clear. It’s also a generational gap — young people are completely committed, while older people are much more divided on this.

Remember that universities operate on a strange calendar, where things start in the fall and end in the spring. We’re now in a new year starting in September or October. This year has been quite different to last year on campus. The repressive measures mandated by Congress and implemented with extraordinary zeal by compliant, craven, and despicable university administrators have been very successful. There has been almost no disruptive activism of the level that we saw last year.

There has been activism on the Columbia campus. Students have been reading the names of people slaughtered by Israel. For days and days and days, they’ve been doing that, and that’s very effective, but it’s not having the effect — nor is it allowed to have the effect — of anything that was done last year up until the police crackdown.

Universities played an enormous role in 2023–24, but I don’t see the likelihood of that continuing, at least in the United States, in the places I can see. In Europe, more may be happening on campuses than is happening right now in the United States. But that contestation has spread to public opinion. Public opinion has shifted because people are seeing on their phone screens the reality that the mass media lies about, distorts, and prevents us from seeing.

I honestly don’t think you can look to the universities, given the success of this wave of repression, for the same kind of inspirational spark that they gave in 2023–24. From what I know, on the campuses where I hear what’s going on, that is simply not the case. This academic year, the police state that has been imposed at Columbia — the checkpoints, the surveillance, the extraordinary restrictions on movement and on political action — has been quite effective.

Those measures have been organized in concert with the state and the New York City Police Department, and in liaison with people from the Israeli intelligence services and the FBI, to make sure that what happened last year cannot happen again, so I wouldn’t look to the universities this academic year. That hasn’t stopped energetic demonstrations off campus — we’ve had many of those, in New York City at least. I may be wrong: we’re only in October, and heaven knows what will happen in the months to come.

Daniel Finn: Your next book, as I understand it, is looking at the connections and the feedback loops between British colonialism in Palestine and in other countries — in particular Ireland. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about that?

Rashid Khalidi: This is a book that I hope to write, not one I have yet written. It’s not a book for which the ideas have fully developed; it’s not a finished product, and I’m not sure how it will develop. What I do know is that I’ve been working on some extraordinary links and correspondences between the methods used in Ireland and those later used in Palestine.

There are also important similarities between Ireland and Palestine as settler colonies. Obviously, there are also enormous differences. English and later British attempts to subdue Ireland go back to the twelfth century and were incessant over the course of century after century after century. The settlement that is really significant in these terms only started with the Elizabethan era and the century that followed, hundreds of years before Zionism as a political project even existed.

Like most settler-colonial projects, what we saw in Ireland was an extension of the sovereignty and population of the mother country into a settler colony. You shipped English, Welsh, and Scottish subjects of the crown as an extension of its sovereignty in order to master the country that was being settled. That’s the classic paradigm of settler colonialism: it’s what happened in North America, Australia, Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, and other countries.

Obviously, Zionism was very different. It was an independent political project — a national project. The settlers who went to North America or Ireland were going as English settlers, subjects of the crown, and extensions of its sovereignty. They didn’t set up their own independent entities. They named Carolina after King Charles, Jamestown after King James, and so on.

Zionism had other aspects. It saw itself as a resolution of the Jewish question. For people persecuted in the Christian world, it was based on a connection between Judaism and the land of Israel, so it had distinct features. But its methodology and its behavior were those of a settler-colonial project.

The early Zionists saw themselves in this light. They saw themselves as European settlers, operating like other European settlers in barbaric, non-European lands whose inhabitants were to be disregarded. That is the approach of settler-colonial projects to indigenous populations.

Like other settler-colonial projects, it required a metropole. The metropole for most of them is the mother country. For North America, Australia, and Ireland, it was England or later the United Kingdom. Zionism was an independent project, and it started off searching for support from the German Kaiser, the Ottoman Sultan, or the French Republic, before ultimately finding Britain as an ally. But the Zionist project shifted seamlessly to relying on support from the United States and the Soviet Union when British support waned in 1939.

It later fought the wars of 1956 and 1967 with French and British weapons and developed its nuclear arsenal with French assistance. There’s an absolute requirement for any settler-colonial project to have a metropole, but Zionism is unique in being able to leap, as it were, from iceberg to iceberg, finding several different external patrons for the project. Today, the West as a whole — powerful Western countries like the United States, France, Britain, Germany, and a few others — serves as the metropole for this project.

The details are fascinating. The people who negotiated an end to the Irish War of Independence were the same people in the same cabinet that adopted the Balfour Declaration, helping to produce the Mandate for Palestine. That set up the regime that Britain created in Palestine to foster and favor the Zionist project. Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill — the personnel were the same.

You take an official from India and you bring them to Ireland to torture people. The next thing you know, a decade later, after more service in India, he’s back in Palestine setting up torture centers. You take the commander of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and you send them to Palestine to set up the Palestinian gendarmerie. Then you ship over the Black and Tans and the veterans of the RIC when Britain has to leave Ireland at the end of the War of Independence in 1921–22.

The connections are remarkable, and they go even further into the 1920s and ’30s. It was the general expertise of empire, but in particular it was the expertise developed in the specific settler colony of Ireland that was then bequeathed to the officers and officials who implemented British policy in Palestine. In turn, they bequeathed that expertise to the Israelis.

The officers who were engaged in putting down the great revolt in Palestine at the end of the 1930s were imparting the lessons of British counterinsurgency to the individuals who became the senior officers of the Israeli army. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were trained by these people. They learned how to shoot prisoners and how to destroy infrastructure.

They were taught by the British masters of these counterinsurgency approaches, many of whom were actually Anglo-Irish or had served in Ireland — Sir Charles Tegart, for example, or Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who commanded a brigade in Cork during the War of Independence and a division in Palestine in the 1930s. He was the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman. Their attitudes and their worldview — in particular the way in which they saw and treated the indigenous population and their favoring of the settlers — were of a piece between Ireland and Palestine.

Contributors

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of many books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) and Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013).

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

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

NOTES

[1] Carl von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist. He authored On War, still considered by many a seminal treatise on military strategy. It contains the well-known aphorism, “War is the continuation of policy with other means.”

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