The following interview with Rashid Khalidi, a renowned Palestinian American scholar and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, first appeared in the December 19, 2024, issue of the New York Review of Books.

Khalidi discusses the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel and the ferocity of the war the Israeli government launched in response. He touches on Israel’s war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and against other Iranian allies in the broader Middle East region. He also details Washington’s indispensable support for Israel’s wars and the popular opposition in the United States and around the world to U.S. and Israeli war aims.

Shortly after the interview was conducted, a 60-day ceasefire in Lebanon was agreed to. It took effect on November 27. Israel invaded Lebanon on October 1, waging a ferocious bombing campaign and ground assault that resulted in the deaths of more than 3,500 and the displacement of well over a million Lebanese, mostly civilians. The invasion followed a series of Israeli targeted assassinations, which decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership. These attacks appeared to have severely weakened Hezbollah. In the ceasefire deal, Hezbollah dropped its previous demand that Israel end its war in Gaza as a pre-condition for Hezbollah halting its yearlong campaign of rocket attacks on northern Israel.

“In mid-November, Iran dispatched a top official to Beirut to urge Hezbollah to accept a cease-fire with Israel,” reported an article in the November 28 New York Times. “Around the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador met with Elon Musk, an overture to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle. And on Friday [November 29], it will hold talks in Geneva with European countries on a range of issues, including its nuclear program.

“All this recent diplomacy marks a sharp change in tone from late October, when Iran was preparing to launch a large retaliatory attack on Israel,” the Times continued.

This swing to a more conciliatory tone is in part due to the victory in the recent U.S. election of Trump, “an unpredictable leader who, in his first term, pursued a policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran,” the Times noted.

“But it was also driven by Israel’s decimation in Lebanon of Hezbollah — the closest and most important of Iran’s militant allies — and by economic crises at home, where the currency has dropped steadily against the dollar and an energy shortage looms as winter approaches.”

Whether the ceasefire will last is uncertain. While many displaced Lebanese are moving back to their homes, others are less confident about the future. Rana, a 40-year-old Beirut resident who left Lebanon in September, told the Israeli daily Haaretz, “I’m worried that this is just a temporary break. The situation isn’t stable.”

At the same time, there are no signs of progress toward a ceasefire in Gaza. Israel continues to prosecute its genocidal war that most recently has led to the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza. The war has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and reduced much of the territory to rubble.

“Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said a report released by Human Rights Watch on November 14.

“The 154-page report, ‘Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged’: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,’ examines how Israeli authorities’ conduct has led to the displacement of over 90 percent of the population of Gaza — 1.9 million Palestinians — and the widespread destruction of much of Gaza over the last 13 months. Israeli forces have carried out deliberate, controlled demolitions of homes and civilian infrastructure, including in areas where they have apparent aims of creating ‘buffer zones’ and security ‘corridors,’ from which Palestinians are likely to be permanently displaced. Contrary to claims by Israeli officials, their actions do not comply with the laws of war.”

World-Outlook is publishing the interview that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, and text below are from the original. Photos are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing the interview in two parts, the first of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

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Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

The scholar of Palestinian history talks about what has and has not surprised him about the world’s response to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

The historian Rashid Khalidi has, for many years, been a preeminent Arab-American intellectual and among the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the aftermath of the armed incursion by Hamas and other militant groups on Israeli territory on October 7 last year, and of the ongoing Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon that followed, Khalidi and his work have only increased in relevance. His book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), which frames the history of Palestinian dispossession as a settler-colonial project dependent on elite support in the West, has been a fixture on the New York Times best-seller list for much of the past year.

Khalidi was born in New York City, where his Palestinian father was a member of the United Nations Secretariat. While relating the history of Palestine through six major acts of war on its people, his book draws on the archive of his father’s family. It begins, for instance, with an extraordinary correspondence in 1899 between his great-great-great-uncle Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, who had been mayor of Jerusalem, and Theodor Herzl, the progenitor of modern political Zionism.

Khalidi recently retired from Columbia University, where he was Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies in the Department of History. In the past academic year, he was a prominent faculty supporter of the student protests at Columbia. We conducted this conversation, via e-mail and over online video chat, in late October and early November of this year.

— Mark O’Connell

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Mark O’Connell: I wanted to begin by asking what your initial reaction was, both as a Palestinian American and as a historian of the Middle East, to the attacks on October 7 of last year.

Rashid Khalidi: I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I’ve always expected that the intensity of Israeli repression would eventually produce a response, but I was certainly surprised by the extent of that response. The overrunning of Israeli military bases and border settlements was something I certainly did not expect.

That was my first reaction. My second reaction, when the reports began to come in of the extent of civilian casualties, was shock. And I was deeply concerned: I knew that it would have an enormous impact here in the US and would lead to an absolutely ferocious Israeli military response.

O’Connell: Has anything about the scale and ferocity of that response, or the reaction to that response in the West, shocked you or surprised you in the course of this past year?

Khalidi: No. The savagery of what Israel has done, its intentional targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure, is routine. The level of it was unprecedented, obviously; the Palestinian death toll and now the growing Lebanese death toll are beyond what we’ve seen before. But that they would attack desalination plants and sewage plants and universities and demolish mosques and so on didn’t surprise me in the least.

If there was anything that was unexpected, it was the participation of the US government on every level, and its complete unwillingness to restrain Israel in any significant fashion. And by participation, I mean a repetition of Israeli lies. The idea that Israel was not trying to kill people on purpose; the idea that every time Palestinians were killed, it was because they were being used as human shields; completely ignoring the purposeful destruction of infrastructure in order to make life impossible; the fact that the US government repeated every single Israeli justification for the unjustifiable: I found that over the top, frankly. This administration has done less to restrain Israel than pretty much any administration, except perhaps the previous one, the Trump administration.

In other words, you go back to Eisenhower, or Reagan, or anybody, and they were always complicit. They were always involved. They always supported Israel up to a point. But that point would come after months or weeks. And here we are in month thirteen. That point has not come.

O’Connell: And so, at what point do we stop talking about America’s “complicity” in this slaughter, and begin to talk of America as an antagonist, of America being at war with Palestine?

Khalidi: That has always been my view. When we were negotiating with the Israelis in Washington, I realized that actually the Americans and the Israelis were really on the same side, opposed to us. It was in effect a joint delegation. Now you actually have revelations in the American press of joint targeting, and of intelligence operations to find and kill leaders of Hezbollah and of Hamas. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the United States is actually directly at war. It’s an intense, high-level collaboration in planning and targeting. Not to speak of the fact that virtually every shell, every missile, every bomb is American, and that the Israeli army couldn’t go on for more than three months without those hundreds of airlifted shipments. So it is participation at an active level without, for the most part, boots on the ground.

O’Connell: You gave a very powerful speech earlier this year at one of the student encampments at Columbia University, in which you made a comparison with the Vietnam War, which ended in large part because of people in the streets. It strikes me that the very obvious difference here is precisely to do with, as you put it, boots on the ground. That war ended because of popular outrage, but the outrage arose because young American men were being drafted to fight in that war. I just wonder to what extent the war that America is involved in here can really come home, in that way, if Americans are not fighting and dying?

Khalidi: I think you’re right. The absence of active involvement of large numbers of American troops makes this a very different situation to the Iraq War or the Vietnam War. But on the other hand, I think that the shift has been swifter here. It took years for public opinion to turn against the war in Vietnam. Even with Iraq it took a year or two. There has been an extraordinary shift in public opinion about this war, relatively swiftly.

Needless to say, this has had no impact whatsoever on decision-makers or on the elite. The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington. That hasn’t changed. But then it didn’t change with Vietnam for quite a while. It didn’t change over Iraq for quite a while. The elites never respond to public opinion unless they’re under much more pressure, I think, than they are right now.

O’Connell: The speed of that change in public opinion in the US, and the intensification of it here in Europe, seems to me to be largely to do with the visibility of the violence. People often speak of being witness to “the first live-streamed genocide.” We don’t need Seymour Hersh or whoever to unearth evidence of a massacre. We pick up our phones, and immediately we’re confronted with footage of the most horrific violence and depravity. That has to be a factor.

Khalidi: It is, it’s true. But you have to be very careful in assuming that the entire public is exposed to those images. There is a segment of the public — the older, more conservative element — who wouldn’t know how to use Instagram or TikTok if their lives depended on it. But the lower down you go on the age scale, what you’ve just said is more and more true. Everyone who’s young enough and independent enough from mainstream media sees what you just described and is horrified. They know that the mainstream media is lying through its teeth and that every politician is lying. That’s true of many older people as well. But again: the older, the richer, the whiter you get — in the United States, at least — the less likely people are to see or believe those images.

O’Connell: Whether or not Israel’s actions in Palestine can be considered a genocide, it seems to me to be very difficult to make sense of what they’re doing if you don’t believe that, at the very least, some kind of ethnic cleansing project is underway.

Khalidi: You have to understand a couple of things. One, there is an almost unquenchable desire for revenge for what happened on October 7 of last year: the destruction not just of the Gaza division of the Israeli army but of a large number of settlements along the Gaza border; the killing of the largest number of Israeli civilians since 1948; the abduction of over a hundred civilians and perhaps a hundred soldiers; the destruction of a sense of security, which is the cornerstone of how Israelis see themselves. So, the thirst for revenge for what happened seems to be unquenchable. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that the Israeli security establishment has a plan. Every time Israel is at war, it attacks civilian populations on the pretext that there’s a military target there. It has always done this. There was always an ostensible military target somewhere, but the point was never only that military target. The point was also to punish civilians and force them to turn on insurgents.

This is their practice and has always been. It’s taken directly from British military doctrine. Go to British wars in Kenya, go to Malaya, and you’ll see that the British military did the same thing. My point is, therefore, they are purposely killing civilians. They are purposely making life impossible. They are purposely making Gaza uninhabitable, as a means — in the twisted, war-criminal minds of the General Staff — of forcing the population to turn against the insurgents.

And the third thing is that there is a settler-colonial project in northern Gaza: take back a piece of Gaza, empty it of its population, and plant settlers. Now that may or may not happen, but multiple senior ministers have called for new settlements there. All three of those elements, I would say, explain the atrocities that we’re seeing. If that doesn’t fit the description of genocide, just throw out the Genocide Convention. It’s absolutely worthless.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

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