This the second part of an interview with Rashid Khalidi, a renowned Palestinian American scholar and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. The interview 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.

The full introduction by World-Outlook to this interview can be found in Part I.

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

— World-Outlook editors

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

O’Connell: By the same token, it’s very difficult to understand what Hamas’s plan might have been in carrying out the October 7 attacks, unless you consider that they knew some version of this was coming, and that it was therefore part of their plan.

Khalidi: I think you have to assume three things. The first is that Hamas undoubtedly had a set of unrealistic expectations as to what would happen in the region once they unleashed this offensive. They seem to have believed that there would be uprisings all over Palestine, that all their allies would go to war alongside them, and that this would be the war to end all wars. I’m talking here about the people in the tunnels, the military wing of Hamas; I’m not talking about the rest of the Hamas leadership outside of Palestine, who I don’t think necessarily had the same unrealistic expectations. The people who planned this attack didn’t have a very clear understanding of the regional situation, or the situation in the rest of Palestine. And so, they did something that did not produce what they expected.

The second thing is that they did not take full control of the battlefield they created, or perhaps of their own forces and those of their allies. They didn’t stop people coming in through the fence openings and doing what they did. In addition, there seems to have been a thirst for revenge on the part of many of the people who carried out this assault. And this led to atrocities, brutalities, attacks on civilians. You cannot say that they didn’t intend to do that.

If you go back and listen to the statement by Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing, on the morning of the attack, he’s talking about attacks on civilians. There seems to have been a desire for revenge, though obviously with means more limited than those Israel possesses. And I’m not comparing it to this unceasing, seemingly unquenchable desire for revenge on the part of the Israeli military that we see daily, but I do think it’s also an element with Hamas.

Thirdly — and I’m not as sure about this as I am about the first two things that I mentioned — they may not have appreciated the degree to which attacks on civilians would justify and enable Israel’s completely disproportionate response. You can contrast that with the way in which Hezbollah seems to have very carefully tried to target military and industrial installations in its attacks. Now, their attacks have killed many civilians in northern Israel, but a tiny number by comparison to what happened around Gaza on October 7.

That reflects an understanding that there may be ways to limit Israel’s retaliation. I’m not sure that that has to do with Hezbollah’s respect for the laws of war, or an understanding of the moral aspect of war; I think it has to do with cold political calculation, which shows a degree of political sophistication that I don’t think Hamas had. You’ll have young people who say, “How can you criticize the resistance?” Well, if you don’t want to accept international law, you don’t want to accept morality, how about politics? How about what is smart? How about what is stupid? I’m not trying to praise Hezbollah. I’m just describing what happened.

O’Connell: You’re planning, I believe, a book about Ireland as a laboratory for the kinds of colonial practices that were later applied in Palestine. As an Irish person, I’m aware that my country is an outlier in Europe, and in the West more generally, in the broad support for Palestine among its population — reflected in a very watered-down form by its government. And one obvious explanation is that we know what Palestine has been through, because we experienced it. Although I often think that’s overstated; Margaret Thatcher never carpet-bombed West Belfast to crush the IRA [Irish Republican Army]…

Khalidi: But I’m sorry, it didn’t start with Margaret Thatcher. It’s perfectly clear that everybody in Ireland thinks of the whole 850 years of history, going back to Henry II and Strongbow. They don’t just think of the Troubles.

O’Connell: No, of course. It makes sense that we Irish would, on the basis of that history, instinctively sympathize with the Palestinian struggle. But what I find strange is the idea that you would need that cultural memory of colonization — to be Irish, or Algerian, or Kenyan, or whatever it might be — to understand that what the Palestinians have been made to suffer is wrong.

Khalidi: Well, what can I say? I think Ireland is really a special case, because it’s the first overseas European colony, and no country has had a colonial experience as long as Ireland’s. That partially explains certain Irish sympathies.

That said, I agree with you. I think it’s monstrous that Germans, for instance, can’t say, “We committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa, and we stood by while our Ottoman allies committed genocide against the Armenians in the First World War, and we committed genocide against the Jews in the Holocaust, so Germany bears an extraordinary responsibility for genocide, for never again allowing it, and genocide is happening in Palestine.” And that just does not happen in Germany, that linkage between the different genocides in which the country was in different ways involved. It never happens. I’m afraid that’s true of all the former colonial powers.

O’Connell: One thing I’ve noticed repeatedly over the past year or so is that whenever the Middle East is spoken of in the European and American media, it is always with an understanding that Israel, to put it in literary terms, is the protagonist.

Khalidi: I put it slightly differently. My objection to organs of opinion like The New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. “How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?” Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.

The vantage point for reporting on Gaza is Israel, so Western journalists call from Israel to these poor stringers in Gaza, who are being hunted down by the Israelis one by one. These people are selected to be killed because they are working for Western journalists. And to every Western outlet that refuses to say “Israel does not allow us to report from Gaza,” and that Israel is deliberately killing journalists, the disgrace and the shame that accrues to them should be endless.

O’Connell: In the early weeks of this war there was a relentless focus in the media on university politics. Obviously, these campus protests were very important, but there was a definite sense that the focus on them, and on the culture war battle lines around them, functioned as a distraction from the actual violence unfolding in Palestine.

Khalidi: I agree. That became the story, and it completely defeated the purpose of the students, and of those opposing the war, which was to focus attention on the atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza. That represents, again, a success for this media-corporate elite, in swiveling away from what they didn’t want us to see toward alleged antisemitism—which of course is the weapon of choice for people who have no argument. If you don’t have an argument to justify what you’re doing, you prevent other people from arguing by calling them antisemites. It’s a brilliant strategy.

O’Connell: You would hope it’s one that might become less potent through sheer overuse.

Khalidi: It’s getting worse. The collaboration between campus security departments, the involvement of local police departments, the involvement of the FBI, and the Justice Department. The interpenetration between Israeli intelligence and American intelligence, and between Israeli security services and American police departments, and the way in which all universities have coordinated and collaborated and consulted, means that you have a cookie-cutter situation, university after university, college after college: a blanket repression of activities on campus.

We have at Columbia what I guess you would call a low-security prison situation, with checkpoints and electronic passage into the campus. The persecution of faculty and staff, the persecution of students, the shutting down of events — one can go on and on, and that’s happening all across American campuses, as a result of quite intense collaboration and coordination and pressure from elected officials, from donors, from boards of trustees, from alumni and parents.

O’Connell: So, the anxiety on the part of the universities is not so much that they would be on the wrong side of history, or that they might be complicit in any actual antisemitism. It has to do rather with how these things might affect donations and other revenue sources?

Khalidi: Exactly. It’s money, and the fear of legal liability. The way American antidiscrimination law has been weaponized to shut down dissent is frightening. It’s not the first instance in American history. You had this during the McCarthy era. You had it at different periods of American history. But it’s quite frightening.

O’Connell: The pressures on free speech, the rate at which universities are coming to resemble large corporations: do you think these things have contributed to a diminishing role of the university in society?

Khalidi: The mask has dropped from American universities. They are clearly not institutions where the ideas and views of the faculty, or the welfare of the students, are the first concern. It is very clear that big private universities are primarily financial institutions, huge hedge funds with large real estate portfolios, which have as a secondary purpose making money from students. There is a rhetoric of student welfare, which is used to advance the interest of a minority of students at the expense of a majority of students. But that rhetoric is completely false. As institutions, they have absolutely no respect for, and pay no attention to, the voices of faculty.

Last May at Columbia, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences held a vote of no confidence in the president, Baroness Nemat Shafik, over the treatment of student protesters. It was passed two-to-one. You would think this would mean something. It might as well not have happened. Students don’t come to university to see expensively tailored vice presidents and deans. They come to learn from the faculty. The views of the students, you would think, might mean something. But no. “We’re a hedge fund. We’re a real estate empire. And we care primarily about other hedge fund owners who are, in fiduciary terms, our owners.”

O’Connell: I was about to say that, as you’re retiring, this is no longer your problem. But of course, this is everyone’s problem.

Khalidi: It’s a problem for American society. And it’s very distressing. I mean, it’s of a piece with the way our politics are completely dominated by money. It’s of a piece with the fact that a Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, or a Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, can completely change the course a newspaper takes, as happened with the recent decisions not to endorse a presidential candidate.

Those are naked examples, but such things are happening all the time, right across corporate media. Which is only one reason why the alternative media, and social media, are going to be a larger and larger share of what people actually pay attention to. Because the corruption of that whole world stinks so badly that it will sooner or later turn people off. The death of the corporate media, which I fervently hope for, has, I think, been hastened. It’s been revealed that it is just money that drives everything.

O’Connell: What effect do you think Trump’s second term is likely to have on academic life in the US?

Khalidi: The situation on campus is appalling, has been getting worse for over a year, and will continue to worsen. The assault by politicians, the media, and donors on free speech, academic freedom, and the independence of the universities has been ferocious. There will be no fundamental difference, except that these same actors will be more overt and less hypocritical in their repression. Virginia Foxx, Elise Stefanik, and their ilk already had the cowards who run universities dancing to their tune, to the universal approval of donors and the media.

I expect no fundamental change, simply a deepening and an extension of existing pernicious trends. More faculty and staff will be fired, discouraging others from acting in line with their consciences; more students will be disciplined and tried, more programs and departments will be closed, and more agents of repression will be hired to police the universities and even to “teach” in them. Apocalypse Light will simply become a fuller apocalypse.

O’Connell: Although it’s hard to imagine things being worse for Palestinians than they already are with Biden in the White House, do you foresee a deterioration in the situation of Palestinians with Trump in power?

Khalidi: It is impossible to say what Trump will do in foreign policy. A battle appears to be taking place between hawkish neocons and isolationists for Trump’s ear. How that will affect Palestine is unclear. Things that have been disastrous may get worse, or perhaps not. It is hard to think what Trump could do that would be worse than what Biden-Harris have already done for thirteen months, but as we learned in the 1970s and 1980s during the war in Lebanon, things can always get worse.

I doubt that Trump wants a war with Iran, or indeed wants the war in Gaza and Lebanon to still be raging when he takes office. However, that will not necessarily cause the Netanyahu government to change course. The tail has been wagging the dog very hard for quite a while, and the ability of American policymakers to believe, or pretend to believe, every transparent lie told by their Israeli interlocutors (“human shields,” “every precaution taken to avoid civilian casualties,” “no ethnic cleansing,” “no genocide,” “no intention to resettle Gaza,” etc.) appears limitless. I doubt that will change one bit under Trump.

O’Connell: Usually, these kinds of conversations end with the interlocutor asking for some glimmer of hope. But given the current realities, I won’t insult you by even going there.

Khalidi: Well, if you did, I would say that the shifts in public opinion we’ve seen in the West where Israel and Palestine are concerned are a harbinger of change. That won’t be quick. It’ll be harder than Vietnam, harder than Iraq, harder than the change around apartheid in South Africa. The elites will fight tooth and nail to not change anything. But I think that this ongoing change offers a little bit of hope for the future. If you understand how the Israeli project is intimately and integrally linked to the West, then a shift in Western public opinion sooner or later is going to have an impact on Israel.

Israel has always benefited from wall-to-wall support in every Western country, with very few exceptions. It had never lost public opinion. It has now lost public opinion. That may change, and evolution is not inevitable, but if that trend continues, things will have to change for the better, however fiercely the pro-Israel elites resist. Israel cannot go on without the complete support of the West. It’s not possible. The project doesn’t work. We’re in a different world than the world we’ve been in for over a century. And that might be a source of optimism.

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

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