The following interview first appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz on November 30, 2024. “Khalidi has been described,” wrote Haaretz, “as the most significant Palestinian intellectual of his generation, as the successor to Edward Said, and as the preeminent living historian of Palestine.”

After a 22-year-long career, Khalidi recently retired from Columbia University, where he served as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. During this time, he also edited or co-edited the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is the author of several books, including The Hundred Years War on Palestine.

In this wide-ranging interview, Khalidi returns to important themes he has discussed at other times in the 14 months since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. (World-Outlook has previously published four such interviews.) “One of the problems we have today,” he explains, referring to the Palestinian struggle, “is disunity and the absence of a unified national movement and of a clear, unified strategy. Without that, you’re not going to liberate anything.”

He again addresses the role of violence in the anti-colonial struggle. While renewing his criticism of the Hamas-led attack, he points to Israel’s historic denial of any possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state. He then adds, “The violence of the colonizer is three to 20 to 100 times more intense than the violence of the colonized. So if we want to talk about violence, let’s talk about violence; if we want to focus on terrorism and the violence of the Palestinians, we’re not talking the same language.”

Itay Mashiach, who conducted this interview for Haaretz, notes “the importance he [Khalidi] attributes to keeping an open channel with Israelis.” Hence, Mashiach adds, “also his consent to be interviewed [by an Israeli publication]. In his view, it’s an integral element of the path to victory.”

Khalidi stresses this point when asked to explain his views on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Mashiach asked whether Khalidi’s support for BDS made it an issue for him to be interviewed by Haaretz. “No,” Khalidi answers. “I’ve published books in Israel. I think it’s important to reach an Israeli public. I know it’s a very diminished public, but the point is that you don’t win, you don’t bring change without understanding how to appeal to public opinion, over the heads of the governments and over the heads of the propaganda machine, whether in the United States or in Israel.”

When asked about the possibility of Jewish-Palestinian alliances he explains:

“That’s a tough question. Among many Palestinians, especially young Palestinians, there is a resistance to what they call ‘normalization.’ And that, to some extent, blinds some people to the need to find allies on the other side. In the end, you’re not going to win without that happening. It’s harder than any other liberation struggle, because it’s not a colonial project in which people can go home. There is no home. They [the Jews] have been in Israel for three or four generations. They’re not going anywhere. It’s not like you appeal to the French and they bring their colons home. It’s more like Ireland and South Africa, where you have to come to terms with what you see as a separate population, but which has now become enraciné, rooted, and which has developed a collective identity.”

Events in Syria shake the region

Soon after this interview appeared, the Assad-family dictatorship in Syria was overthrown after a series of lightning-fast victories by Syrian armed groups that had been fighting the Assad regime for many years. This victory over a brutal government that had oppressed the Syrian people for decades opened up a series of opportunities and challenges for working people in Syria and the broader Middle East region. The Assad regime was a key ally of the reactionary theocracy that rules Iran and was long supported by the Putin regime in Russia.

A December 9 article in the New York Times reported, “Foreign powers like Iran, Turkey, Russia and the United States, which support different sides in the conflict, are expected to push to retain influence in the new era, potentially prolonging Syria’s internal disputes.”

However, it is Israel that has moved most aggressively and decisively to shape future events. “Israel said Tuesday [December 10] that it had destroyed Syria’s navy in overnight airstrikes,” reported the December 10 Times, “as it continued to pound targets in Syria despite warnings that its operations there could ignite new conflict and jeopardize the transition of power to an interim government.”

The report added, “The Israeli military confirmed it had struck Syrian navy facilities overnight, and that it has conducted more than 350 airstrikes in the past 48 hours on military assets belonging to the Assad regime. Targets included anti-aircraft batteries, airfields and weapons production sites in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia, and Palmyra.”

The United Nations special envoy for Syria called on Israel to halt its military operations.

How the Syrian people respond to these developments will become clearer in the coming weeks and months.

*

World-Outlook is publishing this interview for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, text, and photos that follow are from the original. Due to its length, we are publishing 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 in Part II.)

Palestinian-American Historian Rashid Khalidi: ‘Israel Has Created a Nightmare Scenario for Itself. The Clock Is Ticking’

The story isn’t Hamas, religion or terrorism. Rashid Khalidi, the preeminent Palestinian intellectual of our time, is convinced that the Israelis simply don’t understand the conflict — living in a ‘bubble of false consciousness’

Interview with Rashid Khalidi by Itay Mashiach HAARETZ

On May 1 this year, the day after the New York police, with the aid of stun grenades, burst into the building where pro-Palestinian protesters had barricaded themselves on the campus of Columbia University, Prof. Rashid Khalidi went to one of the gates of the university to talk to demonstrators. In aviator sunglasses and wielding a megaphone, the historian looked to be in his element.

“When I was a student back in the 1960s, we were told we were led by ‘a bunch of outside agitators,’ by politicians whose names nobody remembers today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism,” he told the crowd, adding that, “today we honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful war… And one day what our students have done here will be commemorated in the same way. They are – and they were – on the right side of history.”

Khalidi has been described as the most significant Palestinian intellectual of his generation, as the successor to Edward Said, and as the preeminent living historian of Palestine. Last month he retired from Columbia after 22 years, during which he also edited or co-edited the Journal of Palestinian Studies. In his 2020 book The Hundred Years War on Palestine, he summed up the conflict by way of six “declarations of war” on the Palestinians. Israeli readers would not consider some of the events described to be wars — the Balfour Declaration and the Oslo Accords, for example.

The declarers of the wars — Britain, the United States and, above all, Israel — are described as powerful oppressors who have repeatedly run roughshod over the Palestinians and quashed their rights. Are we again talking about Palestinians “wallowing in their own victimization” (in the words of Khalidi, who is well aware of this criticism, in the book), or about a different perspective on the subject? Judging by the book’s sales, his message is falling on receptive ears. After October 7, it catapulted onto the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there almost consecutively for a total of 39 weeks.

Khalidi argues that the present war is not the “Israeli September 11,” nor is it a new Nakba [the Arabic word for catastrophe that Palestinians use to describe the outcome of the 1948 war that led to the creation of the state of Israel — World-Outlook]. While each of those events marked a historical rupture, this war is part of a continuum. Despite its anomalous level of violence, the war does not stand outside history, he believes. On the contrary: The only way to understand it is within the context of the war that has been ongoing here for the past century.

Khalidi, 76, is a scion of one of the oldest and most respected Palestinian families in Jerusalem. Its members have included politicians, judges and scholars, and it can trace its genealogy back to the 14th century. The family’s famed library, which was established by his grandfather in 1900 and resides in a 13th-century Mamluk building in Jerusalem’s Old City abutting the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), constitutes the largest private collection of Arabic manuscripts in Palestine – the oldest of them goes back about a thousand years. On the same street, Chain Gate Street, is another building, which also belongs to the family and was intended to house an expansion of the library. Earlier this year, Jewish settlers burst into it and briefly occupied the site.

Khalidi integrates family members into the history he writes, in some cases attributing extensive influence to their actions (the Israeli historian Benny Morris has characterized this “a species of intellectual nepotism”). His uncle Husayn al-Khalidi was mayor of Jerusalem briefly during the period of the British Mandate, and was exiled to the Seychelles in the wake of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. In 1948 his grandfather refused initially to leave his home in Tel a-Rish; the house is still standing, on the outskirts of the Neve Ofer neighborhood in Tel Aviv, thanks to the fact that members of the proto-Zionist group Bilu rented rooms in the building in 1882, making it a historic landmark for Israelis.

During the War of Independence, Ismail Khalidi, Rashid’s father, was a student of political science in New York, where Khalidi was born in 1948. It is not the only juncture at which his biography intersects with the history of the conflict, the subject of his research. He was teaching at the American University of Beirut when the Israel Defense Forces besieged the city in 1982. Because of his connections with the Palestine Liberation Organization, foreign correspondents covering the Lebanon war often quoted him anonymously as “an informed source.”

By mid-September, long after an American-brokered cease-fire and the departure of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization — W-O] from Beirut, Khalidi looked with bewilderment at “a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity,” he writes in the book. The next day it turned out that the flares were intended to light up the way to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps for the Christian Phalanges.

From 1991 to 1993, Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks in Madrid and Washington. He elaborated on his criticism of the role played by the United States in the negotiations in an earlier book, “Brokers of Deceit,” in 2013. The American diplomatic effort in the Middle East had only made the possibility of peace more remote, he maintained.

“The Americans were more Israeli than the Israelis,” he says now. “If the Israelis say ‘security,’ the Americans bow down and bang their heads on the ground. And the most extreme form of this is Joe ‘Hasbara’ Biden, who talks as if he’s [IDF Spokesperson Daniel] Hagari,” he adds, using the Hebrew word for Israeli public diplomacy efforts.

However sharp his criticism of the U.S. and Israel may sound to Israeli ears, Khalidi has riled members of the younger generation and the more militant of pro-Palestinian activists in North America with his nuanced responses to events since October 7, 2023. “I think many of them would disagree with all the distinctions I made about violence,” he says, adding, “I don’t care.”

At the beginning of the war last year, he was unequivocal in saying that Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians was a war crime. “If a Native American liberation movement came and fired an R.P.G. at my apartment building because I’m living on stolen land, it wouldn’t be justified,” he told The New Yorker in December last year. “You either accept international humanitarian law or you don’t.”

Today Khalidi is angry. People who were in contact with him in the days after October 7 said he was devastated. “It affected me like it affects everybody who has personal connections,” he told me. “I’m affected on every level.”

He has family in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Beirut, as well as students and many friends in Israel. When I asked him whether he was surprised by the level of violence, he paused for a moment to think. “Yes, I was surprised on October 7,” he said, and added, “less by the Israeli response.”

Throughout our conversation, conducted online in late October and mid-November, the importance he attributes to keeping an open channel with Israelis is apparent. Hence also his consent to be interviewed. In his view, it’s an integral element of the path to victory.

What would you say Palestinian society is feeling at the moment?

“There’s a degree of grief and pain that just doesn’t go away, when contemplating the number of people who have been killed and the number of people whose lives have been ruined forever: Even though they may survive, they will have been traumatized in ways that can’t be healed. At the same time, it’s happened before. I mean, 19,000 people were killed in Lebanon in 1982 — Lebanese and Palestinians. It’s horrible to say this, but we’re used to it; Palestinian society is inured to suffering and loss. We’ve experienced it before, every generation.

“I don’t think that mitigates the grief,” he continues. “It certainly doesn’t mitigate the anger, the bitterness. Everyone I know wakes up every morning and looks at the latest horrors, and again before going to bed. It accompanies us in our lives every day, all the time, even when we’re trying to avoid thinking about it.”

In Khalidi’s view, “Israelis live in a little bubble of false consciousness that their media and their politicians create for them, and underestimate the degree to which the rest of the world knows what’s actually going on. The shift in public opinion is a result of people seeing what’s really happening and reacting as normal people would to babies dying. You [in Israel] don’t see babies dying. You Israelis, you as a group, as a collective, are not allowed to see that.

“Or it’s framed in a way that says, it’s their own fault or it’s because of Hamas or human shields or some other lying explanation,” he notes. “But most people in the world see it for what it is. They don’t need some lying Admiral Hagari to tell them that what you see is not real.”

What surprised you about the level of violence on October 7?

“Like Israeli intelligence, I didn’t think such a huge attack could be mounted. You know, it’s like a pressure cooker. You put pressure on, and you put pressure on, not just for decades but over generations. And sooner or later, it will explode. Any historian can tell you that the Gaza Strip is where Palestinian nationalism was the most developed, where movement after movement was created. The pressure being put on those people who are squeezed into that area, seeing their former villages right across the Green Line — any historian should have been able to predict it. It’s action and reaction. But I didn’t expect that level.”

Has Israel ever had a real opportunity to break out of this cycle of blood?

“I think this has been increasingly the direction [taken by Israel] for most of this century. The last Israeli attempt, the last sign of a willingness by an Israeli government to do something other than to use force, was under [former Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert. And I’m not suggesting that was an off-ramp [from the conflict]. But with that exception, it’s been an ‘iron wall’ since Jabotinsky [Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who coined the term in 1923]. Force and more force. Because you’re trying to impose a reality on the region, trying to force people to accept something that has sent shock waves throughout the Middle East since the 1920s and 1930s. I mean, you read the press in Syria and Egypt and Iraq in 1910, and people are worried about Zionism.”

At the beginning of “The Hundred Years’ War,” you quote from a letter sent by a member of your family, an accomplished Jerusalem scholar, to Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, in 1899. Zionism was natural and just, he wrote — “who could contest the right of Jews in Palestine?” But it’s inhabited by others, he added, who will never accept being superseded. Therefore, “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

“He saw it as clearly as I see you today. This reality has been causing shock waves from the beginning. You had volunteers coming to fight in Palestine in the 1930s from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt; and again in 1948. I see it as a continuum, but I don’t think it’s possible to see it otherwise, frankly. You have to pretend that history started on October 7 or on June 7, 1967, or on May 15, 1948. But that’s not the way history works.”

In your book, you describe 2006 as a potential missed exit. You argue that Hamas performed a surprising U-turn, participated in [Palestinian Authority] elections with a moderate campaign, and accepted implicitly the two-state solution. The “Prisoners’ Document” from that period, calling on Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join the PLO and focus the struggle in the territories across the Green Line, expressed a similar spirit. Do you believe Hamas was going through a genuine transformation that could have, down the road, led to an end of the violence?

“I have no personal insight into the hearts and minds of the Hamas leadership. What I can tell you is that within the spectrum of opinions, it had a resonance that I think is reflected in some Hamas statements and among some of the leaders. This encompasses, I think, the period before the Prisoners’ Document and the coalition government of 2007, and may even have included [Hamas founder] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who talked about a hundred years’ truce. Did they represent everyone? I don’t know. What was in their hearts? I don’t know. But there appears to have been something there that Israel rigorously chose to squash.”

How do you account for that?

“It’s perfectly clear that across the entire Israeli political spectrum, from end to end, there was no acceptance of the idea of a completely sovereign, completely independent, Palestinian state that represented self-determination. On the [Benjamin] Netanyahu end of the spectrum, that’s clear. But even [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin, in his last speech in the Knesset, said, ‘We are offering the Palestinians less than a state, we will control the Jordan River Valley.’ What does that mean? It means a continuation [of the occupation] in a modified form. That’s also what [former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak and Olmert were offering, with tinkering at the edges.”

In the negotiations held in Taba [2001] and in Annapolis [2007], there was talk of sovereignty.

“Excuse me. A sovereign state does not have its population registry, its airspace and its water resources controlled by a foreign power. That’s not sovereignty. That’s a Bantustan, it’s an Indian reservation. You can call it whatever you want, a mini-state, a non-state, a partial state or ‘less than a state.’”

Maybe the openness to a state would have developed further down the line. Rabin’s speech was delivered under tremendous political pressure.

“Maybe. If you didn’t have three-quarters of a million settlers, if Rabin hadn’t been assassinated, if the Palestinians had been much tougher in the negotiations. In Washington [1991-1994], we said to the Americans that we were negotiating about a pie while the Israelis are eating the pie through ongoing settlement. ‘You promised that the status quo would be maintained, and they are stealing.’ And the Americans did nothing. At that point it should have been clear that if we didn’t take a stand, colonization would continue, Israeli security control and occupation would continue in a different form. That’s what Oslo did.

“Part of the problem is that the Palestinians took the awful things that were offered to us in Washington. They gave 60 percent of the West Bank to Israel in the form of Area C. Those were concessions by the PLO, it’s not Israel’s fault. No Palestinian leadership should have accepted any such agreements.”

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

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