The following is the second part of an interview with Rashid Khalidi, a renowned Palestinian-American scholar. It first appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz on November 30, 2024.

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

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

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

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

A colleague of yours, the Israeli historian Shlomo Ben Ami, explained the collapse of the Camp David talks, in July 2000, as a Palestinian leadership failure. In an interview in 2001, he said that the Palestinians “couldn’t free themselves from the need for vindication, from their victimization”; that negotiating with Arafat was like “negotiating with a myth”; and that “the Palestinians don’t want a solution as much as they want to place Israel in the dock.” Is it possible that the region missed a historic opportunity because of Yasser Arafat’s leadership?

“You want to take me down into the weeds; I want to get up and look at the rotting garden. [An American] president wasted seven and a half years of his presidency — before bringing, a couple of months before an election, when he’s not a lame duck but a dead duck, people to Camp David. You want to broker it? Then do it within the time limit set by the [Oslo] agreement you signed on the White House lawn in 1993. [The process] should have been completed by 1999. Barak had already lost his majority in the Knesset — another dead, or dying, duck.

“As for Arafat, where is he in 2000? I lived in Jerusalem in the early 1990s. You could drive anywhere with green plates from the West Bank — to the Golan Heights, to Eilat, to Gaza. You had 100,000 [Palestinian] workers in Israel, and Israelis shopping across the West Bank. By 1999, the Palestinian economy had been stunted. Permits, checkpoints, walls, blockades, separation. Arafat’s popularity collapsed.”

You’re talking about the deteriorating Palestinian economy in the 1990s, but another important and traumatic episode for Israel in that decade was the suicide bombings of 1994 to 1996, to which you devote little space in your book.

“The separation began before the first suicide bombing. The idea of separation was central to how Rabin and [Foreign Minister Shimon] Peres understood this [process] from the beginning. And separation means you wall off the Palestinians in little enclaves and detach them from the Israeli economy. All these developments were pre-planned. The excuse of the suicide bombings explains the specifics, but it doesn’t explain the idea.”

The suicide attacks were a significant factor in scuttling the process.

“Remember what preceded the suicide bombings.”

You’re referring to Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Palestinian worshippers in Hebron, in February 1994.

“Yes, and Rabin’s response to the massacre. He did not uproot Kiryat Arba [the urban settlement abutting Hebron], he did not pull the settlers out of Hebron, he did not punish the guilty — he punished the Palestinians. Then it became clear what Oslo was: an extension and reinforcement of the occupation. And Hamas took advantage of this. They saw that the whole edifice that Arafat tried to sell to the Palestinians was not going to lead to what he had claimed. That, along with everything else that was happening, gave them an enormous opening. The situation of the Palestinians worsened throughout the 1990s, giving Hamas tremendous ammunition.

“Looking back, from the 1973 war until 1988, the PLO moved away from [its declared goal of] the liberation of all of Palestine and from the use of violence. That is summarized in the PLO’s 1988 Palestinian National Council declaration in Algiers. Those who objected ended up in Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and so on.

“How could the first group have triumphed? They had to be able to provide their supporters with tangible evidence that their approach was succeeding. But they provided their base with nothing. Nothing. A worse situation than in the early 1990s. So, of course, the people who reject partition and insist on armed struggle and on full liberation are going to find support.

“My point is that there’s a dialectical process here, which on the Israeli side is driven by a failure to understand that you have to let go. And it seems impossible for Israel to let go: of land, of population and population registries, of security, of bridges, of the Shabak [Shin Bet security service] sticking its fingers up everybody’s nose. They wouldn’t let go – and that’s more important than myths about whatever Arafat would or wouldn’t let go.”

The question is whether the Palestinian national movement in the 1990s was capable of understanding that this letting go required an internal Israeli political evolution that would take a little time. And when you blow yourself up in the middle of Tel Aviv, that option of a shift of perspective loses in the elections.

“I know that the suicide bombings of the 1990s had an enormous impact on Israeli public opinion, but that really is beside the point. If the colonizer wants to decolonize, a decision is made to do so. There are two ways to make the colonizer realize that: when the cost becomes too heavy and public opinion at home changes; or when the colonized devises a strategy that works on multiple levels.

“The Irish figured out a strategy, so did the Algerians and the Vietnamese. The Palestinians, to my distress and sadness, did not. Neither for approaching the Israeli public over the heads of their leadership, nor for dealing with your metropole, namely the United States and Europe, without which you don’t exist as an independent state and you don’t have your bombs or your planes. The Irish, they’re brilliant; the Algerians, very smart; the Vietnamese, geniuses. The Palestinians — not so smart. If you want my critique of the Palestinian leadership, there it is.”

Your explanation for the rise of Hamas is essentially materialist: The PLO’s diplomatic alternative brought about worse living conditions for the Palestinians and left a political vacuum in the militant branch, which Hamas filled. But what about the role of religion and of Islamic aspirations in Palestinian society?

“Religion has been an important element in Palestinian nationalism from the outset, but its popularity fluctuates. In the heyday of the PLO, the Islamists were very weak – almost nonexistent, politically. So to say that Palestinian society is deeply Muslim and deeply Islamist, you have to explain several decades when that wasn’t the case. Hamas never won a majority among Palestinians. In 2006, they won 43 percent of the vote. I know Christians in Bethlehem who voted for Hamas because they were fed up with Fatah. So I don’t think even 43 percent represents their actual popularity at that time.”

You are critical of Israel for ignoring the possibility that Hamas underwent a change in those years. But what many Israelis ask themselves is why the Palestinians didn’t use the opportunity of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza to develop their society and build a peaceful alternative.

“Because the occupation never ended. That is a profoundly stupid question, which is put forward by people who are trying to justify a fundamentally false narrative. Gaza was never open; it was always occupied. Airspace, sea space, every entry, every exit, every import, every export — the f—ing population register remained in Israel’s hands. What changed? A few thousand settlers were removed. So instead of being in small prisons within Gaza, the Palestinians were now in one large prison in Gaza. That is not an end of occupation, it’s a modification of occupation. It’s not an end to colonization.

“You leave Gaza in order to intensify [your hold] on the West Bank. You have Sharon’s aide, Dov Weissglas, saying [in an interview in Haaretz in 2004, that Sharon’s disengagement plan], ‘supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.’ You think we can’t read Hebrew, for God’s sake? A state means sovereignty. And sovereignty doesn’t mean a foreign occupying military power controlling your population register.

“Think about that for two minutes. I mean, it’s like the United States Census Bureau being controlled in Moscow. Seriously? Imports and exports are decided by some corporal or some bureaucrat in some ministry in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem? I mean, seriously? And Palestinians are supposed to say, ‘Oh, let’s create a nice little utopia inside the prison’? What kind of nonsense is that?”

What do you think about armed struggle from a moral perspective?

“Let’s start with the fact that violence is violence; state violence and non-state violence are both violence. If we don’t accept those principles, we can’t talk. 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.

“The second starting point is that legally, since World War II, it has been accepted that people under colonial rule are entitled to use all means for their liberation, within the limits of international humanitarian law. That means combatants and noncombatants, it means proportionality. It’s not morality, it’s international law.

“But that applies to both sides, to both colonizer and colonized, if they accept international humanitarian law. When you destroy a whole building to kill one Hamas person in Jabalya, clearly proportionality and discrimination have gone out the window.

“Who started it is not the point. Proportionality and discrimination don’t say that you don’t have to worry about these rules if the other guy is a bad guy and the other guy started it. And finally, you have the political aspect [of violence], which relates to the wisest way to achieve your aims.”

On this point, in your book you quote Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani intellectual who worked with Franz Fanon and the FLN [National Liberation Front—W-O], the Algerian liberation movement. In the early 1980s, the PLO tasked him with assessing their military strategy. He argued that unlike in the Algerian case, the use of force against Israelis “only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it [also] unified Israeli society.”

“Yes, and I think that is something extremely important. If you’re talking about the French [in Algeria], I would argue that placing a bomb in a café violated both moral and legal sanctions, it’s a violation of international humanitarian law. Two heroines of the Algerian revolution — Jamila Bouhired and Zahra Zarif — did that.

“At the political level, I think it’s debatable, because the colons [French settlers in Algeria, also known as the pieds-noirs], in the last analysis, have somewhere to go back to. They suffer what I call ‘colonial fear.’ They are terrified of the indigènes [indigenous population], because the indigènes outnumber them and they know the indigènes resent them.

“But they don’t suffer from a hereditary fear of persecution. They don’t have a mobilized narrative whereby every attack on them is placed within that context, rather than within the local context of Algeria. And ultimately, that violence is successful. Morally, the attitude toward indiscriminate violence is black and white. But it’s gray politically. What Eqbal Ahmed says about Israel is that because of the nature of Jewish history, a strategy of indiscriminate violence — which the PLO was then pursuing — is politically counterproductive.”

How do you assess the effect of BDS — the boycott movement against Israel — now, two decades on?

“Twenty years ago, BDS resolutions [by student governments] couldn’t pass on any American campus; today they pass easily. But no boycotts have been instituted, or very few; no sanctions have been imposed; and there’s been very little divestment.”

A failure, then.

“No! The point is that public opinion has changed. The point of BDS was to open a topic that the other side doesn’t want opened. Why are they [the Israelis] calling everyone who dares to speak about this genocide [in Gaza] an antisemite? Because they have no arguments, they have nothing to say; so shut them up with the most toxic accusation possible in the Western world. The point [of BDS], the way I looked at it, was not to bring about actual boycotts, divestment or sanctions. It was a lever to open up a subject that nobody wanted to discuss. And it was, in my view, enormously successful in that regard.

“Now you are beginning to have the Dutch, the Germans, the Spanish, the Canadians, restricting [certain] arms supplies to Israel. These and other moves are the result of a change in opinion in the Western metropole, and that’s largely due to BDS.”

And for you as a BDS supporter, it wasn’t an issue to be interviewed by an Israeli newspaper?

“No. 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.”

In your book, you note that the Algerians and the Vietnamese did not pass up the opportunity to influence public opinion in the home societies of their enemies, and you argue that this was crucial for their victories. What should Palestinians do that they are not doing in order to reach Israelis, if that’s at all possible?

“The answer to that would have to come from a unified Palestinian national movement with a clear strategy — it’s not for Rashid Khalidi to give. One of the problems we have today 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. Public diplomacy — which you can call hasbara, or you can call it propaganda — is absolutely essential. Any liberation struggle succeeds only thanks to that. If the South Africans hadn’t had it, they would still have apartheid.”

What is the role of the Palestinian diaspora in this current leadership vacuum, and specifically the role of intellectuals like yourself?

“I think that the diaspora and a younger generation in the diaspora who are assimilated and fully acculturated and understand the political culture of the countries they’re in, will have an important role in the future. I think the role of my generation is pretty much over, myself included. We can’t benefit yet from the talent and the understanding of Western politics that the young generation possesses. That will come soon, I hope. But it requires an organized, centralized, unified national movement. We don’t have that now.”

What about the establishment of a government in exile?

“Historically, the [Palestinian] leadership was always outside. One of the many mistakes Arafat made was to take the whole PLO and bring it into the cage of the occupation. Who does that? When you liberate, you move part of your leadership, maybe — [but] he hadn’t liberated anything.

“They were so desperate to get out of Tunis and the other places they were in because of the mistake they made in supporting Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991, that they were willing to jump from the frying pan into the fire. It was a fatal mistake. Who places the whole leadership under the control of the Israeli military and security services? It’s mind-boggling. So, yes, you will need [leadership in] the diaspora, and it will end up being partly outside and partly inside in the future, one assumes. Like with Algeria.”

In the anti-apartheid movement, cooperation with white South Africans was crucial. What can be done in order to expand the Jewish-Palestinian alliance?

“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.”

Nevertheless, you analyze this conflict as a case of settler colonialism.

“You hear what the people in the right wing of the current government are saying about Gaza, you see what they’re doing in the West Bank, how they stripped people of their land and restricted them in the Galilee and in the Triangle [an area of dense Arab population in central Israel] after 1948. If that’s not settler colonialism, I don’t know what it is. Everything that was done from the beginning is clearly within that paradigm.

“But Zionism starts as a national project, and then they find a patron, and then they use settler colonial means. That is unique. None of these other settler colonial cases start as national projects. The settler colonial paradigm is useful only up to a point. And Israel is the most unique case imaginable. No mother country, almost the entire population is there out of persecution, and there is the link to the Holy Land — to the Bible, for God’s sake.”

You’ve explored the transfer of knowledge on counterinsurgency methods between Britain’s colonies, and described how the Zionist leaders adopted colonial practices from the British. What have you found?

“I’m actually working on that now. The British export [to Palestine] the entire Royal Irish Constabulary, following Irish independence, and form the Palestine Gendarmerie. When revolts break out, they bring in experts from elsewhere. They bring in General [Bernard] Montgomery, who commanded the brigade in Cork in 1921 [where reprisals were carried out against the Irish rebels]; he commanded a division in Palestine in 1938. They bring in Sir Charles Tegart, whom they had sent from Ireland to India, to build ‘Tegart Forts’ [here] — torture centers, which was his expertise. He comes to Palestine to impart this knowledge. And a fellow by the name of Orde Wingate whom every Israeli military expert knows intimately — the father of Israeli military doctrine.”

In an interview with the New Left Review, you described Wingate as a “cold-blooded colonial killer.”

“He served in the Sudan, God knows what he did there. I’d have to do some more research to find out. In Palestine he formed the Special Night Squads, consisting of chosen cadres from the Palmach and Haganah [Jewish underground forces] who were matched with selected British soldiers.

“He launched a campaign of night raids. Attacking villages. Shooting prisoners. Torture. Blowing houses up over people’s heads. Horrific stuff. I mean, the accounts that you have, he’s clearly a murderous psychopath. Moshe Dayan was one of his trainees, along with Yitzhak Sadeh [commander of the pre-IDF Palmach shock troops] and Yigal Alon. There’s probably a dozen senior officers of the Israeli army, most of whom reach the rank of major general, who were trained by this man. The Israeli army’s doctrine originates with Wingate.”

* * *

You finish your book by saying that “settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.” Which path are we going down?

“The extermination of one side by the other is impossible. The expulsion of one side by the other is — I would have said impossible — I think now possible but unlikely. So, you have two peoples. Either the war continues, or they come to an understanding that they have to live on a basis of absolute equality. Not a very optimistic answer, but the only answer. Let me add that this resolution [of the conflict] is much closer as a result of the present war, because Western public opinion has turned against Israel in a way that has never happened, since the Balfour Declaration [by Britain, in 1917, in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine] until today.

“Western public opinion was always unanimously sympathetic to Israel, with tiny exceptions. In 1982, when they saw too many buildings destroyed and too many children killed [in Lebanon], and in the first intifada [1987-1992], when there were too many tanks facing too many children throwing stones. But otherwise, wall-to-wall support. Elites, public opinion. Without exception, for a hundred and something years. That’s changed. This [shift] may not be irreversible, but the clock is ticking. Israel has created for itself, by its behavior since October 7, a nightmare scenario globally.

There are segments of the Israeli left that fantasize about an imposed solution from outside. Is that possible?

“It will be possible when and if American interests regarding Palestine change. The United States has forced Israel to do many things that the American strategic or national or economic interest dictated.”

During the Cold War, for example.

“Right. [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger forced disengagement agreements down the throat of the Israeli government. [Secretary of State James] Baker forced [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir to participate in Madrid [the 1991 peace conference]. Obama forced them to accept the [nuclear] deal with Iran. [President Dwight] Eisenhower forced them out of Sinai [in 1957]. It’s been our misfortune that Palestine doesn’t represent an important American national interest.

“The dictatorships in the Arab world suppress public opinion and are subservient to the United States; the oil regimes are dependent on the United States for their defense against their peoples and external enemies. If that changes, if things that Israel do harm the American national interest, that might bring about external coercion. I’m not holding my breath.”

The younger generation of pro-Palestine activists in the United States criticized you over the distinctions you make about violence. What do you say to them?

“I have no love for violence, but it’s very clear to me that violence has been an essential element of every liberation struggle. Against the overwhelming violence of the colonizer, there will be violence whether I want it or not. The Israeli [perception is that] if force doesn’t work, use more force. This is the result. You chase the PLO out of Lebanon and you get Hezbollah. You kill [Hezbollah leader Abbas] Musawi, you get [Hassan] Nasrallah. You kill Nasrallah, good luck with what you’re going to get. You kill [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar — wait and see what you get. That’s the nature of colonial violence. It engenders resistance. I would wish for the resistance to be intelligent, strategic, ideally also moral and legal, but it’s not going to be, probably.”

What do you wish Israelis understood better about the conflict?

“They need to understand something that’s very hard for them to grasp: how the Palestinians and the rest of the world see the situation. It’s seen from the beginning as an attempt to create a Jewish state in an Arab country. This is not some innocent bunch of refugees arriving in their ancestral homeland and suddenly being attacked by wild men and women. They arrive and do things that generate everything that follows; their very arrival and the structures with which they arrive create the conflict.

“Was there ever a Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in the 18th century, 17th century, 19th century, 15th century, 12th century? No. This is not a conflict that’s been going on from time immemorial. You have to put that self-justifying version of history aside. I mean, to understand that Palestinians, Arabs, the rest of the world, and now also Western public opinion see it this way. There are still the elites who will support anything Israel does. But the clock is ticking. Underneath, something is seething.”

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

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