The Saturday Read Conversation: Rashid Khalidi

On October 7, Israel’s response, Obama’s betrayal & the “100 years’ war on Palestine”.

Rashid Khalidi is perhaps the leading academic on Palestine in the US. He is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 2003, and ran the center for Middle Eastern studies at Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, where he met and befriended Barack Obama, then a young professor. Khalidi was born in New York, from where he spoke to the New Statesman on 6 November over video link, but he and his family have deep roots in Palestinian society.

His most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), tells a history of the Israel-Palestine conflict that doubles as a history of his own family and of his life. (He was born in 1948, the year in which Israel was founded.) He was living and teaching in Lebanon during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war, and was affiliated with the PLO in press reports at the time. He advised the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid Conference of 1991, in the years leading up to the Oslo Accords.

His manner is both professorial and polemical, both friendly and stern. He speaks expressively. When he talked below of Palestinians being “locked into enclaves” after 2005 he created a cage in mid-air with sounds and gestures. His answers often gathered a strength of feeling as he unwound them, as the occasional exclamations below seek to convey.

Read on for the first half of our conversation. Click through to read in full, for more on Obama (“…from that point on we really lost touch with him”), the Arab states (“Egypt has had peace with Israel since 1979 – the Egyptian people have not accepted that”), Iran (“I think it believes Israel cannot destroy Hamas”), and how Khalidi thinks Israel should have responded after 7 October.

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Harry Lambert: You set out a compelling account in your book of how Palestine was, in effect, colonised. I can’t judge that account. But given the case you make, do you think the creation of the state of Israel was legitimate?

Rashid Khalidi: I think it depends on what lens you choose. Take the Covenant of the League of Nations [1919], which said that Palestine and other provinces were independent nations, so they should have been granted self-determination. But under the Balfour Declaration of 1917 they were not, so there’s a contradiction [one conceded by Balfour in a 1919 memo]. International law called for Palestine to be independent, but it also called for the establishment of the Jewish national home and in effect excluded Palestinian statehood. The same can be said about the UN Charter [1945], which also calls for self-determination, and contrasts with the UN Partition Plan of 1947, which created a state for the Jewish minority in most of Palestine.

So you can say international legitimacy is on the side of a Jewish national home and of a Jewish state in most of Palestine, while an Arab state was never created – in fact it was strangled at birth. Or you can say, by the right of self-determination that people should have had after the First and Second World Wars, that there was no legitimate ground for creating a Jewish state in a majority Arab country. I would take the latter position.

Palestinians as a people had a right to self-determination after those wars, whatever rights should have accrued to the Jewish people after the First World War or after the Holocaust. Those [Jewish] rights were being exercised at the expense of another people that had – what I would argue were – prior rights.

The fact that racist immigration laws prevented Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from going to the United States or going to Britain, forcing them to come to Palestine – and the fact that the Zionist movement wanted to bring them to Palestine – doesn’t annul the right of a people to self-determination. The world had a problem which it chose to resolve at the expense of the Palestinians because it had a justified sense of guilt over a long period of time, from its persecution of Jews, and over a very short period of time after the Holocaust.

HL: But given these origins, it must be difficult for you to see how this conflict can be solved within today’s constraints. Because according to the position you take, this state should never have been created in this manner.

RK: That’s correct. I think Israel in the structure in which it exists has a problem. That doesn’t mean there’s no possible resolution for a problem of two peoples in one land, or for resolving the problem created by a colonial-settler paradigm. There are solutions that have been put forward in South Africa, in what used to be called Southern Rhodesia [Zimbabwe], in Kenya, in Ireland – I think you can see how you might grow towards a situation where the settler becomes a native, and is accepted as having a distinct personality. In the case of Ireland, the Protestants are no longer on sufferance. They are part of this polity with their own distinct identity. The same thing would be true of Israelis.

HL: But is the logic of what you’ve just said that the Jewish people would remain in some form settlers or colonialists until they come to sort of peace with the Palestinian people?

RK: You can see in the West Bank – day in, day out for the past 56 years [since the 1967 war] – to what extent this is and has always been a settler-colonial process. We see it with our bare eyes every single day, as armed settlers rampage through Palestinian towns and villages, chasing people off their land. The same kinds of legal processes were applied in Australia and North America, to dispossess people and squeeze them into smaller areas. That process is a settler-colonial process. Israel as a state is accepted in the international community, it has all of these aspects of legitimacy. But that process is, in my view, illegitimate.

They’re stealing land in the West Bank as we speak! They’re doing the same thing in Jerusalem. I’m afraid they’re going to try and do the same thing in the northern part of Gaza – chase everybody out and make it a free-fire zone. In many parts of the West Bank [Israel] hasn’t taken it over, they declare it a military or green zone: you can’t build on it, you can’t live; “it’s ours”, they’ll say. And it is and one day they’ll put a settlement there, or not. Anybody who is blind to that, and to the earlier colonial nature of Zionism before 1948, is missing something about the state of Israel as it was established, and operates today.

HL: You describe the Zionist movement as more well-resourced than the Palestine cause in the thirty-year period to 1948, with it being able to finance land purchases and so forth. Given that, what could Palestinians have done to resist the momentum of history at that time?

RK: They could have done one of two things. They could have tried to compromise and say, ‘OK, you can have most of our country or half of it,’ but I don’t think Zionism would have been satisfied with that. They wanted, in [Zionist politician and soldier, Ze’ev] Jabotinsky’s words, to transform Palestine into the land of Israel. And they meant all of it – they didn’t mean 12 or 20 or 8 per cent. And by 1967, they had all of it.

Or they [the Palestinians] could have resisted earlier. Look at what the Egyptians and Iraqis did. They rose up against their colonial occupiers. Britain intended to rule Egypt and Mesopotamia [Iraq] as an extension of the Indian Empire – the empire that controlled the Gulf and southern Iran and would have been extended into Mesopotamia, with Indian settlers put in. But the Iraqis rose up in 1920 and forced a feeble and unsatisfactory form of independence on the British. The Egyptians rose up in 1919 and did the same thing. I’m not saying it could have happened. It didn’t happen. But had it happened, maybe the Palestinians could have cut a better deal with the British.

HL: But was Palestine big enough to have caused those problems for Britain? Egypt was a much bigger country to try and control.

RK: This is part of the problem. These other countries were also dealing with only one colonial power. The Palestinians were up against the British, the Zionist movement, and the League of Nations. In Palestine, there was no Arab administration [unlike in other Arab countries, where the British ruled indirectly through local leaders]. The British ruled directly, and then they allowed the Jewish Agency [the body designated to represent the Jews in Palestine] to establish a sort of quasi-state under their protection. Palestinians were not allowed to have a parallel structure.

HL: You talk in the book about how your father was sent by his older brother in 1947 to see Abdullah I, the king of Jordan, in order to deliver a message from the Palestinians. There was, to your point, no formal diplomatic channel.

RK: In the 1920s, in the 1930s, the Palestinians did have a generally accepted representative: the Arab Higher Committee. But the British exiled most of the members of that committee in 1937, including my uncle and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. From that point on, the Palestinians suffered from not having a recognised central representative. And that continues until the founding of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] in 1964. Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1974 is one of the first occasions when the Palestinians were allowed to speak for themselves.

HL: Who then speaks for the Palestinian movement today?

RK: The Palestinians have a grave problem: the division of the national movement since the 1990s. There was a golden era of recognition of the PLO after Rabin became Israeli prime minister again in 1992. That was centred on its renunciation of “terrorism”, its adoption of a two-state approach, and its acceptance of Security Council resolution 242 [of 1967, which called for Israel to withdraw from occupied territories]. All of these things had grave disadvantages by the way. You accept that your resistance is terrorism, you accept the resolution that excludes you, you join negotiations on a basis that is designed to limit what you can get.

Nevertheless, the PLO represented majority opinion among the Palestinians until sometime in the late 1990s, when people begin to realise that the 1993 Oslo Accords had actually been designed to freeze and exacerbate an unfavourable status quo. Instead of ending occupation, occupation is reinforced. Gaza is blockaded starting in 1993. The first limitations on movement in and out of Gaza start then. GDP per capita falls, movement is restricted. Before 1993 you could drive with Palestinian plates to the Golan Heights, to Eilat [Israel’s southernmost point, on the Red Sea] or to Gaza with no hindrance. Suddenly the Palestinians are locked into enclaves – Bantustans [areas reserved for black populations in apartheid South Africa]. That’s Oslo.

That’s when Hamas [formed in 1987] becomes a serious challenger. The blocking off of the political horizon, which the PLO had assumed Oslo provided, was grist to the mill of Hamas. The Israelis in a sense helped to create Hamas as a counter to the PLO in the late 1980s. Israeli intelligence people have written this. Israel pulled the rug out from under the PLO, and you had the Second Intifada [2000-05]. And because the PLO don’t submit to what Israel demands, the US lifts its hands and says: ‘OK, then stay in their interim status under Israeli control and stew in your own juices.’

That’s been the American position. They weren’t willing to talk to a unified Palestinian national movement when Hamas won a plurality of the Legislative Council in the 2006 elections. [Mahmoud] Abbas had won the presidency the year before. The two sides [Hamas and Fatah, Abbas’ party] agreed on a unity government that would have allowed them to negotiate and which would have supported a two-state solution. Hamas was talking about a 100-year truce. Israel was not interested.

HL: You knew Barack Obama well, when you both lived in Chicago in the 1990s. What do you make of his approach to the issue in office?

RK: I think he understood a great deal more than his presidency ever showed. But he was a wily politician. He tried and failed to…

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For a contrasting perspective on the conflict, here is a recent interview with Eitan Shamir, an Israeli military strategist. These interviews may also be of interest.

— Harry, Will & Pippa.

Thanks to Barney Horner.

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