Professor Rashid Khalidi on Israel’s growing wars in the Middle East and the United States’ complicity in them.
Last November, I asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and the most renowned Palestinian American historian today, about the lack of statements from President Joe Biden expressing sympathy for Palestinians. At the time, I was writing an article outlining Biden’s long-standing and unusual unwillingness to challenge Israel.
“I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all,” Khalidi replied. “He sees the Israelis as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus, which is being sucked at by every element of the mainstream media.
The professional bluntness was typical of Khalidi. Throughout his decades long career as an academic and public intellectual, he has not shied away from lacerating fellow elites as he uproots deep assumptions about Israel and Palestine. In doing so, he has made himself a fitting successor to Said, the late Palestinian American literary critic his professorship was named after.
Khalidi’s 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, was called a “pathbreaking work of major importance” by Said. In the early days of the ongoing war, Khalidi’s most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, became a New York Times bestseller. He is currently working on a study of how Ireland was a laboratory for British colonial practices that were later employed in Palestine. At the end of June, he retired and became a professor emeritus.
We spoke last Wednesday — one day after Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel following a series of Israeli escalations — to assess the one-year mark of the current war.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A year ago, more than 1,100 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 attack. At least 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza in response. Now, Israel has invaded Lebanon and provoked a war with Iran, which launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday. A year ago, was this a nightmare scenario?
It is a nightmare scenario, but we may be at the beginning of the nightmare. This is potentially a multiyear war now. By the time this is published, we will have entered its second year. But the risks in terms of a regional confrontation are much, much greater than most people would have assessed back in October 2023. This is potentially going to be a world war, a major regional war, a multifront war. In fact, in some respects, it already is.
An article in the New York Times this morning stated that “Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.” The US has also said it will work with Israel to impose “severe consequences” on Iran. Are you surprised that there’s been essentially no willingness by the US to use its leverage over Israel?
I have to say I’m a little surprised. Firstly, because every earlier war, with the exception of 1948, was eventually stopped by the United States, or by the international community with the involvement of the United States, much more quickly than this one. You’ve had wars that went on for a couple of months. But eventually, after backing Israel fully, the United States stopped Israel. There’s absolutely no sign of the United States doing anything but encouraging Israel and arming and protecting them diplomatically. In historical perspective, this is unique to my knowledge.
Secondly, it is a little surprising in domestic electoral terms. I don’t think Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris have a whole lot to worry about on their right. People who are going to vote on this issue in one way are going to vote for [former President Donald] Trump anyway. Whereas on his left, I think one of the terrible ironies of this — we will only find this out after the election—might be that Harris loses the election because she loses Michigan. Because she lost young people and Arabs and Muslims.
To the left, there’s a huge void where some people are going to hold their noses and vote for Harris. But some people will not vote for her under any circumstances. And if that tips the margin in favor of Trump, it will be one of the most colossal failures of the Democratic Party leadership in modern history to not understand that there’s lots of space to their left and there’s no space to their right. They have hewed right, right, right on this—at least publicly. Personally, I don’t understand that electoral calculation.
I also go back to the first thing I said: I don’t understand how the United States doesn’t see that the expansion of this war is extremely harmful to any possible definition of American national interests.
What do you think the Biden administration and its supporters fail to understand in terms of the cost to the United States of enabling this war?
The administration and the entire American elite is in another place from Americans, who reject the Biden policy, want a ceasefire, and are opposed to continuing to arm Israel. That’s the problem. You have this cork in the bottle. The bottle has changed. The cork hasn’t.
The media elites, the university and foundation elites, the corporate elites, the donor class, the leaderships of the political parties, and the foreign policy establishment are way out in right field and are completely supportive of whatever Israel does. They back Israel to the hilt—whatever it does. And you are getting the same kind of mindless drivel in the foreign policy world about an opportunity for “remaking the Middle East” that we got before the 2003 Iraq fiasco.
Israel killed the guy they were negotiating with in Tehran—[Ismail] Haniyeh. They don’t say anything. You want a ceasefire? Haniyeh allegedly wanted a ceasefire. Israel goes and kills the guy in Tehran. The US doesn’t say anything. Not a peep. This is a high-level provocation.
[Harris] and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this.
You’re trying to bring about a ceasefire on the Lebanese border? The Israelis kill the person they’re negotiating with. Not a peep. The US says: He was a bad guy. He killed Americans. Good thing.
I find it mind-boggling the degree to which the elite is blind to the damage that this is clearly doing to the United States in the world and in the Middle East — and the dangers that entails. I hear not a peep out of that elite about the potential danger of Israel leading them by the nose into an American, Israeli, Iranian, Yemeni, Palestinian, Lebanese war, which has no visible end. I mean, where does this stop?
An Israeli Army tank moves near the border amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and militant group Hamas.Saeed Qaq/SOPA/Zuma
Harris has declined to break with Biden on Israel in her public rhetoric. If she’s elected, do you expect a significant shift in her approach to Israel and Palestine?
No, I do not. She had multiple opportunities to do a Hubert Humphrey—to disassociate herself from the president who just decided not to run again. To allow a Palestinian speaker at the [Democratic National] Convention, to meet with certain people, to modulate her virulent, pro-Israel rhetoric, she hasn’t taken those opportunities. I don’t expect that she will.
She and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this. They can ignore Arabs and Muslims, and then they can win the election anyway. That seems to have been their decision. That might change if their internal polling at the end of October shows she’s losing Michigan. But it would be a little bit late.
Humphrey’s speech was on September 30. So we’re already past that.
And it was too late for Humphrey.
The main success that Biden administration officials pointed to again and again was preventing a regional war. That has now completely fallen apart. You were in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion with your kids and your wife, Mona, who was pregnant at the time. How does your personal experience of that invasion influence how you see what is happening in Lebanon today?
It’s not deja vu for me. I actually feel it’s much, much, much worse. I’m following along with all my relatives in Beirut, as I have been following along with relatives in Palestine over the past year, as they report on what’s happening to them and around them. It’s similar, but it’s a lot worse. I think my kids are going through the same thing, especially my daughters, who were little children during the ’82 war.
And all of us are sitting in safety outside the Middle East. I’m thinking of the family that we have who are still in Beirut. They’ve been through war and misery and the collapse of Lebanon and various phases of this war in the past. I know they are resilient. But it’s really hard to experience it again and again and again. They went through it in 2006 and now they’re going through it again.
It’s horrifying that nobody seems to read history or understand that no good can come from this. Leave aside good for the Lebanese — obviously, nobody in the Western elite cares about the Lebanese or the Palestinians. There’s a degree of insensitivity, which is shocking, but we’re used to it. But nobody even cares about the Israelis. They are putting their head into a buzz saw in both Gaza and Lebanon: a tunnel without end.
What do the Americans think they are doing, pushing, allowing, arming Israel to do this vis-à-vis Iran, vis-à-vis Yemen, vis-à-vis Lebanon, vis-à-vis the Palestinians? Where does this end for Israel? They are getting themselves into a minefield out of which they will not be able to extract themselves without enormous, terrible results for them — and obviously infinitely more devastating results for Lebanon and the Palestinians.
I don’t understand the blindness of the United States in basically encouraging Israel to commit harakiri. This cannot end well for them. It’s not going to end well for anyone else. I’m not minimizing the horror. It’s going to end worse, obviously, for Palestinians and Lebanese. But what can they possibly be thinking in Washington? Or, for that matter, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?
Palestinians, including children who were injured in an Israeli bombing, arrive at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip. Ahmed Zakot/dpa/Zuma
Perhaps the most horrifying result of the 1982 invasion was Sabra and Shatila, when Israeli soldiers assisted Lebanese Christian militants as they slaughtered thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims inside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. You and your family were staying in a faculty apartment that Malcolm Kerr had found for you after American and international troops pulled out of Beirut. Could you talk about what you saw from the balcony of that apartment?
What we witnessed was the Israeli military firing illumination shells over Sabra and Shatila after they had introduced militias that they paid and armed to kill people on the basis of an agreement between [Israeli Defense Minster Ariel] Sharon and the Lebanese forces. We were a little shocked because the fighting had stopped a couple of days before. The Israelis had occupied West Beirut. There were no Palestinian military forces at all in Beirut. No fighters, no units, nothing. The camps were defenseless, and the Americans had promised the PLO that they would protect the civilian populations left behind when the PLO evacuated its forces.
So, we were quite perplexed. What is going with these illumination shells being fired when it seemed completely quiet? We went to bed not knowing the massacre had started. When we woke up, we found out from Jon Randall and Loren Jenkins, who were working for the Washington Post, what they had just seen.
A Pro-Palestinian demonstration encampment at Columbia University in April 2024Yuki Iwamura/AP
When we spoke in November, you held up your phone so that I could hear pro-Palestine demonstrations passing by you in Morningside Heights. Edward Said had the opposite experience decades before.
He said he was radicalized by being in New York during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and talked about hearing someone in Morningside Heights ask, How are we doing? It drove home that Arabs and Palestinians effectively did not exist. What do you make of the significance of that shift?
I was in New York in June 1967, and I remember people collecting money for Israel in bedsheets outside Grand Central station. The same fervor that Edward witnessed, I witnessed in ’67. There’s been an enormous shift in American public opinion. The polling numbers are unequivocally opposed to this war, opposed to Biden’s policy, opposed to continuing to arm Israel.
We’ve seen it on campus. The campus has been shut down in response to last year’s protests. We call it Fortress Columbia. You can’t get a journalist onto the campus without two days’ notice, and even then, it doesn’t work. Columbia has sealed the campus and installed checkpoints to prevent the people of the neighborhood from walking across the campus on what should be a public thoroughfare on 116th Street.
The protest movement has been shut down by repression, but the sentiment is I’m sure still there. Most young people have an entirely different view of this war—and of Palestine and Israel—than their grandparents have. The difference is enormous and striking, and I think it may be growing. The invasion of Lebanon will do nothing to change the way people see things. I think it will just reinforce it.
I’ve seen a sea change in the past couple of decades that I was at Columbia. I arrived there in 2003, and sentiment was not favorable to Palestine overall. I still had the sense that I had when I was an undergraduate many decades ago that I was swimming against the tide of opinion among students and faculty. That’s not the case anymore. Two-thirds of the arts and sciences faculty voted no confidence in the president because of her position on the protests. I couldn’t have imagined something like that happening 25 years ago.
Palestinians bury the bodies of 80 victims at a mass grave in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah.Mohammed Talatene/dpa /Zuma
Do you ever fear that the shift is arriving too late? That by the time America potentially decides to hold Israel accountable, there might not be a Palestine left to save because the West Bank has been annexed and Gaza has been leveled?
Gaza has been leveled, and the West Bank has long since been annexed. It’s been incorporated into Israel in practice for decades. Israeli law operates in the West Bank for Israelis only. Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller Bantustans, and Israel is encouraging them to leave. But that doesn’t mean that Palestine is gone. You still have as many Palestinians as Israelis within the frontiers of Palestine. That’s not going to change.
They still have a problem. How do you establish an entity involving Jewish supremacy in a country where at least half of the population are not Jews? I don’t see how they get out of that conundrum just because they’ve devastated Gaza or just because they’ve annexed the West Bank.
They’ve created that conundrum and there’s no way out for them. They either entirely annihilate the Palestinian population or drive it out, which I don’t think is possible in the 21st century, at least I hope not, or they come to terms with it. They’re not willing to do that right now. They’re even less willing to do that after October 7. Public opinion has hardened in Israel for reasons that are perfectly understandable.
But do I see that this is too late? No. I worry that no matter how consequential the shift in public opinion is, the elite will hold on stubbornly. And that it will take even longer than it took for public opinion opposing the Iraq war or public opinion opposing the Vietnam War to force elites that were dedicated and committed to mindless, aggressive wars abroad to finally change their course. It took years and years on Vietnam, and it took years and years on Iraq.
That’s what I’m afraid of—that the anti-democratic intent of the elite, and of the party leaderships, of the foreign policy establishment, and of the donor class will prevent a shift for many more years than should be the case. If we had a really democratic system, if we had a system where public opinion had as much of an effect as money—which it doesn’t, unfortunately—then you would have seen a change already. There’s no indication that there will be a change for quite a while, regardless of who is elected in November.
Family, friends, and supporters of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas protest on the Israeli coastal road outside Kibbutz Yakum.Ilia Yefimovich/dpa/Zuma
A consequence of timing this interview to coincide with the one-year mark of the war is that it can obscure what came before. How should the reality of daily life in Gaza in the decades leading up to October 7 shape how we understand what has happened in the past year?
The people who have been fighting Israel in Gaza, for the most part, are people who grew up as children under this prison camp regime imposed on them by the Israelis and on the southern border by the Egyptians. Most of them have never been allowed to leave Gaza. Most of them have had all kinds of restrictions on everything they can do and buy and say for their entire lives. And they’ve lived under an authoritarian Hamas regime, which was quite unpopular in Gaza before October 7.
The people who have been fighting the Israelis are the people who Israel’s prison camp has created. And what Israel has done in the last year is far, far worse than anything it did in the preceding 17 years of the blockade. They killed over 2,300 people in 2014. They’ve killed probably well over 50,000 in the past year, if we count those buried under the rubble. The number is 41,600 as of today. The numbers are hard to process.
The kids growing up now are going to be the successors to today’s fighters, given that nobody’s offering them a future, given that they’re going to live in misery for a decade if not longer, given that Israel will dominate their lives in even more intense ways than it had before. The people who grow up in that situation—some of them are going to turn into even more ferocious fighters resisting Israel.
The same thing is happening in South Lebanon. People grew up in South Lebanon being bombarded by Israel, and they became the fighters in the ’82 war. There’s a picture of [former Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah fighting in ’82 as a young man. That experience of constant Israeli attacks and the occupations of South Lebanon in ’78 and ’82 created Hezbollah. Even Ehud Barak admitted as much.
I’ve seen not one mention of the fact that the United States helped Israel kill 19,000 people in Lebanon in 1982. And that might have been a factor as important as what Israel was doing in creating Hezbollah and in it turning against the United States. They considered the United States responsible for Sabra and Shatila because it had promised to protect the civilians—that no harm would come to the civilians the PLO left behind.
I fear that the United States’ full-throated support for what Israel is doing may have the same effect in the 2020s and 2030s, unfortunately. I’m not happy about any of this. I consider all of these things disastrous. But I’m looking at them coldly. The things that I’m talking about have produced what has passed, and what we’re seeing now will produce, heaven forbid, possibly even more horrible things in the future. Those who don’t read history and don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, but in a much worse way, I’m afraid.
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and until recently the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
He has authored a number of books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness; has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association; and has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, and the University of Chicago.
Noah Lanard is a reporter at Mother Jones. Reach him at nlanard@motherjones.com
https://portside.org/2024-10-13/most-prominent-historian-palestine-what-last-year-has-meant
