The New Yorker Radio Hour
Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism
Fri, 13 Dec 2024
Power dynamics in the Middle East shifted dramatically this year. In Lebanon, Israel dealt a severe blow toHezbollah, and another crucial ally of Iran—Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria—was toppled by insurgents. But the historian Rashid Khalidi is skeptical that these changes will set back the Palestinian cause, as it relates to Israel. “This idea that the Palestinians are bereft of allies assumes that they had people who were doing things for their interest,” Khalidi tells David Remnick, “which I don’t think was true.” The limited responses to the war in Gaza by Iran and Hezbollah, Khalidi believes, clearly demonstrate that Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance “was designed by Iran to protect the Iranian regime. . . . It wasn’t designed to protect Palestine.” Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of a number of books on Palestinian history; among them, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” has been particularly influential. The book helped bring the term “settler colonialism” into common parlance, at least on the left, to describe Israel’s relationship to historic Palestine. Sometimes invoked as a term of opprobrium, “settler colonialism” is strongly disputed by supporters of Israel. Khalidi asserts that the description is historically specific and accurate. The early Zionists, he says, understood their effort as colonization. “That’s not some antisemitic slur,” he says. “That’s the description they gave themselves.”The concept of settler colonialism has been applied, on the political left, to describe Israel’s founding, and to its settlement of the Palestinian-occupied territories. This usage has been disputed by supporters of Israel and by thinkers including Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, who has also written about philosophy for The New Yorker. “Settler colonialism is . . . a zero-sum way of looking at the conflict,” Kirsch tells David Remnick. “In the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory. That’s not at all the history of Israel and Palestine.” Kirsch made his case in a recent book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.”
Chapter 1: What is the current situation in the Middle East?
How these developments will affect the war in Gaza is impossible to predict. But today I'm going to talk to two people who have thought very deeply about the conflict and the way it resonates around the world. Later this hour, I'll speak with Adam Kirsch of The Wall Street Journal.
But first, I'm joined by Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern and Arab studies, and to my mind, the best historian of Palestinian history in English. Recently, President Biden was seen coming out of a bookstore in Nantucket, carrying Khalidi's 2020 book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, to which Khalidi remarked, it's four years too late.
So let's start from not the beginning of things. Obviously, this is a story that's been going on and on and on. But how do you go about writing a history of this period? Would you even attempt it?
The short answer is no, I wouldn't attempt it. I mean, I'm obliged with new editions of my book that are published in different countries to write. update it with a forward or an afterward. And that's a very difficult job because it's shifting sands. You're standing in a river that's always moving. So, it's almost impossible to do.
The forwards that I wrote six months ago for three or four foreign translations are outdated already, which is why I try to avoid predicting the future and I try to avoid writing about the present as much as I can. I'm always asked to do that. And so I hesitate about starting on October 7th. I mean, it is a cataclysmic event. Heaven knows. It's led to enormous changes in the Middle East.
So it's going to be a marker for historians for a very long time to come. But I think the antecedents are as important as the sequels.
And we will talk about all of that, but I want to ask you what you think, looking back, Hamas intended to happen. They certainly, its leadership seemed to be intent on some kind of cataclysm in the region and not just on the border with Israel. What do you think was planned?
I think that... A distinction probably is important about who decided on this and who knew about this and what the people who decided on it thought.
I have a sense, I may be wrong, I'm not in Gaza, I'm not in touch with these people, I really don't know, but I have a sense that the people in Gaza, the military leadership in Gaza, planned and decided on this on the basis of an estimation of the situation that wasn't shared either, I think, entirely with the rest of the Hamas leadership outside.
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Chapter 2: How does Rashid Khalidi view the Palestinian cause?
Since 1948, in fact, Arab countries have been scared of Israel, most other countries. You know, Israel has bombed seven Arab capitals. Most of the wars have been fought on Arab soil. Arab governments are very afraid of Israel, and I think Iran is afraid of Israel, with good reason, I would add.
Recently in Israel, the leadership of the settler movement from the West Bank had a conference where they talked openly about not only annexing the West Bank, but also resettling Gaza. Israeli settlements in Gaza were abandoned in 2005. But they're talking about putting them back in. Netanyahu is not necessarily supporting this, but he's allowing it to have real voice. It's normalizing the idea.
And there are people in his cabinet who support annexation of the West Bank and resettling Gaza as policy.
And ethnic cleansing. They all go together. You boot the population out, you occupy, and then you settle.
Moshe Ya'alon, the former defense minister, who's nobody's lefty, has described what's going on in northern Gaza as ethnic cleansing. So I ask you, where is the Palestinian movement now? What are its prospects?
Well, first of all, the Palestinian movement is fragmented. There is no unified Palestinian national movement. There are two discredited factions, neither of which, it appears to me today, has a viable strategy. So the Palestinian National Movement, for the better part of two decades, has been, in my view, in terrible shape. It's in just as bad or worse shape today.
The Palestinians are in worse shape today because what's going on in the West Bank is almost invisible. The rolling annexation, the rolling theft of land, the rolling expansion of settlements, the ongoing incorporation of most of the West Bank into Israel, whether it's formally annexed or not. And that process is about to recommence in Gaza. It started in 1967.
It was partially rolled back in 2005 with the evacuation of the settlements and with the removal of the occupation to the frontiers of Gaza rather than being inside of Gaza. So Gaza was controlled and occupied from without rather than from within. It's about to be controlled from within again. So the Palestinians are in that sense worse off. Israel is also, in my view, worse off.
Occupation, ethnic cleansing, Colonization produces resistance. If you don't eliminate the population you're colonizing, they will resist. Now, they may try and expel them. In other words, ethnically cleanse them entirely.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of October 7th?
But it is unique in having this connection to Palestine, to the Holy Land of Judaism and the Jewish people.
Which is entirely different from the American experience in the way you describe it. It seemed that the American experience and many of the other ones that you named are entirely more pernicious.
Yeah, there's the matter of can you succeed entirely in eliminating the native population or reducing them to subjection, which is what happens in Australasia and North America. It's not what happens in other settler colonies. It's not what happens in Algeria. It's not what happens in Kenya. It's not what happens in South Africa or in Ireland.
But in Palestine, there have been any number of attempts to divide the land. Do you think that that has run its course?
You're talking about partition.
Some form of division between Palestinians and Israelis. Your problem is you have now two peoples and you have one country. And neither are going anywhere.
Unless, heaven forbid, I don't think Israel can be eliminated. Nuclear power, one of the strongest countries on earth, it's not going anywhere, nor are the Israelis. Some may leave, but that's not going to change anything. Some Palestinians may leave, that's not going to change anything.
You have two peoples in the same place, and both of them in their imaginary see it in its entirety as their ancestral homeland. I'm not talking about reality, I'm talking about imagined communities, okay? That's how the Palestinians see it. That's how the Israelis see it. And I would argue on the one hand, you could say there are various reasons why the Palestinians may be right.
And there are some reasons you might say the Israelis are right. But anyway, that's another issue. So how do you deal with that? There are two ways. You cut the baby in half, the Solomonic situation, which is what partition supposedly was directed at doing. Or you figure out a way for these two peoples to live in some kind of binational situation.
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Chapter 4: How does settler colonialism relate to Israel and Palestine?
The Israeli military didn't regain control of these border settlements and of its military bases, all of which, most of which were overrun, for four days till the 10th. That is obviously traumatic. I mean, and of course it triggered all kinds of historic memories. for Israelis and for Jews. I mean, obviously, just as Palestinians are triggered thinking of 67 and 48 and whatever else.
Israelis were triggered. I mean, we had these comparisons to pogroms. We had peculiar comparisons to the Holocaust. 800 people is not 6 million people, 800 civilians. But anyway, the point is that in terms of people's imaginary, that's what was going through their heads. And everybody in Israel is connected, just like everybody in Palestine is connected.
You know, everybody knew what was happening in those four days, those three or four days. So, yeah, trauma, trauma. However, let us treat human beings as human beings. 800 Israeli civilians were killed. 50, 60, 70, we won't know until the rubble is cleared in a year or two how many Palestinians were killed.
The most common figure you hear from Gaza is around 45,000.
So trauma is trauma. I'm not suggesting that people's suffering can be measured and compared. But I think if we have the same yardstick for humanity, we are talking about a level of tragedy which I don't think has frankly been conveyed as it should have been by the media.
Rashid, your book offers three pathways to how colonial conflicts end. You say it's one of these three things. And I'm paraphrasing. The elimination or subjugation of native people is in North America. The expulsion of the colonizer, like the French in Algeria, or compromise and reconciliation. And here you mention South Africa, Zimbabwe.
And Ireland as well.
And Ireland, of course, which you're working on now as your latest scholarly project, as I understand it from our last conversation. Yeah. Do you think compromise and reconciliation is still possible despite everything we've seen in the last 14 months and the last 25 years or more?
It is unavoidable and inevitable. There's no other way. Neither side's going to eliminate the other and nobody's going anywhere. So, you know, it may take us another two generations or another generation. I don't know. I'm a historian. I can't tell you about what's going to happen. But I can tell you there's no alternative. There is no alternative. And it has to be based on justice and equality.
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Chapter 5: What are the prospects for the Palestinian national movement?
I mean, Jabotinsky and other Zionist leaders used the word colonialism to describe themselves. And it's true. Jabotinsky in particular said... This is Vladimir Jabotinsky, who is the godfather, in essence, of the Herod party, which became now Likud and...
Right. He was often attacked at the time in the 1920s and 30s as an extreme right-winger and even a fascist by other Zionists. But I think that he was prescient about one thing. The Arabs will not welcome us here. The only way that we're going to create a Jewish country here is by fighting for it. In creating Zionism and creating a Jewish state, the Zionist movement did oppose Arab aspirations.
It opposed Arab desires for the future of that land. The reason why I think settler colonialism is not the right model for understanding this— How is that justifiable in your mind? I think it's justifiable by—well, let's say the reasons why Zionism justified it were the historic claims of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, that this was the land where Jews had originated.
It was the land that their religion was focused on, the biblical homeland. And European anti-Semitism. Right. And the other was existential necessity. And I think that those two reasons are probably better than the reasons that 99% of states on the map were created. So if you ask, you know, why is Palestine an Arab country?
The reason is that, you know, in the 7th century, Islamic Arab armies conquered it and spread that religion across North Africa and the Middle East. Before that, it was mainly a Christian country under the Roman Empire.
So you're saying the Zionist sin is by being too recent.
I think that it's recent and it is unresolved. I think that's actually one of the main reasons why settler colonialism is not a good model for thinking about this conflict. Settler colonialism involves, in the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory.
And that's not at all the history of Israel and Palestine. The history of Israel and Palestine is that now there are about equal numbers of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, about seven and a half million of each. So the question is, what future can be created for those 15 million people that is better than the current situation, which involves constant war and occupation?
And what is the answer you come to? We're now sitting in a moment that I don't know the situation has been more dreadful in my lifetime.
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Chapter 6: How do the narratives of Israelis and Palestinians differ?
Chapter 7: What does Rashid Khalidi suggest for a resolution?
Chapter 8: What lessons can be drawn from historical contexts?
I don't dispute that at all. Obviously, the reason why these protests exist is because of the war. The way that this idea is used when people say that Israel is a settler colonial country, they mean this country should not exist. It has no right to exist. And many of those people would say the same thing about the United States.
But of course, the United States is not an imminent danger of destruction. There's no one who's making war on it. But there are countries and groups that have been making war on Israel since it was created. It's not a matter of do I sympathize with victims. It's really a recipe for creating more victims on both sides. Because it says to Israelis, we will never accept the existence of your state.
This is a fight to the death. And if it's a fight to the death, that means more death. The greatest evil is settler colonialism. Israel is settler colonialist. Therefore, people who fight Israel are virtuous. And it leads to some very strange political bedfellows where people who claim to be progressives are waving the flags of groups that are, you know, religious fundamentalist.
You contest Khalidi's claim that Zionism is a classic 19th century European colonial venture in a non-European land. Why do you take issue with that characterization, and how would you characterize it?
Khalidi shows that from the point of view of Palestinian Arabs, Zionism was a colonial enterprise. It came to their land and created a state there without their consent.
I mean, Jabotinsky and other Zionist leaders used the word colonialism to describe themselves. And it's true. Jabotinsky in particular said... This is Vladimir Jabotinsky, who is the godfather, in essence, of the Herod party, which became now Likud and...
Right. He was often attacked at the time in the 1920s and 30s as an extreme right-winger and even a fascist by other Zionists. But I think that he was prescient about one thing. The Arabs will not welcome us here. The only way that we're going to create a Jewish country here is by fighting for it. In creating Zionism and creating a Jewish state, the Zionist movement did oppose Arab aspirations.
It opposed Arab desires for the future of that land. The reason why I think settler colonialism is not the right model for understanding this— How is that justifiable in your mind? I think it's justifiable by—well, let's say the reasons why Zionism justified it were the historic claims of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, that this was the land where Jews had originated.
It was the land that their religion was focused on, the biblical homeland. And European anti-Semitism. Right. And the other was existential necessity. And I think that those two reasons are probably better than the reasons that 99% of states on the map were created. So if you ask, you know, why is Palestine an Arab country?
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