In this Episode
This special episode comes to you in partnership The Historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. In the spirit of the Black Church, which has begun to rise up and call for a ceasefire in Gaza, St. Thomas’s 17th rector, The Very Rev. Canon Martini Shaw and his team decided to focus the church’s Lenten season on understanding what’s going on in Gaza. To learn more about St. Thomas, click here for the history of the church and its founder, the Rev. Absolom Jones.
As ethnic cleansing and plausible genocide grip Gaza, we ask, “What’s going on? And how did we get here?” Our guest for this episode is Dr. Rashid Khalidi. He is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He has also served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of almost a dozen books, the latest one being The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917- 2017 which we will be talking with him about today.
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us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyearswaronpalestine
history.columbia.edu/person/khalidi-rashid/
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Transcript
Lisa Sharon Harper: [00:00:00] From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection. I’m Lisa Sharon Harper, president of Freedom Road, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap. Welcome to the Freedom Road podcast. Each episode, we speak with national and global faith leaders, advocates, scholars, artists, and activists to have the kinds of conversation we normally have on the front lines.
It’s just that this time we’ve got microphones in our faces. And you are listening in. And this special episode comes to you in partnership with the historic African Episcopal church of St. Thomas Now, in the spirit of the Black Church, which has begun to rise up and call for a ceasefire in Gaza, St. Thomas’ 17th Rector, the very Reverend Canon Martini Shaw and his team decided to focus the church’s Lenten season on understanding what’s going on in Gaza. So a portion of this episode will be listened to by the parishioners of the historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. And, of course, they are welcome to tune into the podcast to hear the conclusion of our conversation.
When considering who should help us understand what’s going on, I could think of no one better than the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, [00:03:00] Palestinian historian, Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Saeed professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University in New York City, Dr. Khalidi is the author of eight books in addition to The Hundred Years’ War, including Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, and The Iron Cage.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this. So please tweet to me at Lisa S. Harper or thread me or insta me all at Lisa S. Harper or reach me on Facebook, or you can reach out to Freedom Road at Freedom Road. Us and keep sharing the podcast with your friends and networks and letting us know what you think.
Okay. Let’s dive in. I am so excited for this conversation. I have been immersed in your book for a few months actually. Um, and, uh, and I’m, I’m not allowing myself to move on until I’ve really fully digested each chapter at a time, which is why it’s [00:04:00] taking some, it’s, it’s a thick book. I mean, you in one paragraph, you actually.
You say a lot and, and this is a, this is a book full of history. So we always start on Freedom Road and are on this podcast with our faith story. So I wonder if you can share with us just briefly, what is your faith story? How… what faith are you and how did you come to that faith?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Well, my family is Muslim.
I am not, as it happens, a practicing Muslim. My mother was Christian, Greek Orthodox originally, then Unitarian. She herself was not a practicing Christian. My grandmother used to take us to the first Unitarian church in Brooklyn because she was a practicing Unitarian. So I’m a Muslim who’s been to a lot of, to church a lot.
Thanks to my grandmother. But as I say, I’m not practicing. I have a family that has been very involved, [00:05:00] religiously. My grandfather was a Qadi, a religious judge. And many, many members of my family were involved in the Muslim religious hierarchy in Jerusalem going back literally centrally, centuries.
My mother’s uncle was a Bishop, a Greek Orthodox Bishop of hopes, actually. So I have religious figures on both sides of my, of my family. And so that I guess is my story.
Lisa Sharon Harper: I appreciate that. So how does your family story, I’m glad that you started there. How does it connect with the story of Palestine?
Well, I was amazed at how much it does.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: My, my own family happens to have been a Jerusalem family. My father’s family. And they have been in Jerusalem as far as we can tell, at least as far back as the Crusades, maybe earlier. There’s a possibility that it goes back even before 1099 when the Crusaders took Jerusalem.
And killed all the [00:06:00] Muslims, all the Jews, and most of the Orthodox Christians in the city, by the way. So my family has an old connection with the city. They were very much involved with the religious hierarchy there. Many of my ancestors were involved in the Sharia courts, the religious courts, which had both religious and civil, uh, uh, responsibilities in the city.
And we have a family library there. The Khalidi library, which is one of the, one of several big family libraries in Jerusalem dating back many centuries, but founded as a public library by my grandfather, 125 years ago.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: So that, that’s my, that’s the family connection to Palestine and to Jerusalem.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. You know, actually when you open your book, one of the things that I was. I mean, honestly, just like, whoa, on the first page, actually, you kind of go in and you start with the Khalidi library and the reality that a lot of the [00:07:00] research that you did for this book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, it comes from that library and from your family papers.
And can you tell us what’s the significance of that? And in terms of the story that might’ve been told before and how this history helps fill it in.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: I mean, I had written a book, which was very much based on research in several family libraries in Jerusalem, not just our own, the book you mentioned earlier, Palestinian identity.
And that was a book written for other academics, really. It was a deeply researched, historical study of the development of the idea of Palestinian identity. And it was rooted in, as I’ve said, both our family, uh, library and many others, the Boudet family library, the private papers of the Husseini family, and others.
And I had written a number of books of that sort, and my son kept… who’s a playwright, and you know, appeals to broad audiences said, Pa, enough already, [00:08:00] writing for academics, would you please write a book which speaks to ordinary people that, you know, non-PhDs can read.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: And he kept at me, and kept at me, and he said, All of these stories you tell us, and your, and your mother, and our mother tells us, about what happened to you in Beirut, or whatever your father told you, or your aunts and uncles told you, would you put that stuff in a book?
Instead of just dry, boring, you know, documents, and whatever. That’s so cool!
Lisa Sharon Harper: Look at your son. Thank you, son.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: We all have to thank him. I’m afraid I had another cousin who did the same. They, they, they were coming at me, both of them. It was like stereo. I got it from my son. I got it from my cousin. And so finally I tried to do that using the same materials.
And there’s 45 pages of footnotes in this book. So the stuff that I talk about, I try and document for whoever wants to, you know, follow, go down that rabbit hole and learn why I say what I say, but throughout, I tried to follow that injunction of my son’s and of my cousin, [00:09:00] to tell a story that people can understand through which they can picture Palestinian history.
So I put as much family lore as much of things that you know, my wife’s uncles and aunts told me my own uncles and aunts told me the things that I had found in memoirs of people I knew. And stories people had told me. And that’s really where a lot of this comes from, not just from the family.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Right. Okay. So can you tell us about your third great uncle, Yousef Daya al Din Pasha al Khalidi?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Right. Yousef was…
Lisa Sharon Harper: A pretty big deal.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: He, yeah, he was an interesting character actually. I really enjoyed researching and finding out more about him, you know, he was born in the 1860s or 1850s.
Yeah. And in those years, people didn’t get a modern Western education who came from a, [00:10:00] you know, a religious family. They would get a classical religious education. They would study the Quran, they would study in a madrisa. They would go to Cairo or another center of Islamic learning and study with some great _____, and they would become religious, you know, religious figures.
He took a different course. He went to Malta to a Christian school, and then he went to Istanbul to a secular school. And then he eventually went to Vienna and studied at the Royal and Imperial University there and he later on became a professor there or at least he taught there. And he became someone who had a classical Islamic education, and also a modern Western education so he became a diplomat.
He served in Ottoman government service, he became elected to the first Ottoman Parliament, which was elected in 1877, after the first Ottoman constitution was adopted, and he was an opposition deputy. He was a reformist, and he was opposed [00:11:00] to the autocratic ways of the sultan, and when the sultan, Abed al Khamid suspended parliament, he exiled him.
So he was a maverick, I guess you’d say. He went to Vienna, he studied more, he taught there. Eventually, he became mayor of Jerusalem. And so it was in, in the course of his study in Vienna, and his living in Vienna, and his work in Jerusalem as mayor, he was responsible for the building of the first carriage road, the first, you know, properly paid road between Jaffa and Jerusalem when he was mayor.
It was in the course of that he learned about Zionism, that he learned about antisemitism in Europe, that he began to read about Judaism. And he began to read about other religions. I know this because some of his books are in the family library, so I can actually see the books and the newspapers that he read.
I can read his correspondence with his nephew, who later on [00:12:00] became a deputy of Jerusalem in the second Ottoman Parliament in 1908. And from all of this, I got the background to what I start the book with, which is a letter that he wrote to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political science.
Lisa Sharon Harper: The founder of modern political science, Theodore Herzl.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Modern political Zionism, Zionism.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. I was like, yes, well, no, I’m familiar because of your book. So tell us about that letter and about the correspondence that went on there. I think that’s really critical.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Right. In 1899, he was in Istanbul, Yusuf al Khalidi, and, we know that he read the Austrian press because there’s a pile of old Vienna papers in the family library which he got, you know, those would have been censored by the Ottoman post office, but he got them through the Ottoman, through the Austrian post office.
Each European power had its own separate [00:13:00] post office in Istanbul that was not subject to censorship. So he was reading the Austrian press and there was a great deal of coverage of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, the second Congress. And so he knew about, even if he didn’t know him, he knew about Herzl, he knew about this new political movement, and he wrote to Herzl telling him, first of all, you know, we Muslims and you Jews are cousins.
We’re all children of Abraham. Secondly, he said to him, we understand the connection of Judaism and Jews to the Holy Land. Of course, he said, we understand that. It’s in the Quran, by the way. It’s not just in the Bible. That connection of the Jewish people to Palestine. And he said, and I know about, about the persecution of Jews and how terrible that is.
So he was aware of antisemitism. He’d served, by the way, in Russia as the consul general. And that was where the most virulent [00:14:00] antisemitism was taking place at that time. And this is, the letter was written in 1899 and there was, there were pogroms going on against Jews, terrible, terrible persecution, killings and so on.
He said, I understand all of that. And he says, there’s nothing against the idea in principle of a Jewish homeland. But he said, Palestine is already inhabited and don’t do, in effect, he was saying, don’t do this here. And he ends, he ends that passage on Palestine saying, for the sake of God, leave Palestine alone.
I’m paraphrasing. So that’s the, that’s the letter that he wrote to Herzl. He sent it by somebody, I think he knew from Paris, who was the chief rabbi of France, and it reached Herzl and Herzl wrote him back and we have Herzl’s reply. And as I mentioned in the book, Herzl, it’s a very courteous reply, of course.
He, you know, did him the, as I say, he did him the courtesy of replying, but he [00:15:00] basically dodged every single one of the main points, that Yusuf De al Khaldi had made. Uh, and in fact, interestingly responded to one of, to a point that he had not made, saying we have no intention of removing the Palestinians.
And you said, Yousef never mentioned that. So it was in fact in Herzl’s, apparently in Herzl’s mind, and in fact, in his diaries, Herzl says, we’re going to spirit the ______ population discreetly across the borders. So the idea of removing the Palestinian Arab population, Muslims and Christians from Palestine and replacing them with new Jewish settlers was already in Herzl’s mind, which one presumes is why he put it in the letter.
So that’s the course…
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wait, just to be clear. I’m sorry. Just to be clear. He said to your third great uncle, we have no intention of removing anybody, but in his own letters and his diaries…
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: In his own diaries…
Lisa Sharon Harper: In his diary, he said, [00:16:00] We’re getting them the heck out of Dodge. We’re taking them over the border.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: He said, we will spirit them discreetly across the board.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay. So the subtitle of your book is a history of settler colonialism and resistance. 1917 to 2017, right? So I understand colonialism and I’m saying this, I’m going to define this for the sake of our listeners who may not be that familiar, but colonialism, I understand to be basically when a nation state, nation or state decides that it wants the resources on a particular people groups land and so they basically they go take over the land in order to extract the resources and also sometimes the, the labor, the free labor provided by enslaved people. Right? So colonization…
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Exactly right. Enslaved people or indentured people or subjugated people.
You’re absolutely right. That’s colonialism. So India is a perfect example. [00:17:00]
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. Oh, thank you. Okay. So it’s for, yes. India is a great example, right? So British India or
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Or Egypt, Nigeria, there are many examples, exactly.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So it’s for the purpose of taking the resources or the free labor off of the land. But settler colonialism is worse.
It’s actually like leagues worse. And can you explain what settler colonialism is?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Settler colonialism involves Exporting a part of your population of the population of the metropole of England. Or of France or of Holland, whatever European country. These are European… this is part of the expansion of Europe.
It involved both classical colonialism, what you just described, and settler colonies, which involved replacing an indigenous population as much as possible with a European population. So in Algeria, the French were not just engaged in colonialism as they were in, say, Morocco or Tunisia, taking over the country, taking, [00:18:00] trying to get as much as possible of the resources, exploiting the population.
They were also trying to, in Algeria, replace as much as possible the Arab population, the indigenous population, with European French settlers. Same thing happens in South Africa, Kenya, uh, Libya, uh, Ireland, in fact, Ireland, and of course, North America and Australasia, the most obvious cases.
And in fact, the most successful cases are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The other cases are somewhere in between, much less successful, generally. Even in Ireland, the English only were able to push the native Catholic population back a certain amount and less than a quarter of the population ended up being English or Welsh or Scotch… Scottish Protestants were brought in.
They call them “planted” to replace the native Irish and that that’s what settler colonialism. It’s entirely different than classical colonialism in that respect.
Lisa Sharon Harper: [00:19:00] So why do you describe the Palestinian experience as one that has survived and is surviving settler colonialism?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Well, a lot of it has to do with land and a lot of it has to do with population.
That’s what settler colonialism is all about. You take as much as you can in the land. And you replace as much as you can of the population, push them into less and less favorable territory, if possible, exterminate them. I mean, in North America, there was an enormous population of Native Americans who were basically killed in a variety of ways.
The same thing was true in Algeria. The same thing was true in Australia and New Zealand. It was much more successful in North America and Australasia than it was in any other settler colony. And in Palestine, that is exactly what happened. There was an attempt as much as possible to push Palestinians out.
And replace them with European Jewish settlers and later, uh, Jewish Jewish Jewish populations brought in from other parts of the Arab [00:20:00] world, in fact. But originally almost all of the settlers were Eastern European Jews coming from areas of anti-Semitism and persecution in Eastern Europe primarily.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. So can you give us just very quickly, like a little bullet point list of the ways that settler colonialism kind of took hold in Palestine, just what are the actions that were done.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Right. Well, at the outset, several things the first thing was to try and get international support for this. Herzl tried, he went to the Kaiser, he went to the French, he went to the Ottoman Sultan, he ultimately failed.
His successor, Chaim Weizmann, succeeded. They wanted to establish in public law a right to Palestine because they understood that you couldn’t do this without support of a European colonial power. The second thing to do was to purchase and try and take control of land. And the third [00:21:00] thing to do was to proselytize and encourage Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, where they were persecuted to immigrate to Palestine.
They weren’t terribly successful with that. The overwhelming majority of Eastern European Jews either stayed and tried to fight anti-Semitism or immigrated to North America. A tiny fraction ended up settling in Palestine. It wasn’t until the British took over Palestine after World War One that, first of all, the Balfour Declaration gave them absolute rights in Palestine.
In fact, supreme rights over the rights of the Arabs. And they had the support of a great imperial power. And they were able to bring in more and more settlers. And even then, it was only with the rise of the Nazis that the population balance really shifted. About 17 percent of the population of Palestine was Jews, was made up of the Jewish population before the rise of the power of Hitler.
By the time the 30s were over, the Jewish population was over 30%. So they had almost doubled their [00:22:00] proportion of the population. And in his diaries, David Ben Gurion, who was one of the successors ultimately to Herzl and the first Prime Minister of Israel, he says, At this rate of immigration, we will have a Jewish majority in a few years.
And were it not for the Holocaust and World War II, that, in fact, that might have happened.
Lisa Sharon Harper: These are our stories. You’re listening to the Freedom Road Podcast, where we bring you stories from the front lines of the struggle for justice.
So Dr. Khalidi. I want to dig into this history a bit so that our listeners can understand the story, especially from the perspective of the Palestinian people.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Right.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Balfour Declaration? You mentioned that earlier. What was that?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: The Balfour Declaration was a declaration by the British [00:23:00] cabinet during World War One, November 1917.
Lord Balfour was the foreign secretary and he issued the declaration on behalf of the British cabinet. Which meant it was the official policy of his majesty’s government. It’s later incorporated into the mandate for Palestine issued to Britain by the League of Nations in 1922. So it’s a document that has to be…
Lisa Sharon Harper: Is that called the British mandate? Is that what that is?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Yes. The British mandate of Palestine. Exactly.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay. Okay.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Which is a mandate offered to Britain by the League of Nations, which took control of these former Ottoman territories after World War In the Balfour Declaration, Britain, Balfour wrote that His Majesty’s government looked with favor on the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home, or a national home for the Jewish people is the term that he uses.
And he says, it being understood that nothing shall be done that will harm the civil And religious rights of the non Jewish population. So you have a situation [00:24:00] where there’s a country with 95 or 96 or 94 percent of our population who are never mentioned by name, and we’re not given national or not described as having national or political rights.
One group is described in national terms. They’re to get a national home. They are a people. The other lot, the majority, overwhelming majority, are never described by name. The word Arab and Palestinian do not occur in the Balfour Declaration. And they are not entitled to national or political rights. They are entitled to civil and religious rights.
So, rights to do with property and rights to do with worship. But political rights, national rights, not only are not granted to them in the Balfour Declaration, when the Balfour Declaration is incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine, that’s the way the British were told by the League of Nations to govern Palestine.
To give one group national rights and to do everything possible to help them achieve those national rights. And to treat the others as if they were not a national group, as if [00:25:00] they did not have political rights throughout the, the two decades up to World War II. That’s the way the British governed Palestine.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So when you say political rights, just to be clear again for our audience, are you talking about like the right to vote, the right to run for office, the right to represent your people in the government?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. The Palestinians did not have the right to an elected assembly, which would have reflected the fact that they were an overwhelming majority, the fact that they didn’t accept having their country handed over to another group to create that other group’s national home, and which would have governed the country.
Every other League of Nations mandate ultimately had those privileges. They were given the right to have elections in Iraq, in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Syria. They eventually were given independence. Iraq gets its independence in 1932. The French negotiate treaties with Lebanon and Syria in [00:26:00] 1936. They never got their independence, but they had those treaties.
Palestine was an exception. What the British were basically trying to do was to wait until the Jews in Palestine, the Jewish population, were a majority, and then say, now you can have elections.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: You actually only had elections for, um, mayors and, and, and, and local councils. The Palestinians were never allowed the National Assembly, which would have legislated, for example, that not anybody can come here and take over the country, which, which were the British allowed.
The British opened immigration and eventually the country would have been were not as I said for World War Two and the horrors of the Holocaust would eventually come to have a Jewish majority.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And so when you, when I was reading, when I was reading your book, one of the things that that struck me was the intentionality of the legal wrangling that.
They knew was going to result in a shift in the population and there was [00:27:00] an intrinsic kind of belief and understanding that you could not have a Jewish state with Palestinian rights. So, what they did in this British mandate and correct me if I’m wrong, I think I just heard you say this, but I just needed to be clarified is that they basically took away the rights. And then also there did something else. They made it…
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: So you’re right. What you just said is correct. Okay.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Only Jewish people could become citizens. Is that right? Okay. So clarify that.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Well, first of all, any immigrant could become a citizen of Palestine.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Palestinians were also citizens of Palestine.
The point is those citizens didn’t have equal rights. The Jewish citizens were allowed to eventually have a national assembly, which becomes the body that ratifies the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948. So they have an assembly, the Palestinians are not allowed to have that.
And there is no… the British govern the territory, [00:28:00] unlike in Jordan, unlike in Syria, unlike in Lebanon, unlike in Iraq, where there’s a national government under the mandatory power. Now the British and the French controlled those countries, but there was at least a development towards independence. There were elected governments.
I mean, you have a prime minister and a president in Lebanon and Syria in the 20s and the 30s. You have a prime minister and a king in Iraq and in Jordan from the 1920s. This is not allowed to the Palestinian majority because they’re working… they have written, I mean, they wrote their own ticket, the British, they wrote the mandate document, which the League of Nations then granted them.
And that was based on the Balfour Declaration. As you say, the British knew. What this meant.Balfour writes secret memoranda where he says, you know, we know that we’re ignoring the rights of the Palestinians, but we think that we think that we’re doing something that’s more important. That the aspirations of the Jewish people are more important than this popul… this Arab population.
They knew what they were doing. The Prime Minister at the time, [00:29:00] uh, the, the, the Foreign Secretary Valour the Churchill, who at that time was the first Lord of the admiralty. I think they all knew what they were doing. And these were the guys, these were the people who later on in the 20s assure Chaim Weizmann, who was Herzl’s successor as the leader of the Zionist movement, we always intended for you to have a Jewish state.
As soon as you have a majority.
Lisa Sharon Harper: This is also happening, by the way, at the same time in the US that we have the rise of race riots all over the country in the 1920s and teens. And you also have like a major, um, in the 1917, you have a major, pandemic that is happening all over the world with the influenza.
So there’s like major uproar, upheaval happening in the world, and then there’s this big thing that is kind of placed in the middle of it, which is the Balfour Declaration and then eventually the British Mandate. So can you take us to when does [00:30:00] America enter the picture? Like, how does, how does the U.S. enter the picture?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: The United States is already involved, even in World War I. Woodrow Wilson and the U. S. government supported the Balfour Declaration at the peace conference after World War One. And in various phases, Congress endorsed it. The United States supports the Balfour Declaration at the same time as Woodrow Wilson, this hardened white supremacist, racist president who is expelling black employees from government service.
Who is himself a Southern, you know, he’s a believer in white supremacy. A confirmed believer in white supremacy is supporting the Balfour Declaration. And supporting treating the Palestinians as second class citizens. This is the time of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States.
It’s also the time eventually after World War I of racist immigration. [00:31:00] Legislation which prevents Jews, Catholics, Southern Europeans, Arabs from immigrating to this country. And which favors white, Protestant, Northern Europeans. So it’s, it’s, it’s part of a movement, I would argue not just in the United States, in Great Britain as well.
Which involved antisemitism. It’s weird. You’re talking about something which is supposedly favorable to the Jewish people. At the same time, as you have virulent anti Semitism linked to white supremacy in the United States, in Britain, in other European countries. The Ku Klux Klan did not only lynch black people, it also lynched Arabs and Jews.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: A man named Frank, a Jew, a Jewish clerk, I think he was. That’s right, Leo Frank. Is lynched. One of my students found that an Arab was lynched in Northern Florida. So you’re talking about a philosophy of white supremacy, [00:32:00] which of course, President Wilson himself endorsed.
Lisa Sharon Harper: He had the birth of nations, right?
Didn’t he show the
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: He screened birth of nations in the white house, in the white house, racist films ever made. At the same time you had in England, people who were favorable to Zionism and were supposedly philosemites. Who were responsible for anti Semitic legislation when Balfour was prime minister before he became foreign secretary, he had been prime minister.
He passed the Alien Exclusion Act of 1905-1906, which prevented Jews fleeing from persecution in Eastern Europe from coming to England. So the same man who barred, persecuted Jews from coming to England in 1905-1906, 11 years later is the author of the Balfour Declaration.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. Wow. Okay. So. Thank you. The US enters the scene… when does the US enter the scene? And you…
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Like I said that it’s during, during World War I and at the Peace Conference, the United [00:33:00] States plays a role, the United States endorses…
Lisa Sharon Harper: But when does the US take over? When does the US take over?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: After World War II. World War II is a huge shift in the global balance of power.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Tell us about that shift.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: The colonial empires are defeated by Germany and Japan. France is occupied. The Netherlands is occupied. Belgium is occupied. These are colonial powers.
The colonial empires in East Asia are overrun by the Japanese, the Philippines, our colonial empire, the American colonial empire, or part of it, in what is now Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, so called, what is today Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, all of these areas, Burma, all these areas are overrun.
And so the colonial empires are defeated and lose many of their possessions. Or are themselves occupied in Europe and the United States and the Soviet Union become the two great post war superpowers and American [00:34:00] troops arrive in the Middle East. They arrive in Morocco. They arrive in Algeria. They arrive in Iran and actually they never leave American bases stay.
In the Middle East, really from World War II until today, and so you have an American military presence, an American political presence, an American economic presence, which comes to overshadow, over time, after World War II, the presence of the great imperial powers, Britain, France, which had dominated the Middle East from before World War I, and right through the interwar era, and it’s in that period that the United States becomes, and has stayed since, the dominant power in the Middle East.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Tell us about the Nakba.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Okay. Um, well, a couple of other events in the, in the, that build up to the Nakba. The Nakba is how Palestinians describe the destruction of most of Palestinian society and the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from most of Palestine before [00:35:00] and during the 1948 war. The war that starts with the United Nations decision to partition Palestine in November 1947, which continues for five or six months until May 15th when the British are supposed to leave and when an Arab and Jewish state are supposed to be established. And in the end, obviously only one of those is established, the Jewish state. That’s the state of Israel in May of 1945. And during that period, in the months leading up to May 15th, um, in effect, a civil war takes place in Palestine between the Palestinians and between the Jewish community called the Yishuv.
The Palestinians are about two thirds of the population. Um, the Jewish population is about one third. Remember, they were, they were five or six percent in 1917, they are now about a third of the population due to immigration, um, and population increase. But the Palestinians are still the overwhelming majority.
The partition resolution [00:36:00] nevertheless gave most of the country over to a Jewish state, even though two-thirds of the population was Palestinian, and even though a Jewish ownership of land was only about six percent, five or six percent. In the civil war that erupts between the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, the superiority of the Jewish community comes out very quickly.
The Palestinians had been crushed in a revolt against the British in the 30s. About 15 or 16 percent of the Palestinian population was killed. Arab population, adult Arab population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled by the British. Their arms were confiscated. Their leaders were exiled. So they’re broken.
But before World War Two even begins. And so when the civil war takes place, the Yishuv has armed forces that the British have helped to arm and train to help them fight the Palestinians in the 30s. And they very quickly win this war against the Palestinians in the up to May 15th, 1945.[00:37:00]
Lisa Sharon Harper: Forgive me, I want to interject just to make sure that we’re kind of all tracking, right?
So when I’m hearing you say, and it’s also, I picked this up in your book as well, is it basically in the years during the British mandate, leading up to World War II. There was not an understanding… there was not an understanding of these powers and, and what they were facing. So while you had Jewish people who were very well-versed in Western power structures and all the rest and Israelis who would become eventually Israelis within Palestine, you had folks who had not, they had very little, if any interaction with Western powers.
They didn’t know how this was going and they began to fight among themselves because of basically feeling like we’re losing. How are we, how are we losing our land like this? And so they’re going, now they’re going to war with each other. Is that right?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: [00:38:00] You’re right about everything you said. Let me just add a couple of things.
The first is that the Palestinians did not have the kind of sophisticated knowledge of Western societies that Europeans coming to Palestine natively, innately, naturally did. You know, you’re talking about Russians, you’re talking about Austrians, you’re talking about Germans. People who are steeped in the languages and cultures and politics and international relations of Europe.
They are Europeans. I mean, Weizmann is a European, Herzl is a European, Ben Gurion is a European, and Golda Meier lived in Milwaukee. She was born in Eastern Europe. She immigrates to Milwaukee, then she comes to Palestine. So you’re talking about people who are versed in the culture and politics of the societies that they have to deal with in order to ensure the success of science.
And you’re absolutely right. The [00:39:00] Palestinians don’t have that. There are very few. I mean, Yousef the person we just talked about my great, great, great uncle. Well, he happened to have been educated in Europe, but they were a tiny minority, part of an elite that was cut off from the majority of the population.
And their knowledge was secondhand. They were not Europeans or Americans by, by education and upbringing. They were Arabs. They were Palestinians. The second thing is, yes, the Palestinians were divided partly because of the divide and rule policy of the colonial power. The British were always trying to divide and turn the Palestinians against one another. And even when they united in this great revolt from 1936 to 39, they’re ultimately crushed by British power. The British bring in 100,000 soldiers. They use the Royal Air Force to bomb. They use the counterinsurgency techniques that colonial powers always do.
Blow up houses over there. Residents shoot prisoners, torture people, execute people carrying arms, the kind of arbitrary emergency regulations, the British later on using Kenya and Malaya, and [00:40:00] that they’d been using in India and Ireland even before that. The Palestinians are crushed by the British, and as you say, also divided and they don’t have that diplomatic skill if you want, but naturally the Europeans, the sophisticated, educated Europeans who lead the Zionist movement, of course, had.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So, what happened with the Nakba then?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: What happens with the Nakba is even before the state of Israel is declared, even before Arab armies then come into Palestine to try and right the balance after May 15th, 300,000 Palestinians are driven from their homes, uh, as a result of massacres, bombardments and so forth.
The entire Arab population of Haifa, 70,000 people are expelled. They flee by sea. They flee by land. The entire Arab population of Jaffa, 70,000 people, are expelled. They flee mainly by sea. The populations of Tiberias, the populations of other towns, and many, many villages, [00:41:00] some of them in the area, a lot of the Arab state, many of them in the area, a lot of the Jewish state under partition, are driven from their homes, 300,000, maybe more, by May 15th.
At that point, the State of Israel is established. The state of Israel would have had a population in the outlines drawn by the UN partition plan, which would have had almost the same number of Arabs and Jews. So it wouldn’t even have been an overwhelmingly Jewish state.
It would have been a half-half state. The Arab state would have been almost entirely Arab. There were maybe 10,000 Jewish, would have been 10,000 Jewish residents of what would have been the Arab state, which in fact never comes into being. And then when the Arab armies come in, they’re eventually defeated by what becomes the Israeli army.
The militias that the Zionist movement has built up are… become the army of the state of Israel. May 15.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: And they defeat the Arab armies in detail, one after another, um, and drive out another 400,000 or so people such that by the end of the 1948 war, three quarters of a [00:42:00] million Palestinians have been made Refugees.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Walking Freedom Road from coast to coast and around the globe. This is the Freedom Road Podcast. So. Rashid, I feel weird calling you that because I got my good, you know, African-American home, good home training. And I’m like, I’m supposed to call you Dr. Khalidi.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: You can call me, you can call me either. It’s fine.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay. Um, well I’m gonna, I’m gonna.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: My PhD students call me Rashid. So there’s no reason why you should. All right.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Well, I’m going to, I’m going to sit with your PhD students for a moment and I’ll call you Rashid. Rashid, what happened in 1967?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: In 1967, there’s a complicated backstory and I won’t bore everybody with that.
In 1967, the Arab armies, are defeated by Israel. [00:43:00] In a preemptive strike, after, the Arab armies start to concentrate on Israel’s frontiers and Israel, feels that it’s threatened. The important thing about 1961 and many important things about 1967 is it leads to the occupation of more Arab territory. It leads to the occupation of the rest of Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza strip. It leads to the occupation of Sinai, Egyptian Sinai, and it leads to the occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The other important thing about the ‘67 War is that it takes place with an American green light. Israel sends the head of its intelligence service to Washington. He meets with President Johnson, with the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Wheeler.
He meets with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, and they say to him, you’re going to whip the Arabs, whatever happens. If they attack you, you’ll beat them. If you launch a preemptive attack, you’ll just destroy them. And that goes against [00:44:00] what many Israelis felt, what many Americans felt that Israel was in existential danger.
In fact, as the American intelligence services and the U. S. military understood perfectly well, and the Israeli military understood it as well, they had vast superiority over the Arab armies. Even all of them together and mobilized weren’t in a position to defeat Israel, let alone destroy it. Though many, many people believed, as I say, that Israel was in existential danger.
I remember I mentioned in the book coming out of Grand Central Station in New York City and seeing people collecting money for Israel in bedsheets out of fear that this would be as they thought a second Holocaust. So here you’re talking about elemental fears among the Jewish population of Israel and many other people the world over. But the point here is that the United States had Israel’s back in 1967 and moreover had reassured the envoy of the Israeli government. You guys are going to win whatever happens. I mean, we’re with you. It was a green light to go [00:45:00] ahead and launch this preemptive war.
Lisa Sharon Harper: It strikes me that this is happening in the middle of The Vietnam War. I mean, America’s own colonial project actually in Vietnam.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Exactly.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. So we were silent…
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: At the same time as the civil rights movement, at the same time as all kinds of upheavals in the United States. I mean, I was a college student in those years and I remember, and these things were linked for us. In a little bit, in a way that things seem to be linked for a much younger generation today.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Right now, yeah.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: You see a sort of intersectionality between racial discrimination, uh, between colonialism, between foreign wars, and between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So in a nutshell, in 1967, basically, the war that was waged by Israel was backed by the U.S. and what was the outcome of that war?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Well, two outcomes. I mentioned one of them, which is the occupation of all these Arab territories, some of which are still occupied. So the occupation of [00:46:00] 1967 continues in the Golan Heights. The occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Continues in the Gaza Strip, continues in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem.
The only area that Israel occupied in ‘67 that was returned was the Sinai Peninsula, which is returned to Egypt as a result of the 1978 peace treaty.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Right. So this is what I never understood. I’m sorry. I need to… I just, I never understood this. If the battle for declaration and the mandate and the international UN partitioning and, you know, establishment of Israel offered this land and then in 1967, there’s war to take more.
How is that allowed to, to stay like, why is that never contested on or was it contested on the international stage? Because it was according to international law. That was established after the world after World War Two, in large [00:47:00] part to protect Israel from ever having or Jewish people from ever having that same thing happen again, that those laws were being broken in order to establish this greater territory.
Am I right about that? Like?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: You’re absolutely right. The visibility of the acquisition of territory by force is in the UN charter.
Lisa Sharon Harper: It’s not allowed.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: It’s not allowed. I mean, it’s banned by the UN Charter, the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, which is what Israel did in 67. And that’s included, that, that language is included in the UN Security Council Resolution 242 that’s passed in November 67.
But the American government makes sure that that resolution is passed with a huge loophole that you can drive a Mack truck through, which is to condition that on Israel’s security. And Israel’s… and Israel getting peace treaties with the Arab countries. And, very importantly, on the definition of territories occupied.
You know, [00:48:00] Israel is supposed to withdraw from territories occupied, not all the territories or the territories. So the United States government under President Johnson, Ambassador Goldberg is the guy who drafts it with the British ambassador to the UN. Makes sure that even though the inadmissibility of territory by force, of acquisition of territory by force, is part of the preamble to the resolution, the operative language does not force Israel to withdraw.
Until it obtains its security, so it gets peace treaties, and it’s not even obliged to withdraw from all territories, so there’s a contradiction in the language of the resolution. This is the beginning of a blatant U. S. bias in favor of the Israeli position. I mean, it was, it was blatantly biased in ‘47 when the partition resolution was passed.
But this is, I call this a declaration of war. That’s the framing of the different chapters of my book. I call the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate a Declaration of War. I call the Partition Resolution a declaration of war on Palestine and the Palestinians. [00:49:00] And 242 is another declaration of war. And you’re absolutely right in seeing the contradiction between the principle and the charter of the United Nations and between the way in which 242 has been interpreted.
So that’s still supposedly the template for peacemaking in the Middle East to this day.
Lisa Sharon Harper: What is? What is?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 that has these contradictory this contradictory language.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. Wow. All right. So since the 1980s, Palestine has experienced two, if I’m right, official intifadas.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Correct.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And I wanted you to, to explain a little bit of what does intifada mean, what sparked them and how did they resolve?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Intifada means, in Arabic, rising up or shaking off, and as the term is understood by Palestinians, it means an uprising against an illegal Israeli military occupation, which today has been going on for 56 years.
In [00:50:00] June, it’ll be 57 years, in three months, it’ll be 57 years, or four months. That’s how Palestinians understand the term, and that’s what the first Intifada of 1987 was. The occupation had been going on for 20 years. It had been normalized by the Israelis. They thought they could continue it indefinitely and continue to settle… plant, illegally plant Israeli settlers in occupied territory, violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Nobody forced them to stop that, and they have been continuing it to this day. There were a few thousands of settlers in the ‘60s. There are now 700,000 plus. Between occupied Arab East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
And they’re calling for resettling the Gaza Strip where there had been a few thousand before 2005.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So when we talk about occupation, we’re not actually going back to 1948. I mean, some people do, but what you’re talking about is since 1967, since the illegal seizing of land that was not actually granted to [00:51:00] Israel through the United Nations.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: That’s correct.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow. And so,
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: And the Intifada, the Intifada was an attempt to revolt against this illegal occupation. The First Intifada led to negotiations. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, the negotiations in Washington that I took part in as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation. I described my experiences in this book and in another book, the one that you mentioned, Brokers of Deceit, and finally, the Oslo Accords and subsequent negotiations, which, of course, never produced what the Palestinians expected, which was an independent, sovereign, contiguous, viable state.
That never, that never took place. And so by 2000, Palestinians were fed up. And there was another uprising.
Lisa Sharon Harper: That was the Camp David Accords, right? Pardon me? That was the Camp David Accords. That fell apart.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. After the Camp David meeting of 2000. Correct. Correct. Between, uh, President Clinton. Prime Minister [00:52:00] Barak, Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Yasser Arafat.
That’s correct.
Lisa Sharon Harper: And so that, when that fell apart, basically everything blew up and we got the second Intifada.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Correct. Which was much, as I said, much bloodier and more violent than the first. The first was largely non violent,
Lisa Sharon Harper: And was led by women.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: …was led by boycotts, um, uh, and a variety of non violent attempts to resist the occupation, which were brutally suppressed.
And many people were killed, both Palestinians, mainly Palestinians, but also Israelis. But the second Intifada was much, much bloodier.
Lisa Sharon Harper: You know, can I get, can we go backwards just for a moment and then go forward? We hear about the Nakba, we hear about people being removed. We even now have more, a more visual picture of what that removal looks like because of what’s happening in Gaza now.
And also especially in the West Bank, where people are literally walking into people’s houses and saying, this is mine now. Right? Like [00:53:00] what? Um, but what we don’t often hear is the numbers of dead. Right. How many people died in the Nakba?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: About 15,000 Palestinians, both civilians, mainly civilians, but also a lot of combatants.
What we are seeing now in Gaza is the most devastating loss of life in Palestinian, modern Palestinian history. 15,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, uh, 6, 000 Israelis were killed in 1948, about 4, 000 of them soldiers, almost 2, 000, about 2, 000 civilians. In 1967, many fewer were killed, but 300, 000 more Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank, from the Gaza Strip, and from Jerusalem. In the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which I talk about in a chapter of the book, 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed, both civilians and combatants. So far, the number of killed in Gaza is over 28,000, and there are about 7 or 8,000 [00:54:00] missing, who are undoubtedly dead under the ruins of their homes.
So we’re talking about In the realm of 35,000 people, this is over double the death toll in 1948 of Palestinians. This is much, much more than the death toll and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s the highest Palestinian death toll ever. It’s also one of the highest Israeli civilian death tolls. About 800 Israeli civilians were killed in the attack by Hamas on the 7th of October and then the days immediately following. So it’s one of the highest Israeli civilian… it is the highest Israeli civilian death toll since 1948, and it’s the highest Palestinian death toll ever. And it’s the highest dislocation of Palestinians ever, a million and a half to two million people.
We don’t know the actual number. And many of them apparently are about to be forced to move yet again. I mean, I have family. My [00:55:00] niece’s in laws are in Rafah. They were forced to move four times. To where they are now, and there is now apparently a plan for an Israeli offensive into the area where a million or a million and a half people are crowded, which will force them to move yet again.
So this is the largest displacement of Palestinians in Palestinian history. It’s the largest death toll in Palestinian history. 67,000 people have been wounded, the highest casualty toll, about 4.5 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip have been killed or wounded or missing. And if you can imagine what that would be like in a larger population.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So take us to October 7th and the month or months before it, before what happened. What was happening in Palestine and the relations between Palestine and in Israel for actually the year or two years before October 7th.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: I mean, I’ll go back a little further because I think that there’s an attempt to pretend that [00:56:00] history started on the 7th of October with the killing of all of these Israeli civilians and with the surprise attack that Hamas launched, I think you have to go back a number of years.
First of all, there have been no substantive negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis for at least 15 years since the early 2000s. And most of them went nowhere. All of them went nowhere. So the Palestinians have been kept in this condition of limbo now for 56 years. The people in the Gaza Strip are mainly descendants of people who were made refugees by Israel when it ethnically cleansed the southern parts of what is now Israel.
They are the population of towns like Beersheba, now Beersheba, Ashkelon, now Ashkelon, Ashdod, now Ashdod, formerly Asdod, and dozens and dozens of villages in southern, what is now southern Israel. So the population of the Gaza Strip are people who are forced into the Gaza Strip by Israeli military offensives in 1940, and they have been kept there [00:57:00] for… by the Egyptians for a period, but most recently by the Israelis, since 1967.
So for 56 years, they have been prisoners of a sort of siege. That has kept them inside the Gaza Strip.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: And that siege has become a real siege since about 2007. When the fences are erected, when the checkpoints are erected and so on. Um, and so you have a population that’s basically cooped up in this tiny territory, 20 by, 20 miles by about 5 miles.
And it, we’re talking about 2. 3 million people. Most of them have never been allowed to leave the Gaza Strip in their entire lives. Think about being cooped up in an area 20 by 5. 20 miles by five. I cannot imagine. Your life, the life of your parents in some cases. So that’s the situation before the 7th.
There were various… Hamas is an organization that believes in violent resistance. Okay. They… when the PLO [00:58:00] recognized Israel in the 1980s, when the PLO renounced violence, when the PLO entered negotiations with Israel in the 1980s, that was the peace, the peace process that I talked about starting in Madrid.
Negotiations in Washington later on Oslo and Camp David. Hamas refused to renounce violence, refused to recognize Israel. It has always argued that only violent resistance will end occupation. Only violent resistance will bring Palestinian rights. And so they picked up sort of the torch of armed resistance, which they argued the PLO had dropped.
And the failure of the PLO to achieve Palestinian rights of any sort, to end the occupation, to stop settlements, to establish a Palestinian state fuels the strength.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So wait real quick. So because the PLO never actually was able to actualize the work that they were doing to try to win political rights [00:59:00] without violence.
Now the people are like, Well, what is our other choice? We now are, we’re now in the camp of armed… we think armed violence is the only way, or at least it’s got to be one of the ways that we choose.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Some people, the ones who support Hamas. I mean, if you look at the polls before the 7th of October, they never had them.
Even in the elections that they won in 2006, they had about 43 percent of the vote. So they never, a lot of people, more in some periods, less in other. But yes, a lot of people feel that way. I mean, negotiations have gotten us nowhere. Nonviolent resistance has gotten us nowhere. There was a thing called the March for a Return, where people would march to the border.
And the Israelis would shoot them down. Hundreds were killed by snipers. Many, many hundreds were wounded. Thousands, actually. So, for whatever reason, some people have decided that only armed struggle, only violence. And this is not, this is [01:00:00] not unique to Palestine. Look at Ireland. Look at Algeria.
Look at South Africa. Look at India. We think of Gandhi. Gandhi was not the only Indian nationalist. There were Indian nationalists who called for armed struggle. There’s a character I’m following who served in Ireland, served in India, served in Palestine, Indian nationalists, tried to assassinate him six times.
That’s not Gandhian. That’s, I mean, honestly,
Lisa Sharon Harper: I think. But in America, we just need to look at Geronimo, right?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: There you are.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Or any of, any of the chiefs that were trying to fight off settler colonization. Exactly. On the Western Plains. If you see, we understand that. Wow.
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: If you see things through that framework, which is how the Palestinians see it.
They see, this is, they see it as this is our country. A bunch of Europeans are coming here. They have a connection to Palestine. They’re Jews. Judaism has a connection to Palestine. Nobody disputes that. It’s in the Quran, for heaven’s sakes, as well as the Bible. However, for them to come and say, we’re going to take over the country. I mean, this early Zionist leader, I talk about him in the book, Zeb Jabotinsky says, what we’re trying to do is [01:01:00] transform Palestine into the land of Israel.
Well, anybody who’s trying to do that is going to be resisted, whether they’re Jewish or Danish or Peruvian. I mean, opposing a colonist who’s trying to take over your country. It’s not against the religion of that colonist. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about resisting, whether peacefully or violently, an attempt to take over your country and transform it into something else.
You know, if the colonists ordained, it would not be anti-Christian to oppose them. Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So, on October 7th. When we all watched, wow, when we watched the carnage of October 7th, cast by Hamas over the southern part of Israel with a hundred… 1,200 people dead, 800 of about which you said are, were civilians…
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: And 250 people taken hostage, about half of the [01:02:00] soldiers and half, about half of them civilians.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Right. What was that? Would you call that a third intifada or what would you call that?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: No, no, this is a new phase. This is something completely different. I mean, the intifadas mainly took place. inside the occupied territories. There were, it’s true, during the Second Intifada, there were suicide bombings inside Israel.
But they essentially took place, as most of Israel’s wars after 1948 have taken place, on Arab soil, on Arab soil in Palestine, or the wars with the Arab countries were mainly fought on Arab soil. This was an attack into Israel, which defeated a whole division of the Israeli army, the Gaza division, which overran army bases, and then overran civilian settlements.
Yeah. Kibbutzes and other settlements and towns. I mean, there was fighting, in Sderot, which is a town, there was fighting in Ofakim, which is a town. I mean, these guys reached many kilometers into Israel. People were killed. There were [01:03:00] massacres. There were, the horrific things happened, obviously. But it’s something completely different than the Intifadas in my, in my view, anyway, and, and, and we’re talking about it in a sense of paradigm shift.
Because of the fact the Israeli army was actually defeated for several days, there’s a huge debate inside Israel. How could this have happened? How could we have been surprised? How could the army not have defended these settlements? I mean, if you read the Israeli press. That’s what Israelis, one of the things Israelis, of course, are debating.
They’re not, you know, they’re horrified at the massacres and the carnage. But they’re also asking, how did the army fail to stop this? How did they not know this was coming?
Lisa Sharon Harper: So I have two concluding questions for you, and we’ll take them one at a time. But I think it’s important for us to bring this to the current moment.
And especially talking with an historian, really in many ways, the historian on the history of Palestine, I think right now. The ICJ [01:04:00] ruled that Netanyahu’s current carnage in Gaza is a plausible genocide. Is that how you would characterize it?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: Well, that’s the preliminary finding. It’ll take years before they come to a final decision on this.
I think it is a plausible genocide. I mean, the level of death and killing and wounding 4.5 percent of the population. And starving the rest and depriving them of water and electricity and food and medicine would appear to be genocidal. It’s a legal decision. I’m not a lawyer. I’ll leave it to the International Court of Justice, but I think that they made… that if you look at the South African submission, which is worth reading, they make a very plausible case for intentionality and for the fact that this is genocidal now. I don’t know. We’ll see what the international court of justice… It seems it seems like a reasonable assessment to me, you know.
Lisa Sharon Harper: So, in youview, as an historian, one who has, you know, perspective [01:05:00] on all the different decision points that were made by pretty much all of the sides over the course of the last hundred years or more. What do you think is the way to lasting peace? How can we get there? How can we learn from the past in order to make different decisions going forward?
Dr. Rashid Khalidi: I think we have to understand several things. The first is people have to accept certain historical facts.
People have to accept, for example, that whether you like it or not, there’s the Palestinian people like most modern peoples. It developed very recently. There was no Nigerian people in 1800. There was actually no French people in 1800 or in the 1860s, 1760s or 70s. You had, you had this conjury of peoples who become a people through education, through conscription, through, uh, Napoleonic laws and so on and so forth.
And that’s true. That’s true. Even in Europe, where we think these nations go back hundreds of years. No, they don’t. The British [01:06:00] put a Dutchman on the throne in 1688 and they put a German on the throne in 1714. Where’s the nationalism of the English? So even, even France and Britain, are relatively modern 19th century creations as we understand them today.
They don’t see themselves. Do you think they go way back? The same is true with Israel. The same is true with Palestine. However, there is a people there and that has to be part of the solution. There’s also an Israeli people. Now this people has roots in the Bible, in the Jewish people. But what you have in the Bible and what you have in Jewish peoplehood is not modern nation-state nationalism as you have in Israel.
It is developed into a modern nation state. Among people, most of whose great grandparents would not have accepted the tenets of Zionism in the 1700s or the 1800s or even in the 1900s. It’s a modern nation state. However, and it has those roots, but it…[01:07:00] national roots of modern nationalism, but it also has several colonial roots without British imperialism, without the support of the United States, you would not have what you have without this replacement of Palestinian population with a Jewish settler population, something which they themselves accepted. Early Zionists, by the way, they talked about themselves as settlers. They saw it as a colonial venture. There was nothing wrong with that in the 20s and the 30s of the last century.
You have to accept that there are two peoples and those two peoples have to have individual and national and civil and religious rights on a basis of complete equality. How you do that, I don’t know. One state, two states, confederation, binational state, that’s another issue. But anything that’s not based on absolutely equal rights, both, for both groups and for all individuals, is not sustainable, is not just, and won’t last.
So that’s my, that’s not a real… that’s not an answer to your question. But that’s the… those are the [01:08:00] principles, I think that a resolution of this has to be based on.
Lisa Sharon Harper: The conversations leaders have on the road to justice. This is the Freedom Road Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. The Freedom Road Podcast is recorded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This episode was engineered and produced by Corey Nathan of Scan Media. Freedom Road Podcast is executive produced by Freedom Road, LLC.
We consult, coach, train, and design experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment, and lead to common action. You can find out more about our work at our website, freedomroad. us. Stay in the know by signing up for our updates on Substack, yes, Substack. We promise we will not flood your inbox.
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