All too often, the question of Palestine is framed as an eternal conflict arising from ancient ethnic or religious hatreds, with questions regarding the origins of the state of Israel and the legitimacy of land claims reduced to matters of scriptural interpretation. Such views entirely omit the actual history of Palestine and the Zionist movement. The colonization of Palestine, a process still playing out before our eyes to this day, has definite historical origins at the turn of the 20th century, when Zionism was born and the encroachment of Palestinian land began. Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundreds’ Year War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917- 2017, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a look into this essential history, and how it can help us frame Israel’s present war on Gaza.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and the author of several books.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Chris Hedges: The conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, which has reached a terrifying crescendo with the assault on Gaza, is the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Jewish Zionists in Israel backed by major imperial powers, starting with the British and a century later with the US. This century-long assault by Israel has one objective: to force an indigenous people from their land. The historian Rashid Khalidi breaks what he calls The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine into six periods; The first is the British support for Jewish Zionists during the British occupation of Palestine from 1917-1939. The second declaration of war is the 1947-1948 Nakba or catastrophe that saw Zionist militias ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine, and carry out a series of massacres. The third is the 1967 war when Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and expelled roughly another 250,000 Palestinians. The fourth declaration of war on Palestine was Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut, followed by the departure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters to Tunisia and other parts of the Arab world, and the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The fourth war against the Palestinians began with the First Intifada, or uprising in 1987, continued with the Second Intifada, and is taking place with the Israeli assault on Gaza.
The backdrop to this century of war by Israel and the Palestinians is the failure of Arab leaders to offer meaningful support to the Palestinian people. In fact, these leaders often colluded with Israel to weaken the Palestinian resistance movement. Joining me to discuss Israel’s settler colonial project, how it is being played out in Gaza, and its consequences is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialization and Resistance, 1917-2017. First, I have to say that for anyone who wants to put what’s happening in Gaza in context, I can’t think of a better book. You make the argument correctly, of course, that we see variations in scale, savagery, and tactics, but not in intent. Let’s begin with on the eve of the Balfour Declaration, only 6% of the residents of historic Palestine are Jewish. If you can lay out the importance of the backing of superpowers, first Britain and then the US, in pushing through this Zionist project.
Rashid Khalidi: Thanks for having me, Chris. I chose to start this narrative with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 because the framing of the conflict as one between Zionism and the Palestinians or between Israel and the Palestinians is basically false. Of course, there is a national conflict there, and that’s central to it but without the external support that Zionism received from the British, none of what we have seen in the past century and more would’ve happened as it did. British and later American and other external support was absolutely essential to the success of the Zionist project from the very beginning. So I start this tale of what I call the Hundred Years’ War with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which gives the support of the power of the greatest empire of its day to the Zionist project. Calling for, in the words of the Balfour Declaration, “the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.” Now the Balfour Declaration and the mandate that follows it never mentioned the Palestinians and that’s essential. Removing the Palestinians, eliding the Palestinians, is and has always been part of, not only the Zionist project but of the project of the great powers that supported it.
Chris Hedges: You’re right. The British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings. Explain.
Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. There are many motivations for the British issuing the Balfour Declaration and some of them that have been induced are “philosemitism” or Christian Zionism: The belief in the 19th century among Protestant evangelicals in Britain that the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land was a Christian duty. These are minor, in my view, minor elements in the motivation for the British. The essential motivation for the British was imperial and strategic; Britain wanted to create a buffer to defend the eastern frontier of Egypt under British control, they wanted to do this 10-11 years before the Balfour Declaration. They also wanted to control the Mediterranean terminus of the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf; Thinking at that time of a railway and later on creating in that space that runs from Haifa through what is now Jordan to Iraq, creating a road system, creating an oil pipeline, and creating a series of air bases.
So the British had these objectives in mind: Protecting Egypt’s defenses from the east by controlling Palestine and controlling the Mediterranean terminus of this shortest land route between these two bodies of water, which was essential obviously to their connection to their Indian empire. That’s what motivated Britain and strategic motivations were also what led them to change their policy at the end of the 1930s.
Chris Hedges: Can you talk about the rise of nationalism? In historic Palestine, they had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 20 centuries from the 7th century until 1948. And you deal with that issue –
Rashid Khalidi: From the 16th century.
Chris Hedges: – 16th century. Sorry, sorry. 16th century, yes. Can you talk about that and how it affected Palestinian identity?
Rashid Khalidi: Well, nationalism was developing all over the Ottoman Empire, not only among Arabs, among Turks, among Armenians, and among Greeks. It was also developing among Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which is where Zionism comes in. It is in Palestine a settler colonial project but it is also a national movement among persecuted Eastern European Jews.
In the case of Palestine, you had a local patriotism that over time developed into Palestinian nationalism as part of a broader movement towards nationalist identifications all over the colonized world and all over much of Europe. You have similar things happening in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe: The rise of national consciousness and demands for national independence and self-determination in the period before World War I, during, and after World War I. And that’s what happens in Palestine, as in other parts of the Arab world.
Chris Hedges: So there’s a clear understanding. It’s one of the nice layered textures of your book is that your family was involved at very high levels with this Zionist project, where we also see how they’re saying one thing to the Palestinian leadership and quite another amongst themselves. But I want to talk about opposition. Because initially, the opposition is nonviolent and democratic, they form congresses, they have leaders, and it goes nowhere.
Rashid Khalidi: Well, the opposition actually began before World War I. The opposition is parliamentary. The opposition is in the press. There’s a little bit of resistance by peasants to their dispossession in different parts of Palestine where Zionist colonies are established. But essentially the opposition before and after World War I is, as you say, in the form of demonstrations or speeches, or after World War I, congresses and delegations to London where the British government is obviously, and petitions to the high commissioner in Palestine. All of this, as you say, goes absolutely nowhere.
There were violent outbreaks in 1920 and 1921, and again in 1929 but the thrust of the Palestinian National Movement up until 1936 was essentially demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, petitions, congresses, newspaper articles, and so forth. And it achieves absolutely nothing. The British are unyielding in their support for the Zionist project. Meanwhile, Jewish immigration is growing because of persecution in Europe, the Nazis come to power in Germany in 1933, and immigration shoots up. The Jewish population as a proportion of the whole goes from 17% in 1930-1931 to 31% by the end of the 1930s, as a result of people fleeing the Nazis and not being allowed to go anywhere else; The US has shut its doors to immigration. Britain has shut its doors to immigration.
So this persecuted population coming out of Eastern Europe literally has nowhere to go. People who could and would certainly have been saved from the Holocaust are basically shut out of most Western democracies. And that’s part of the tragedy; These people are forced, in a sense, to go to Palestine, whether they want to or not, because it’s the only country where immigration is unlimited thanks to the British mandate, which says that there should be unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine. So this changes the demographics of Palestine in a period of six or seven years.
Chris Hedges: And you point out that they come both with educational levels and resources that most indigenous members of historic Palestine do not have.
Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. Through something called The Transfer Agreement, the Zionist movement negotiates with the Nazis. People are allowed to bring some of their capital and some of their property with them. And that leads to an influx, not only of the German-Jewish population which is highly educated and skilled and motivated, but also of a lot of capital. And so the economic balance in Palestine shifts. Even though the Jewish population is under 35%, it controls more than half of the economy by 1935.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about the duplicity of the Zionist leadership. Chaim Weizmann, you write for example, told several prominent Arabs at a dinner in Jerusalem in March 1918, “To beware treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power.” You write the Zionist movement leaders understood that “Under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy.” This duplicity, of course, continues to this day, as all of us who covered Gaza and the West Bank, would file our reports, and then watch the Israelis reflexively lie. But talk about this duplicity and its importance.
Rashid Khalidi: Yeah. It goes right back to an incident that I detailed at the very beginning of the book. An ancestor of mine who had been a member of the first Ottoman Parliament, who had been mayor of Jerusalem, lived in Europe, taught in Vienna, and knew German; he knew about Zionism. We know that from his papers and from the books and Viennese newspapers that he received that are kept in the family library to this day. He knew about Zionism. He knew everything about Zionism. So he wrote to Theodor Herzl in 1899, two years after the first Zionist Congress, with full knowledge that the objective was a Jewish state in Palestine. And he tells him that we respect the Jews, they’re our cousins, we understand your suffering, and there’s nothing more noble than the idea of the Jewish people having a state, but not here; There’s already a people here.
The interesting thing is not only this letter from this ancestor of mine, a man named Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, but Herzl’s response which is completely disingenuous, and completely ignores all the points that Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi is making. And then says in response to a question that Yusuf Dia had not even asked, we have no intention of driving the population away. If you look at Herzl’s diaries, he’s talking about spiriting the population discreetly across the borders. We’re talking in the 1890s. This is clear in Herzl’s mind. You have to get rid of the Arabs to have a Jewish state in a majority Arab country, there’s no other way to do it. And that in fact, is always the driving motive of Zionism.
So what Weizmann is saying is profoundly deceptive in the quote that you read, which is from 1918 or 1919, because it was always understood that the objective was a majority Jewish state in what was, at that point, a majority Arab country. And that deceptiveness has been, as you say, a constant ever since. The idea of ethnic cleansing, which is something that was inherent in Zionism and which was practiced again and again in 1948, and 1967, is being practiced today in Gaza. Pushing people into the south of the Gaza Strip was always inherent in Zionism because there’s no other way to, as I’ve said, create a majority Jewish state in a majority Arab country.
Chris Hedges: You quote the Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, this term “politicide” of the Palestinian people. Explain that.
Rashid Khalidi: Well, it was essential to argue that the only people with legitimate rights in this country were the Jewish people. This is now part of the Israeli Constitution, as of a law that was passed in 2018, only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in the land of Israel. That’s part of the platform of the Likud party from 1977, that’s part of the program of the current Israeli government, but it’s always been inherent in the Zionist project. If there were two people there, then why would the minority have a right to the entire country or to most of it? And this approach was essentially adopted by the British and is incorporated, not only into the Balfour Declaration but into the Mandate for Palestine that the League of Nations gave Britain, which is the charter for ruling Palestine under the League of Nations from 1922 when the Mandate was adopted until the British finally left in 1948. The idea is that there are no Palestinian people. The Palestinians are never mentioned in the Balfour Declaration, except as the non-Jewish population of Palestine. They’re never described as a national entity. They’re never described as having political rights. The only rights that are to be allowed to the overwhelming Palestinian majority are civil and religious rights.
This approach, which is a British imperial approach as well as a Zionist approach, continues pretty much up to the present day. Israel becomes a state and is entitled to national self-determination and the rights that a nation-state enjoys. The Palestinians, if they are even to demand these things, do it on sufferance, and are only allowed basically a simulacrum, a pale shadow of these things. You look at all the proposals made to the Palestinians, they’re never for full sovereignty; They’re for some form of autonomy under Israeli sovereignty. That approach has been central not only to Zionism and the diplomacy of the state of Israel after 1948, but to the approach of the great powers, certainly of the US and before Britain.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. I didn’t understand until I read your book how bloody it was. The British, if I remember correctly, sent in 100,000 troops. They armed Jewish militias. But this came, of course, after decades of essentially nonviolent tactics that had failed.
Rashid Khalidi: The spark for this is a growing militancy among young Palestinians, among middle-class Palestinians, among Palestinians who see the extraordinary rise in Jewish immigration. In 1935, 60,000 plus new immigrants arrived in Palestine, which was larger than the entire Jewish population of the country in 1917. And there are articles in the paper saying, at this rate, we’re going to become strangers in our own country. So in response to the ineffectual leadership of the Palestinian elites that dominated the national movement, and in response to this complete unwillingness of the British to respond to Palestinian demands, a general strike broke out in 1936, which is a grassroots effort. The leadership had nothing to do with it. The traditional elite leaders are taken by surprise. The general strike went on for six months, it’s ended with the intervention of the Arab governments which were afraid that this would lead to instability and were trying to do the bidding of their British masters, so the king of Egypt, the king of Iraq and so forth, intervene.
The general strike ends and the British send out a Commission of Inquiry which decides to partition Palestine and give a chunk of it over to a Jewish state from which are to be transferred – The term is “transferred” i.e., expelled – The Arab population. Even in that tiny part of Palestine, there wasn’t a Jewish majority. And the rest of which is to be given to Britain’s client, King Abdullah. The Palestinians reject this. They want self-determination for themselves as the overwhelming majority of the country in the entirety of their country. And what the British are offering them is an insult. So what starts as a general strike and unrest in the countryside turns into a general armed revolt. The British lost control of parts of much of the countryside and they briefly lost control of several cities. They were unable to bring in reinforcements in 1938 because of crises in Europe, the need to tie down British troops in Europe, and because they were afraid to send Indian troops because they were not sure of their loyalty. Because so many Indians are exercised about British repression in Palestine.
So the revolt expanded and by 1938, the British were in a desperate situation. They begin to arm and train auxiliaries from the Zionist militias whom they train in savage, British counterinsurgency tactics: Shooting prisoners, blowing up houses over people’s heads, the large detention camps, and so forth, all of which are the modus operandi of the Israeli army going forward. The people who became the first generals in the Israeli army; Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, and Yitzhak Sadeh, were trained by these British counterinsurgency experts in the late 1930s to help the British put down this revolt. Finally, after the crisis in Europe is temporarily over with the Munich Agreement, the British have reserves that are freed and they flood Palestine with troops and the RAF, and they bomb and destroy their way to crushing the Palestinian revolt. In the course of this, something like 14 to 17% of the adult male Palestinian population are either killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.
So the revolt is crushed, the Palestinians are broken, and thousands of weapons are confiscated. Dozens and dozens of people are summarily executed, many more are shot in the course of operations after being taken prisoner, and the Palestinians really suffer enormously. Their leadership is exiled going into the 1940s in fact, from the effects of the repression by the British of this revolt.
Chris Hedges: I want to go into the Nakba. The relationship between the British and the Zionists changed on the eve of World War II because of course, the British needed Arab support. Although the British formed a Jewish battalion or division, I can’t remember.
Rashid Khalidi: Brigade. Jewish brigade.
Chris Hedges: Brigade. Jewish Brigade. 1948, you have Zionist terrorist groups, Irgun, and Stern Gang, attacking the British. They blew up the HQ of the British at the King David Hotel. So 1948, the Nakba. Then I want to end of course, by talking about what’s happening today, but let’s talk a little bit about the Nakba, or the catastrophe.
Rashid Khalidi: The British do, as you say, shift their position, and they drastically reduced their commitments to the Zionists in 1939. On the eve of World War II, they realized they were going to have to fight that war in the Middle East and they needed the support of the local populations which had come to hate them for the repression of the Palestinians. This goes far beyond Palestine and the Arab world, it goes to the rest of the Muslim world, and in fact, to much of India. So you have the secretary of state for India writing to the cabinet saying, this has become an Indian problem. We cannot continue this support for the Zionists. This is going to hurt us here. They already in 1937 decided they couldn’t send troops from India to put down the Palestinian revolt because they weren’t sure of their loyalty. So Britain does a pivot away from the Zionist movement, reduces its commitments to the Zionists, and makes a bunch of promises, which of course, they never keep to the Palestinians.
After World War II, the situation entirely changed. First of all, the Zionist movement is now fighting the British, as you say. And secondly, the Zionists have pivoted themselves. Having been, in their view, betrayed by the British, their previous patron, which had allied with them only for strategic reasons and which turned away from them for other strategic reasons, the Zionists very shrewdly are able to develop relations with Washington and Moscow. These became their patrons for the period immediately after World War II. When the British finally decided they couldn’t hang on to Palestine, they left India at the same time – This is 1947 – They decided they were going to abandon Palestine and they tossed it into the lap of the United Nations, which created a Commission that has a majority and a minority report. The majority report gives most of Palestine to the Zionists, who at that time, were under 35% of the population. The Jewish population was about 33%-34%, the Arab population is an overwhelming majority, and yet the Palestinians are given over 42% of Palestine. The Zionists are given 55%. And then there’s supposed to be an internationalized corpus separatum in the middle.
The Palestinians say, this is our country, we are the majority, under the covenant of the League of Nations and under the charter of the United Nations, we’re supposed to get self-determination. So they rejected the Partition Plan which would’ve given most of their country, most of which they owned – Zionist land ownership was only about 6% at this time – To a putative Jewish state with a small Arab state in the 43% of Palestine remaining. As soon as the UN Partition Resolution was adopted at the end of November 1947, war broke out in Palestine. The superior military forces that the Zionists developed with British help during the Arab Revolt through the folks who had been part of the Jewish brigade coming back and joining into what became later on the Israeli army, slowly but surely, inexorably started to take over parts of Palestine. By April and May, this has become a rout. The largest Arab cities, the largest cities with Arab populations, Haifa and Jaffa are ethnically cleansed. The populations are driven out. Other cities are taken. The western suburbs of Jerusalem which are the Arab parts of the western suburbs of Jerusalem are overrun in April and May of 1948.
So by the time the British left on May 15, 1948, 300,000 Palestinians had already been made refugees, 70,000 from Jaffa, 70,000 from Haifa, about 30,000 from the western neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and tens and tens of thousands in villages up and down the country. At that point, the Arab armies intervened. Flooded by refugees, the Arab countries were initially very reluctant to intervene. They’re forced to do so both by public opinion and by the rivalry between different Arab governments. And you have what then becomes the so-called Arab-Israeli War, i.e., the war between Israel and the Arab states, in which Israel defeats the Arab states over a period of time. Another 400,000 people are driven from their homes in ethnic cleansing operations in the south and the north of Palestine.
Chris Hedges: “The Zionist movement,” you write, “applied a highly developed understanding of global politics.” Later on in the book, you were an advisor to, I believe in Oslo with the PLO, and you –
Rashid Khalidi: No. In Madrid and Washington.
Chris Hedges: – In Madrid and Washington.
Rashid Khalidi: I never had anything to do with Olso.
Chris Hedges: But this is a problem even today, that the inability on the part of the dominant Palestinian leadership to understand the systems, especially the US and Europe.
Rashid Khalidi: Absolutely. It was a failing of the Palestine leadership in the ’20s, ’30s, and the ’40s. There were a few people who had some understanding but basically, they were not very clear on some of the global elements of power that often determined outcomes in Palestine. That was also true to a very large extent of the PLO leadership that developed starting in the ’50s and ’60s, took over the Palestinian National Movement in the mid-’60s, and was dominant until the end of the Oslo period at the end of the 1990s. And a remnant of it is still there in Ramallah.
To my way of thinking, these people’s understanding, especially of the US and Western Europe, is sorely lacking. Unlike the leaders of the Zionist movement, most of whom originated in the West, or spent a great deal of time in the West. People like Chaim Weizmann, who was a British subject. He was an immigrant to Britain but he understood British politics and British society. Golda Meir, she understood American society. She was born in Eastern Europe but she came to the US as a young woman. She spoke perfect English. I once heard her speak. She was very convincing, very authoritative, and very charismatic, but understood the society she was dealing with.
And that was generally true of people like Herzl. Herzl was a Viennese. He understood European society. He understood European power politics because he was a European. And that gave the Zionist movement an enormous advantage. When you have people like Abba Eban, who trained in Oxford, born speaking English, you have an enormous advantage. This is an advantage that certainly the Palestinians did not have in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, and I would argue did not have during the whole period where the PLO dominated the Palestinian National Movement because even though there were people like Edward Said or myself who knew western societies, we were not decision-makers. At best, they occasionally listened to our advice, but unfortunately quite rarely.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the rise of, I don’t know any other word for it, Jewish fascism. Jabotinsky. Mussolini at one point praised Jabotinsky as a good fascist. It’s always been there. One of the first stories I covered was about Meri Kahane in Israel, this fascistic rabbi, but Israel banned his party in 1994, the Kach party. And now that virulent strain, overtly racist, it’s all come out, especially in the Netanyahu government. Talk about that strain within Zionism and its political triumph.
Rashid Khalidi: Well, there are two elements: One is the anti-democratic element and one is the racist element. The anti-democratic element was not prevalent, except insofar as it had to do with Arabs. In other words, there was a high degree of tolerance for democratic diversity in Israel, insofar as the Jewish population was concerned. The Arab population from 1948 onwards for 18 years was under military government. And so you had a democratic regime for Jews and a military government for Arabs. Now they could vote but they had to check in with the general security services, the Shabak, in order to travel from one town to another, or in order to get certain jobs. So you had a police state, I wouldn’t call it fascist, a police state regime for Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel for the first 18 years of its existence, and a vibrant democracy for Jews.
Now, the strain of anti-democratic thinking of Jewish supremacy and of a willingness to cut corners as far as democracy is concerned, or to completely abandon democracy, as you said, develops with Rabbi Meir Kahane, who’s assassinated at one point. But his thinking lives on in, as you said, the Kach party, and later on in the two right-wing parties that are central to the current government coalition. These are essentially anti-democratic parties, as well as Jewish supremacists. And that links to a broader set of issues – Which don’t have anything to do with fascism specifically – Which has to do with a racist colonial attitude towards the Palestinians. The Palestinians are lesser people, the Palestinians don’t have the same rights or shouldn’t have the same rights as Jews, and the Palestinians either don’t exist or if they exist, they have to accept a subordinate position.
Israel bills itself as a state that is both Jewish and democratic. And as one Palestinian who lives in Israel said, it’s democratic for the Jews, but it’s a Jewish state for the Arabs. It’s a state from which they are excluded, in other words, in terms of certain rights that pertain only to Jewish citizens of the state, various rights that have to do with access to land, various rights that have to do with access to certain jobs, and so on and so forth. There are about 18 or 20 laws that systematically discriminate against Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel inside Israel. And that’s not to speak of the millions of people over whom Israel rules without any recourse, except military courts which have a 99% rate of conviction. There is no law. There is military law. They have no voice in anything, any important decisions about their lives. We’re talking about the population of the Gaza Strip. We’re talking about the population of the West Bank.
So Israel is a state that rules over a territory from the river to the sea with privileges and rights for all Jewish citizens, and a diminishing scale of rights, some for Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel, fewer rights for Palestinians who live in occupied Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the ’67 war, and no rights for the several million Palestinians who live in the territories that have been occupied now for 56 years; The longest military occupation in modern history.
Chris Hedges: You talk a lot about the repression on the part of Israel towards Palestinian resistance movements. The First Intifada, which I covered, was largely nonviolent. The Second Intifada was not nonviolent. You’re very critical of the tactics used in the Second Intifada. You get the March of Return up to the fence on the border of Gaza where Israeli snipers are shooting medics, journalists, and children. But you make a point that in some ways the repression is harsher against nonviolent movements. Why?
Rashid Khalidi: Because it’s convenient to picture the Palestinians as terrorists and because nonviolence has the danger of winning the sympathy of Western countries. When you can put the Palestinians into a terrorist box instead of saying this is resistance to occupation, or this is resistance to settler colonialism, which is what it is, of course, and can picture them as terrorists – Which is something that really became most successful under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the period immediately after 9/11, when he hooked Israel up with the American global war on terror – If you can do that, you can deny that they should be a party to anything, well, they’re terrorists. You can’t talk to them. Obviously, this was a tactic adopted by Netanyahu who subtly and surreptitiously was supporting Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, as a means both of separating the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, as a means of sustaining and deepening the divisions in Palestinian politics between Ramallah and Gaza, between the Palestinian Authority and between the Hamas government in Gaza, and as a means of avoiding any negotiations.
Well, they’re split, and this lot are terrorists. We can’t talk to them. Therefore no negotiations. Therefore, we continue annexation, we continue colonization, we continue dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank, which is the objective of this, and most Israeli governments since 1967 in different forms over time. So the terrorism label, which again has been trotted out starting on October 6 with the Hamas attack out of the Gaza Strip, is extraordinarily useful for hoodwinking Western elites, which are largely accepting of an Israeli analysis, which elides completely occupation, which elides completely the oppression that’s a necessary daily part of the occupation. The violence that is a necessary daily part of occupation, and completely, completely eliminates from view the fact that this is a settler-colonial process to take over as much of Palestine as possible and to squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller spaces if they cannot be pushed out of Palestine entirely.
Chris Hedges: Two points: One, Hamas was elected in a fair election in 2006. Israel imposed this siege or blockade. And secondly, the PA, the Palestinian Authority, as you point out in your book, really functions as little more than a colonial police force. Let’s talk about the current Israeli government. Many of the figures within this government have long called for, the euphemistic term “transfer” but massive ethnic cleansing. Of course, the Biden administration has given the Netanyahu government not only a green light but supporting it with what, $13 billion in supplemental military aid. We already give Israel $3 billion a year.
Rashid Khalidi: $3.8 billion.
Chris Hedges: $3.8 billion. So let’s talk about this government. Are we essentially seeing an even more draconian version of the Nakba? But as you said, these figures were spawned by Kahane and this movement. And they have long advocated for removing, not just the Palestinians under occupation, but even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
Rashid Khalidi: Right. These trends in Israeli society include not just Jewish supremacy on the right, but a desire since the beginning to carry out demographic transformations of the country. That was essential. You can’t create a Jewish state in a majority Arab country without bringing in a larger Jewish population and decreasing the Arab population. It’s the logic of a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab country, up until 1948. And what you see today under this government that came into office early this year, elected in December of last year, and came into power after coalition negotiations early in 2023, has been an accelerated drive for the colonization of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, and since this war began on October 6, a desire to as much as possible push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. This was seen as an opportunity. The atrocities that were perpetrated at the beginning of this attack by the attackers or by the people who came in behind the attackers gave the Israeli right an opportunity to carry out another phase of ethnic cleansing.
Now, we don’t only know this from their statements, we know this from the fact that American diplomacy played, in my view, a disgraceful role in trying to convince both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments to take in populations that Israel would displace, would kick out of the Gaza Strip, and possibly also the West Bank. We know this not only from the angry rejections by the Egyptian government, the Jordanian government, the Saudi government, and every other Arab government of these ideas, and from the retractions by the Biden administration as soon as they saw that angry reaction; We know that from the same funding request that the Office of Management and Budget put before Congress on October 20 for $14 billion for Israel. Buried in that on page 40 is a request for support for migration, including people leaving the Gaza Strip.
There are various clauses that show that the US government was party to an Israeli plan to expel populations from the Gaza Strip. As everybody in the Arab world knows, and everybody in the world should know, when Israel expels Palestinians from Palestine, they never are allowed to return. The Egyptian and the Jordanian governments understood this perfectly and they were not going to go along with this. They treated Blinken with the contempt that he deserved when he tried to peddle this idea to them and the United States eventually retreated from that and the President has repeatedly said now since then, oh, we will not accept the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
The US government was privy to, party to, and complicit in, an Israeli plan to do that in the first week or so of this war, as is evidenced by the budget request put before Congress on October 20. You can go to page 40 of it, and have a look. It’s unequivocal. The US was asking for money for operations outside of Gaza and anybody kicked out of Palestine ever by Israeli ethnic cleansing is not allowed to return. This is not, in other words, a temporary measure, nor was it meant by Israel to be a temporary measure. You can read what the Israeli Intelligence Ministry said. You can read what various Israeli ministers have said. The intention was to ethnically cleanse as much as possible of the Gazan population. Since then, those ambitions have been reduced because the Arab governments wouldn’t go along and the US pulled back. And now what seems to be intended is to squeeze the population of the Gaza Strip into a smaller and smaller part of that very tiny 20-mile-long area.
Chris Hedges: Well, that creates a humanitarian crisis; Gaza already is one of the most populated spots on the planet, a very high unemployment rate, especially among the young, over 50%, half the population, is under the age of 18. It’s clear that not much is left in Northern Gaza but they bomb the south as well. Khan Yunis, one of the cities in the south, half of the city has been declared a free-fire zone. They’ve killed far more UN workers than they’ve killed Hamas militants, as far as I can tell. Is the idea to create such an appalling humanitarian crisis that enough pressure can be put on the Sisi government in Egypt because these Palestinians in Gaza will be pushed out into the Egyptian Sinai? Where do you see it going? Certainly, the true believers, these fanatical Zionists and bigots in the Netanyahu government, this has long been their dream. They have called for this for decades.
Rashid Khalidi: Right. Well, they’re also engaging in small-scale ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank where about 15 or 16 small communities have been forced to leave. 2,000 or 3,000 people have now been driven from their homes in the area south and east of Hebron and in the Jordan River Valley by armed Zionist settlers backed by Israeli troops in a wave of ethnic cleansing. These people argue it’s necessary and correct and the realization of one of their dreams, which is to make the West Bank as free as possible for Palestinians. Even if they can’t drive them into Jordan because the Jordanians have now moved troops to the border to prevent that and have very clearly said we will under no circumstances allow you to do this. Pushing them into smaller and smaller areas of the West Bank stealing their land and taking over more and more of the West Bank serves the same purpose.
As far as Gaza is concerned, it’s not clear where this is going to go. We’re in the middle, at the time that we record this, of a truce, a very short-term four-day-truce. Even if it’s extended the intention of the Israeli military and the Israeli government is to continue the war into the southern part of Gaza. How they intend to do that without more phenomenally high casualty tolls among the civilian population is hard to imagine. They’ve already killed probably as many as 20,000 people. The Gazan authorities say 14,800 have been killed but there are apparently many, many hundreds, perhaps thousands buried under the rubble of their homes, UN schools, and other buildings destroyed in this mad attack on the population of Gaza.
The claim that the objective is to kill Hamas militants is belied by the fact that dozens and dozens of United Nations schools have been hit. Well, they had tunnels underneath. That’s not an excuse for destroying a school full of refugees, which is what’s happened again and again and again and again. Or there was one Hamas militant on the ground floor, so we destroyed a 12-story building and killed everybody inside. Again under any reading of international humanitarian law, this is absolutely outrageous. It’s completely accepted by the US and Western governments, so they are, to my way of thinking, complicit in a litany of war crimes. But it is the policy of Israel clearly to inflict as much suffering as possible on the Gazan population, presumably to make them pay for the defeat that Hamas inflicted on the Israeli army and for the suffering of Israeli civilians thereafter. And also presumably to push them into, ideally from an Israeli perspective, leaving the Gaza Strip and going to Egypt. And if that’s not possible, squeezing them into a smaller and smaller area of the Gaza Strip.
I don’t know what will be the outcome of this. People will try and return to the northern part of Gaza. Some have already tried to do so. There is apparently a large population there. There are relief supplies going into the north to save the population that remains there. And Gaza City is the largest built-up urban area in the Gaza Strip. That’s where the largest group of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip used to live. Where they’re going to go and where they’re going to live is just impossible to foresee at this stage.
Chris Hedges: I want to close by asking why, both within the Republican party and the Democratic party, there is such blind support for the Netanyahu government. Where does it come from? I don’t know that it’s in our strategic interest to alienate the Muslim world at this level. It’ll take us years to regain any trust throughout the Arab world and the Muslim world. But what is its engine? Why is it happening?
Rashid Khalidi: That’s a very hard question to answer and it has multiple answers. First of all, there is a difference between the party leadership in the Democratic party and the base, and there’s a difference between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans are much, much more supportive of Israel. This partly may be due to Christian Zionism, to the zeal with which some evangelicals look upon the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. It may have to do with the appreciation for muscular, colonial, racist aggressiveness that Israel displays on the part of some Republicans. At the top, however, of both parties, it has to do with the fact that people of a certain generation were led to believe things that Israel wanted them to believe. In a time in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, we’re talking about a gerontocracy, look at the leadership in the Senate, look at the president, these are people whose views were formed in the ’60s and ’70s when the only narrative available was an Israeli narrative. So they believe everything the Israelis tell them, whatever fairytales they’re led to believe, they swallow hook, line, and sinker.
The difference is a generational difference and the differences between the bases of the two political parties. The Democratic party has a very broad and disparate base. And most elements of that base are much more skeptical of Israeli claims and are much more critical of Israel than is the Democratic party leadership. So the president, the people around him, the leadership in the House and the Senate are solidly pro-Israel in the Democratic party as in the Republican party. The difference lies in the base. If you look at the components, unions, the postal workers have come out for a ceasefire in opposition to the position of the Biden administration. Pastors of Black churches put a full-page ad in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago demanding a ceasefire. Black intellectuals, Native American intellectuals, and Hispanic intellectuals are all much more critical of Israel, especially the younger ones than are their elders, or are Republicans, as a general rule. This is not only true of young Black students, young Latino students, or young Arab or Muslim students, it’s also true of many young Jewish students. You look at college campuses and Jewish Voice for Peace is a central component of the drives for divestment of these universities’ assets from companies that support the Israeli occupation and Palestinian rights generally.
So there’s a generational divide, even among Republicans, by the way, but especially among Democrats, which shows that even though there’s a high degree, in my view, of brainwashing among the older generation – People who believe that the movie Exodus is an accurate portrayal of reality, which is to say a lot of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, they don’t know better, to be frank – Whereas younger people have much better access to information than their elders. They do not trust or pay any attention to the mainstream corporate media which is full of lies as far as they’re concerned. And as far as I’m concerned. The picture that is given by the American mainstream media is far, far less diverse than the picture given by the Israeli media. I read The New York Times in the morning and I read Haaretz, or The Times of Israel, or Ynet, Yedioth’s English language service, Yedioth Ahronoth. There’s more disparity and more critical thinking in the Israeli press than in The Washington Post and The New York Times, or on CNN or on MSNBC. Young people know that, and they have access through social media and other forms to information that their elders by and large don’t even know exists.
Chris Hedges: Well, it’s money too. AIPAC announced that they’re going to spend $100 million to defeat Rashida Tlaib and a few others who have called for a ceasefire. They’re major donors. And we’ve seen these billionaire hedge fund donors at Harvard and Columbia and UPenn use the power of the money. The response on the part of the presidents of Harvard and UPenn is they’ve groveled before these… Of course, they don’t run the universities, the board of trustees runs the universities. But it’s also the weight of that money and the fact that we live in a political system of legalized bribery.
Rashid Khalidi: Exactly. I would say that this is true right across all of the centers of power in our society. The politicians are bought and paid for. They can only exist with donations that finance their political campaigns, from the president on down to city council members. That’s true of corporations, that’s true of universities, that’s true of the art world; They’re dependent on donors. And it has played itself out in universities in a quite terrible way. The concerns of Jewish students and their understandable worry about antisemitism have been conflated with their concerns about Palestinian advocacy. And universities have been extremely solicitous of that. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students, who include Jewish students, minority students, and Arab students, have been treated in a relatively cavalier fashion.
And if you look around the country, you had a Palestinian child murdered in the Chicago suburbs because he was Palestinian or Muslim. You’ve had three Palestinian students attacked in Vermont a couple of days ago because they were wearing keffiyehs. You’ve had a man shot outside a mosque in Rhode Island and you’ve had a Jewish man knocked to the ground and killed in a demonstration in Los Angeles. So you’ve had four or five incidents of violence, three or four of which are against either Palestinians or people supporting the Palestine cause or Muslims. And yet the solicitude of the university, which is understandable and legitimate for the concerns of some Jewish students, does not extend to other students, including Jewish students who feel put upon by the fact that not only does the government blindly support Israel, not only does the media blindly support Israel, not only is there a general atmosphere in corporations, we won’t hire this person if they signed a petition in support of Palestine, but the university administrations are hostile to them. And so they feel unprotected, students who are supportive of Palestine, which in many campuses are the majority of students.
At Columbia, at Brown, and at many other universities, resolutions in support of divestment from companies that support the Israeli occupation passed with overwhelming majorities. That’s a democratic indication of where a lot of student sentiment was when those votes took place, sometimes several years ago. But if you look at many campuses, the support for Palestinian rights is at least as great, if not greater, than support for Israel today, even after the shock of the attacks of October 6, when there was enormous sympathy in American society generally for Israelis because of the huge number of Israeli civilian casualties, as many as 800, perhaps more, Israeli civilians were killed at the beginning. So there was enormous sympathy but that has not lasted in view of the atrocities being committed in Gaza. People say 800 civilians, 15,000 civilians. Well, they’re all civilians. Children are children. Unless you have a racist view which is that some children are more valued than other children or some civilians are more valued than other civilians.
Chris Hedges: Well, at Columbia, where you teach, didn’t they outlaw Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace? They outlawed those groups, right?
Rashid Khalidi: Yes. They banned them both. They withdrew their right to have events and university support. That’s correct. For the first semester.
Chris Hedges: To close, isn’t this because they can’t win? I’m talking about the Zionists. They can’t really win the argument.
Rashid Khalidi: There’s an argument that antisemitism is the refuge of scoundrels and unfortunately that is what’s happening now. There is real virulent antisemitism in American society, most of it on the right and there’s some antisemitism certainly in some of the fringes of support for Palestinian rights. But in fact, given that they actually can’t win the argument, how do you justify 56 years of occupation? What can you say to justify 56 years of occupation? What can you say to justify no rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories? What can you say to justify the ongoing incessant colonization, appropriation, and dispossession going on in the West Bank? There’s nothing you can say. There are no arguments that justify that unless you say Jewish supremacy and absolute right, and God gave this land to us. You say things like that that are not acceptable to most college students.
So you shut down the debate by saying, well, they’re antisemites, and their slogans are genocidal, which is actually what a university administrator at Columbia said, that the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is genocidal. It’s part of the laws of the state of Israel. It’s the platform of the Likud party, that from the sea to the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty. That was the platform of the Likud party in 1977. So a bunch of students are hollering “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And the Israeli government actually is instantiating in law, in its constitution, that from the river to the sea, the only sovereignty will be Jewish sovereignty. On the one hand, on the other hand. And this lot are persecuted for their beliefs. And on the other hand, you have an Israeli state supported by people in the US, which is made part of its constitutional laws a provision to that effect. We’re operating obviously at Columbia and other university campuses in an unfavorable environment. But in a situation where there is enormous support for Palestinian rights across American society, especially among young people and minorities, but among many right-thinking people who can see through the hype and the cant and the hypocrisy and the lies of the mainstream media and the framing of the mainstream media and of our government.
You listen to President Biden and it sounds like he’s reading from an Israeli teleprompter; Line after line after line are lines that you hear from Netanyahu or you hear from his ministers, or you hear from Israeli propagandists. Line after line after line is the thing that the president says from the beginning of this war until today, crafted in Tel Aviv, crafted in Jerusalem. Tel Aviv is where the defense ministry is. So we are operating in an unfavorable environment. But I would argue that for people who, for example, want a ceasefire and do not want Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its massacre of a part of its population, support for that is overwhelming according to polls. An overwhelming majority of Democrats and a large majority of Americans oppose the Israeli-Biden policy of war until whenever Israelis have decided the war is over, Hamas is destroyed, in their view.
Chris Hedges: I want to say that when those students chant “from the river to the sea” they’re talking about equal rights for everyone; When Netanyahu uses that term, he’s talking about Jewish or Israeli supremacy.
Rashid Khalidi: Right.
Chris Hedges: That was Rashid Khalidi. The Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which is probably the best book for putting the current conflict in context. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
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