Rashid Khalidi
speaker
73 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Rashid Khalidi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Palestinians are in worse shape today because what's going on in the West Bank is almost invisible. The rolling annexation, the rolling theft of land, the rolling expansion of settlements, the ongoing incorporation of most of the West Bank into Israel, whether it's formally annexed or not. And that process is about to recommence in Gaza. It started in 1967.
It was partially rolled back in 2005 with the evacuation of the settlements and with the removal of the occupation to the frontiers of Gaza rather than being inside of Gaza. So Gaza was controlled and occupied from without rather than from within. It's about to be controlled from within again. So the Palestinians are in that sense worse off. Israel is also, in my view, worse off.
Occupation, ethnic cleansing, Colonization produces resistance. If you don't eliminate the population you're colonizing, they will resist. Now, they may try and expel them. In other words, ethnically cleanse them entirely.
I mean, you have to rewind, David. You can't say, what should they have done after October 7th? You put people in a pressure cooker and you don't expect them to explode? Of course they're going to explode. The problem is the pressure cooker. The problem isn't the explosion.
I mean, if you start from October 7th, there's only one set of answers, force and more force, which is Israel's almost universal response. to the Palestinian resistance to the colonization of Palestine. There have been exceptions, Rabin, Barak, sort of, Olmert, sort of. But with those few exceptions, it's always been force and more force. And that's what they did, of course, after October 7th.
But the problem was not starting. It did not start on October 7th.
I mean, I've made a critique. I mean, if you believe in international humanitarian law, you don't kill civilians. And I've argued this previously. I mean, I quote Iqbal Ahmed, against this enemy, this kind of means, indiscriminate use of violence, is counterproductive politically. It's also immoral, i.e. it violates moral laws. And it's also a violation of international humanitarian law.
And one would hope that both of those would be serious considerations. But it's also politically extremely unwise. And that political calculation was apparently not there, or they just didn't control things. I would argue that's morally wrong. I would argue that's a violation of international humanitarian law. I've published this. I've said this repeatedly.
But it's politically a horrific mistake, in my view, which doesn't justify or in any way mitigate the horrors that Israel inflicted 50-fold on Palestinians. thereafter. But it helped to provoke that, and it helped to justify that in the eyes of the world.
Yusuf Diyal Khaldi had been a Western educated, liberal constitutionalist elected to the first Ottoman parliament, opposed Sultan Abdulhamid's autocracy, was exiled, got into trouble, went to Austria, taught at the university there, and later on became mayor of Jerusalem. and had served all over the Ottoman Empire, had taught in Vienna. After he studied in Vienna, he went back and taught there.
He was a student, among other things, of Judaism. We have his books, so we know what he was interested in. And he obviously knew everything about Zionism. He had followed the first and second Zionist congresses. He was apparently familiar with Herzl's book, The Jewish State, Der Judenstaat, The State of the Jews, Jewish State. It depends on how you translate the German. So he writes to Herzl.
in 1899. And he said to him, of course, you have a certain right to Palestine. We know your connection. We're cousins. It was a very friendly letter. We understand the persecution that you're subject to. I mean, he'd lived in Vienna. Vienna had for a very long time this horrific anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Leuger. Horrific man.
One of the things that Herzl personally was responding to was the anti-Semitism of Austria itself. And he knew all about that. He'd lived there. He'd taught there. And he said, but What you're trying to do in Palestine is impossible. It causes all these problems. There's a population here that will not be supplanted.
I'm paraphrasing from his letter to Herzl, which he sent via the French chief rabbi, whom he apparently knew. And he said, for the sake of God, leave Palestine alone. Talking, in other words, about all the problems that we've seen. Meaning what? Don't come. Oriental Jewish communities, Mizrahi communities for the Palestinians and for the Zionist project.
He said, you know, it's a fine idea in principle, but doing it here is going to cause these problems. In other words, he didn't deny the idea that the Jews are a people, have a connection to the Holy Land, have a right if they want to be a national group suffering from persecution.
Well, what he was saying is don't do it here because we are here.
Yeah, a salvation at the expense of an indigenous population, which understood from very early on that it would be supplanted. I mean, he was saying that, and Palestinians were saying it before World War I in their papers.
Well, I mean, first of all, Zionism is many things. I argue in my work that Zionism is among many other things. It's a national movement. It starts as a national movement. It has no original necessary intention of developing into a settler colonial project. It's intended as a refuge for persecuted Jews.
And it's based, as it develops, on an undeniable, incontrovertible connection between Judaism and the Jewish people and the Holy Land. So it's all of those things, of course. But as it developed, it understood that, first of all, these people saw themselves as Europeans. Yes, we are Jews. Yes, we are persecuted in Europe.
But we are going to go elsewhere as Europeans, and we can only do that with the support of a great power. So Herzl spends his life trying to petition the Kaiser, trying to petition the Tsar of Russia, trying to petition the French Third Republic. And Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann, hits, you know, gold.
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