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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when he manages to convince the British to become the patron of what they understand is a settler colonial project. The early Zionists, all of them, wall to wall, understood that they were colonizing Palestine. You wouldn't have had the land purchase agency called the Jewish Colonization Agency. That's not some anti-Semitic slur on a bunch of people who want to rescue the Jews from persecution.
That's the description they gave themselves. for what they understood they were doing, and what they understood was their ancestral land, which they felt they had no choice but to colonize because of persecution in Europe. So, you know, you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
It's unique. Let's start by saying that. There are settler colonial projects that develop into national projects. You and I are living in one. This is a settler colonial project. It's a national project. It's a nation state now. Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Others don't. Algeria didn't. Kenya didn't. Northern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe today didn't. So in that respect, Zionism is absolutely unique.
It's unique in other respects. Every other settler colonial project I know of, Ireland, for example, involves an extension of the sovereignty and the population of the mother country. There's a mother country, which Zionism doesn't have, and the project is an extension. The king sends Protestants to Ulster, okay, or to Virginia, named for Queen Elizabeth. or to Jamestown, named for King James.
It's an extension of the sovereignty of the English monarchy or of the French Republic into North Africa. Zionism doesn't fit that pattern at all. It's not an extension of the sovereignty of Great Britain. It doesn't involve an extension of the population. It's its own independent project, which in a transactional relationship,
hooks up with an imperial power to do its bidding as an ally, if you want, or a patron. So it's unique in multiple respects. I mean, it's not true that this is the only settler colony that involves people fleeing persecution. The Quakers, the Puritans are refugees from persecution by the Church of England. So it's not entirely unique in that respect.
But it is unique in having this connection to Palestine, to the Holy Land of Judaism and the Jewish people.
Yeah, there's the matter of can you succeed entirely in eliminating the native population or reducing them to subjection, which is what happens in Australasia and North America. It's not what happens in other settler colonies. It's not what happens in Algeria. It's not what happens in Kenya. It's not what happens in South Africa or in Ireland.
You're talking about partition.
Unless, heaven forbid, I don't think Israel can be eliminated. Nuclear power, one of the strongest countries on earth, it's not going anywhere, nor are the Israelis. Some may leave, but that's not going to change anything. Some Palestinians may leave, that's not going to change anything.
You have two peoples in the same place, and both of them in their imaginary see it in its entirety as their ancestral homeland. I'm not talking about reality, I'm talking about imagined communities, okay? That's how the Palestinians see it. That's how the Israelis see it. And I would argue on the one hand, you could say there are various reasons why the Palestinians may be right.
And there are some reasons you might say the Israelis are right. But anyway, that's another issue. So how do you deal with that? There are two ways. You cut the baby in half, the Solomonic situation, which is what partition supposedly was directed at doing. Or you figure out a way for these two peoples to live in some kind of binational situation.
Personally, if it were up to me, I would prefer the latter. I don't see how you can partition this country. I think though you have to go through some very painful processes to get to any resolution. that's just inequitable and sustainable. I mean, you have a colonial reality. You have a situation where one people is supreme.
You have the supremacy of the Jewish people as instantiated in a constitutional law of 2018, the Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people law. That's a law which says there's only one people that has the right of self-determination. In other words, there's one people in Palestine. So all of the structures that are related to that view have to be dismantled. You cannot have a resolution.
unless they're dismantled, whether you have two states or one state or a confederation, if there is an equitable solution in which both peoples can achieve their objective of self-determination and in which everybody is treated justly and equitably. And we're so far away from that today. You have to decolonize. I'm sorry to use the term.
You have to dismantle a lot of structures, very powerful structures. You want to get anywhere towards a just, equitable resolution. A whole lot of changes have to happen. And they're not going to happen quickly, unfortunately. And those changes include within the Palestinian polity, but mainly in Israel and Israel's supporters, without which it cannot do what it does.
Well, I mean, the Palestinians are suffering a recurrence of collective trauma. as a result of the Gaza war. I mean, we all wake up every morning and we doom scroll to see how many more people were slaughtered and if anybody we know has had anything to happen to them. And then we all go to bed doing the same thing.
And they have a lot to overcome in terms of how they're going to figure out their strategy going forward. I mean, I mentioned the fact that you have a completely splintered Palestinian national movement. It almost doesn't exist. There's no real Palestinian diplomacy. There's no Palestinian public diplomacy. There's no Palestinian strategy.
There are things happening that nobody's doing anything about. in an official way. I mean, you have Palestinian civil society is active, is doing various things, but that's not something for civil society. It's something for political leadership, which the Palestinians do not have at this moment. So they have a long haul towards resuscitating their national movement.
It's not the first time this has happened. It's been shattered at least twice in the last 50, 60 years, 70 years. That's a prerequisite for anything. Where do the Palestinians, where do we want to go What is our objective and how are we gonna get there? And I don't think there's clarity on this from these two discredited movements that dominate Palestinian politics right now.
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