Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism

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What is the current situation in the Middle East?

1:26

How these developments will affect the war in Gaza is impossible to predict. But today I'm going to talk to two people who have thought very deeply about the conflict and the way it resonates around the world. Later this hour, I'll speak with Adam Kirsch of The Wall Street Journal. But first, I'm joined by Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern and Arab studies, and to my mind, the best historian of Palestinian history in English. Recently, President Biden was seen coming out of a bookstore in Nantucket, carrying Khalidi's 2020 book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, to which Khalidi remarked, it's four years too late. So let's start from not the beginning of things. Obviously, this is a story that's been going on and on and on. But how do you go about writing a history of this period? Would you even attempt it?

Rashid Khalidi 2:22

The short answer is no, I wouldn't attempt it. I mean, I'm obliged with new editions of my book that are published in different countries to write. update it with a forward or an afterward. And that's a very difficult job because it's shifting sands. You're standing in a river that's always moving. So, it's almost impossible to do. The forwards that I wrote six months ago for three or four foreign translations are outdated already, which is why I try to avoid predicting the future and I try to avoid writing about the present as much as I can. I'm always asked to do that. And so I hesitate about starting on October 7th. I mean, it is a cataclysmic event. Heaven knows. It's led to enormous changes in the Middle East.

Rashid Khalidi 3:06

So it's going to be a marker for historians for a very long time to come. But I think the antecedents are as important as the sequels.

3:15

And we will talk about all of that, but I want to ask you what you think, looking back, Hamas intended to happen. They certainly, its leadership seemed to be intent on some kind of cataclysm in the region and not just on the border with Israel. What do you think was planned?

Rashid Khalidi 3:34

I think that... A distinction probably is important about who decided on this and who knew about this and what the people who decided on it thought. I have a sense, I may be wrong, I'm not in Gaza, I'm not in touch with these people, I really don't know, but I have a sense that the people in Gaza, the military leadership in Gaza, planned and decided on this on the basis of an estimation of the situation that wasn't shared either, I think, entirely with the rest of the Hamas leadership outside. or with their putative allies in Lebanon, Hezbollah, or with the Iranians. And everything that the Iranians and Hezbollah have done and said ever since that reinforces this view. They were not taken into the confidence of the people who decided on this. I'm not sure about the rest of the Hamas leadership.

Rashid Khalidi 4:26

The second thing is I think they had a misestimation of the regional situation, that they could spark something, which I think they thought would lead to a regional cataclysm, whatever.

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Chapters

8 chapters

1 What is the current situation in the Middle East? 1:26–8:05 2 How does Rashid Khalidi view the Palestinian cause? 8:05–21:26 3 What is the significance of October 7th? 21:26–28:22 4 How does settler colonialism relate to Israel and Palestine? 28:22–38:21 5 What are the prospects for the Palestinian national movement? 38:21–42:25 6 How do the narratives of Israelis and Palestinians differ? 42:25 7 What does Rashid Khalidi suggest for a resolution? 40:49 8 What lessons can be drawn from historical contexts? 36:57–51:54

Speakers

5 identified

Rashid Khalidi 22 min Adam Howard 9 min Malcolm Gladwell 1 min Unknown 1 min Vincent Cunningham

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Topics in this episode

Israel 1 Wall Street Journal 1 Hamas 1 Hezbollah 2 West Bank 1 Palestine 1 David Remnick 2 Malcolm Gladwell 1 The New Yorker Radio Hour 3 WNYC Studios 1 Meryl Garbus 1 Vincent Cunningham 1

Source

Recorded13 Dec 2024

Publisherfeeds.feedburner.com ↗

CollectionAudioscrape Public Library

Transcriptspeaker-named · 100+ languages

Handlerec:272162

Show notes

Power dynamics in the Middle East shifted dramatically this year. In Lebanon, Israel dealt a severe blow toHezbollah, and another crucial ally of Iran—Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria—was toppled by insurgents. But the historian Rashid Khalidi is skeptical that these changes will set back the Palestinian cause, as it relates to Israel. “This idea that the Palestinians are bereft of allies assumes that they had people who were doing things for their interest,” Khalidi tells David Remnick, “which I don’t think was true.” The limited responses to the war in Gaza by Iran and Hezbollah, Khalidi believes, clearly demonstrate that Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance “was designed by Iran to protect the Iranian regime. . . . It wasn’t designed to protect Palestine.” Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of a number of books on Palestinian history; among them, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” has been particularly influential. The book helped bring the term “settler colonialism” into common parlance, at least on the left, to describe Israel’s relationship to historic Palestine. Sometimes invoked as a term of opprobrium, “settler colonialism” is strongly disputed by supporters of Israel. Khalidi asserts that the description is historically specific and accurate. The early Zionists, he says, understood their effort as colonization. “That’s not some antisemitic slur,” he says. “That’s the description they gave themselves.”The concept of settler colonialism has been applied, on the political left, to describe Israel’s founding, and to its settlement of the Palestinian-occupied territories. This usage has been disputed by supporters of Israel and by thinkers including Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, who has also written about philosophy for The New Yorker. “Settler colonialism is . . . a zero-sum way of looking at the conflict,” Kirsch tells David Remnick. “In the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory. That’s not at all the history of Israel and Palestine.” Kirsch made his case in a recent book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.”

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