The New Yorker Radio Hour
Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism
13 Dec 2024
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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Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The situation in the Middle East remains beyond complicated. It's volatile and it's deadly. The fall of Assad's regime in Syria removes a brutal tyrant from the region and also removes one of Iran's key allies. Israel greatly damaged another Iran ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon before they agreed to a ceasefire.
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?
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.
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