Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

The historian Rashid Khalidi has, for many years, been a preeminent Arab-American intellectual and among the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the aftermath of the armed incursion by Hamas and other militant groups on Israeli territory on October 7 last year, and of the ongoing Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon that followed, Khalidi and his work have only increased in relevance. His book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), which frames the history of Palestinian dispossession as a settler-colonial project dependent on elite support in the West, has been a fixture on the New York Times best-seller list for much of the past year.

Khalidi was born in New York City, where his Palestinian father was a member of the United Nations Secretariat. While relating the history of Palestine through six major acts of war on its people, his book draws on the archive of his father’s family. It begins, for instance, with an extraordinary correspondence in 1899 between his great-great-great-uncle Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, who had been mayor of Jerusalem, and Theodor Herzl, the progenitor of modern political Zionism.

Khalidi recently retired from Columbia University, where he was Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies in the Department of History. In the past academic year, he was a prominent faculty supporter of the student protests at Columbia. We conducted this conversation, via e-mail and over online video chat, in late October and early November of this year.

—Mark O’Connell

Mark O’Connell: I wanted to begin by asking what your initial reaction was, both as a Palestinian American and as a historian of the Middle East, to the attacks on October 7 of last year.

Rashid Khalidi: I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I’ve always expected that the intensity of Israeli repression would eventually produce a response, but I was certainly surprised by the extent of that response. The overrunning of Israeli military bases and border settlements was something I certainly did not expect.

That was my first reaction. My second reaction, when the reports began to come in of the extent of civilian casualties, was shock. And I was deeply concerned: I knew that it would have an enormous impact here in the US and would lead to an absolutely ferocious Israeli military response.

O’Connell: Has anything about the scale and ferocity of that response, or the reaction to that response in the West, shocked you or surprised you in the course of this past year?

Khalidi: No. The savagery of what Israel has done, its intentional targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure, is routine. The level of it was unprecedented, obviously; the Palestinian death toll and now the growing Lebanese death toll are beyond what we’ve seen before. But that they would attack desalination plants and sewage plants and universities and demolish mosques and so on didn’t surprise me in the least.

If there was anything that was unexpected, it was the participation of the US government on every level, and its complete unwillingness to restrain Israel in any significant fashion. And by participation, I mean a repetition of Israeli lies. The idea that Israel was not trying to kill people on purpose; the idea that every time Palestinians were killed, it was because they were being used as human shields; completely ignoring the purposeful destruction of infrastructure in order to make life impossible; the fact that the US government repeated every single Israeli justification for the unjustifiable: I found that over the top, frankly. This administration has done less to restrain Israel than pretty much any administration, except perhaps the previous one, the Trump administration.

In other words, you go back to Eisenhower, or Reagan, or anybody, and they were always complicit. They were always involved. They always supported Israel up to a point. But that point would come after months or weeks. And here we are in month thirteen. That point has not come.

O’Connell: And so at what point do we stop talking about America’s “complicity” in this slaughter, and begin to talk of America as an antagonist, of America being at war with Palestine?

Khalidi: That has always been my view. When we were negotiating with the Israelis in Washington, I realized that actually the Americans and the Israelis were really on the same side, opposed to us.^* It was in effect a joint delegation. Now you actually have revelations in the American press of joint targeting, and of intelligence operations to find and kill leaders of Hezbollah and of Hamas. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the United States is actually directly at war. It’s an intense, high-level collaboration in planning and targeting. Not to speak of the fact that virtually every shell, every missile, every bomb is American, and that the Israeli army couldn’t go on for more than three months without those hundreds of airlifted shipments. So it is participation at an active level without, for the most part, boots on the ground.

O’Connell: You gave a very powerful speech earlier this year at one of the student encampments at Columbia University, in which you made a comparison with the Vietnam War, which ended in large part because of people in the streets. It strikes me that the very obvious difference here is precisely to do with, as you put it, boots on the ground. That war ended because of popular outrage, but the outrage arose because young American men were being drafted to fight in that war. I just wonder to what extent the war that America is involved in here can really come home, in that way, if Americans are not fighting and dying?

Khalidi: I think you’re right. The absence of active involvement of large numbers of American troops makes this a very different situation to the Iraq War or the Vietnam War. But on the other hand, I think that the shift has been swifter here. It took years for public opinion to turn against the war in Vietnam. Even with Iraq it took a year or two. There has been an extraordinary shift in public opinion about this war, relatively swiftly.

Needless to say, this has had no impact whatsoever on decision-makers or on the elite. The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington. That hasn’t changed. But then it didn’t change with Vietnam for quite a while. It didn’t change over Iraq for quite a while. The elites never respond to public opinion unless they’re under much more pressure, I think, than they are right now.

O’Connell: The speed of that change in public opinion in the US, and the intensification of it here in Europe, seems to me to be largely to do with the visibility of the violence. People often speak of being witness to “the first live-streamed genocide.” We don’t need Seymour Hersh or whoever to unearth evidence of a massacre. We pick up our phones, and immediately we’re confronted with footage of the most horrific violence and depravity. That has to be a factor.

Khalidi: It is, it’s true. But you have to be very careful in assuming that the entire public is exposed to those images. There is a segment of the public—the older, more conservative element—who wouldn’t know how to use Instagram or TikTok if their lives depended on it. But the lower down you go on the age scale, what you’ve just said is more and more true. Everyone who’s young enough and independent enough from mainstream media sees what you just described and is horrified. They know that the mainstream media is lying through its teeth and that every politician is lying. That’s true of many older people as well. But again: the older, the richer, the whiter you get—in the United States, at least—the less likely people are to see or believe those images.

O’Connell: Whether or not Israel’s actions in Palestine can be considered a genocide, it seems to me to be very difficult to make sense of what they’re doing if you don’t believe that, at the very least, some kind of ethnic cleansing project is underway.

Khalidi: You have to understand a couple of things. One, there is an almost unquenchable desire for revenge for what happened on October 7 of last year: the destruction not just of the Gaza division of the Israeli army but of a large number of settlements along the Gaza border; the killing of the largest number of Israeli civilians since 1948; the abduction of over a hundred civilians and perhaps a hundred soldiers; the destruction of a sense of security, which is the cornerstone of how Israelis see themselves. So the thirst for revenge for what happened seems to be unquenchable. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that the Israeli security establishment has a plan. Every time Israel is at war, it attacks civilian populations on the pretext that there’s a military target there. It has always done this. There was always an ostensible military target somewhere, but the point was never only that military target. The point was also to punish civilians and force them to turn on insurgents. This is their practice and has always been. It’s taken directly from British military doctrine. Go to British wars in Kenya, go to Malaya, and you’ll see that the British military did the same thing. My point is, therefore, they are purposely killing civilians. They are purposely making life impossible. They are purposely making Gaza uninhabitable, as a means—in the twisted, war-criminal minds of the General Staff—of forcing the population to turn against the insurgents.

And the third thing is that there is a settler-colonial project in northern Gaza: take back a piece of Gaza, empty it of its population, and plant settlers. Now that may or may not happen, but multiple senior ministers have called for new settlements there. All three of those elements, I would say, explain the atrocities that we’re seeing. If that doesn’t fit the description of genocide, just throw out the Genocide Convention. It’s absolutely worthless.

O’Connell: By the same token, it’s very difficult to understand what Hamas’s plan might have been in carrying out the October 7 attacks, unless you consider that they knew some version of this was coming, and that it was therefore part of their plan.

Khalidi: I think you have to assume three things. The first is that Hamas undoubtedly had a set of unrealistic expectations as to what would happen in the region once they unleashed this offensive. They seem to have believed that there would be uprisings all over Palestine, that all their allies would go to war alongside them, and that this would be the war to end all wars. I’m talking here about the people in the tunnels, the military wing of Hamas; I’m not talking about the rest of the Hamas leadership outside of Palestine, who I don’t think necessarily had the same unrealistic expectations. The people who planned this attack didn’t have a very clear understanding of the regional situation, or the situation in the rest of Palestine. And so they did something that did not produce what they expected.

The second thing is that they did not take full control of the battlefield they created, or perhaps of their own forces and those of their allies. They didn’t stop people coming in through the fence openings and doing what they did. In addition, there seems to have been a thirst for revenge on the part of many of the people who carried out this assault. And this led to atrocities, brutalities, attacks on civilians. You cannot say that they didn’t intend to do that. If you go back and listen to the statement by Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing, on the morning of the attack, he’s talking about attacks on civilians. There seems to have been a desire for revenge, though obviously with means more limited than those Israel possesses. And I’m not comparing it to this unceasing, seemingly unquenchable desire for revenge on the part of the Israeli military that we see daily, but I do think it’s also an element with Hamas.

Thirdly—and I’m not as sure about this as I am about the first two things that I mentioned—they may not have appreciated the degree to which attacks on civilians would justify and enable Israel’s completely disproportionate response. You can contrast that with the way in which Hezbollah seems to have very carefully tried to target military and industrial installations in its attacks. Now, their attacks have killed many civilians in northern Israel, but a tiny number by comparison to what happened around Gaza on October 7. That reflects an understanding that there may be ways to limit Israel’s retaliation. I’m not sure that that has to do with Hezbollah’s respect for the laws of war, or an understanding of the moral aspect of war; I think it has to do with cold political calculation, which shows a degree of political sophistication that I don’t think Hamas had. You’ll have young people who say, “How can you criticize the resistance?” Well, if you don’t want to accept international law, you don’t want to accept morality, how about politics? How about what is smart? How about what is stupid? I’m not trying to praise Hezbollah. I’m just describing what happened.

O’Connell: You’re planning, I believe, a book about Ireland as a laboratory for the kinds of colonial practices that were later applied in Palestine. As an Irish person, I’m aware that my country is an outlier in Europe, and in the West more generally, in the broad support for Palestine among its population—reflected in a very watered-down form by its government. And one obvious explanation is that we know what Palestine has been through, because we experienced it. Although I often think that’s overstated; Margaret Thatcher never carpet-bombed West Belfast to crush the IRA…

Khalidi: But I’m sorry, it didn’t start with Margaret Thatcher. It’s perfectly clear that everybody in Ireland thinks of the whole 850 years of history, going back to Henry II and Strongbow. They don’t just think of the Troubles.

O’Connell: No, of course. It makes sense that we Irish would, on the basis of that history, instinctively sympathize with the Palestinian struggle. But what I find strange is the idea that you would need that cultural memory of colonization—to be Irish, or Algerian, or Kenyan, or whatever it might be—to understand that what the Palestinians have been made to suffer is wrong.

Khalidi: Well, what can I say? I think Ireland is really a special case, because it’s the first overseas European colony, and no country has had a colonial experience as long as Ireland’s. That partially explains certain Irish sympathies.

That said, I agree with you. I think it’s monstrous that Germans, for instance, can’t say, “We committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa, and we stood by while our Ottoman allies committed genocide against the Armenians in the First World War, and we committed genocide against the Jews in the Holocaust, so Germany bears an extraordinary responsibility for genocide, for never again allowing it, and genocide is happening in Palestine.” And that just does not happen in Germany, that linkage between the different genocides in which the country was in different ways involved. It never happens. I’m afraid that’s true of all the former colonial powers.

O’Connell: One thing I’ve noticed repeatedly over the past year or so is that whenever the Middle East is spoken of in the European and American media, it is always with an understanding that Israel, to put it in literary terms, is the protagonist.

Khalidi: I put it slightly differently. My objection to organs of opinion like The New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. “How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?” Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.

The vantage point for reporting on Gaza is Israel, so Western journalists call from Israel to these poor stringers in Gaza, who are being hunted down by the Israelis one by one. These people are selected to be killed because they are working for Western journalists. And to every Western outlet that refuses to say “Israel does not allow us to report from Gaza,” and that Israel is deliberately killing journalists, the disgrace and the shame that accrues to them should be endless.

O’Connell: In the early weeks of this war there was a relentless focus in the media on university politics. Obviously these campus protests were very important, but there was a definite sense that the focus on them, and on the culture war battle lines around them, functioned as a distraction from the actual violence unfolding in Palestine.

Khalidi: I agree. That became the story, and it completely defeated the purpose of the students, and of those opposing the war, which was to focus attention on the atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza. That represents, again, a success for this media-corporate elite, in swiveling away from what they didn’t want us to see toward alleged antisemitism—which of course is the weapon of choice for people who have no argument. If you don’t have an argument to justify what you’re doing, you prevent other people from arguing by calling them antisemites. It’s a brilliant strategy.

O’Connell: You would hope it’s one that might become less potent through sheer overuse.

Khalidi: It’s getting worse. The collaboration between campus security departments, the involvement of local police departments, the involvement of the FBI, and the Justice Department. The interpenetration between Israeli intelligence and American intelligence, and between Israeli security services and American police departments, and the way in which all universities have coordinated and collaborated and consulted, means that you have a cookie-cutter situation, university after university, college after college: a blanket repression of activities on campus. We have at Columbia what I guess you would call a low-security prison situation, with checkpoints and electronic passage into the campus. The persecution of faculty and staff, the persecution of students, the shutting down of events—one can go on and on, and that’s happening all across American campuses, as a result of quite intense collaboration and coordination and pressure from elected officials, from donors, from boards of trustees, from alumni and parents.

O’Connell: So the anxiety on the part of the universities is not so much that they would be on the wrong side of history, or that they might be complicit in any actual antisemitism. It has to do rather with how these things might affect donations and other revenue sources?

Khalidi: Exactly. It’s money, and the fear of legal liability. The way American antidiscrimination law has been weaponized to shut down dissent is frightening. It’s not the first instance in American history. You had this during the McCarthy era. You had it at different periods of American history. But it’s quite frightening.

O’Connell: The pressures on free speech, the rate at which universities are coming to resemble large corporations: do you think these things have contributed to a diminishing role of the university in society?

Khalidi: The mask has dropped from American universities. They are clearly not institutions where the ideas and views of the faculty, or the welfare of the students, are the first concern. It is very clear that big private universities are primarily financial institutions, huge hedge funds with large real estate portfolios, which have as a secondary purpose making money from students. There is a rhetoric of student welfare, which is used to advance the interest of a minority of students at the expense of a majority of students. But that rhetoric is completely false. As institutions, they have absolutely no respect for, and pay no attention to, the voices of faculty. Last May at Columbia, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences held a vote of no confidence in the president, Baroness Nemat Shafik, over the treatment of student protesters. It was passed two-to-one. You would think this would mean something. It might as well not have happened. Students don’t come to university to see expensively tailored vice presidents and deans. They come to learn from the faculty. The views of the students, you would think, might mean something. But no. “We’re a hedge fund. We’re a real estate empire. And we care primarily about other hedge fund owners who are, in fiduciary terms, our owners.”

O’Connell: I was about to say that, as you’re retiring, this is no longer your problem. But of course this is everyone’s problem.

Khalidi: It’s a problem for American society. And it’s very distressing. I mean, it’s of a piece with the way our politics are completely dominated by money. It’s of a piece with the fact that a Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, or a Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, can completely change the course a newspaper takes, as happened with the recent decisions not to endorse a presidential candidate.

Those are naked examples, but such things are happening all the time, right across corporate media. Which is only one reason why the alternative media, and social media, are going to be a larger and larger share of what people actually pay attention to. Because the corruption of that whole world stinks so badly that it will sooner or later turn people off. The death of the corporate media, which I fervently hope for, has, I think, been hastened. It’s been revealed that it is just money that drives everything.

O’Connell: What effect do you think Trump’s second term is likely to have on academic life in the US?

Khalidi: The situation on campus is appalling, has been getting worse for over a year, and will continue to worsen. The assault by politicians, the media, and donors on free speech, academic freedom, and the independence of the universities has been ferocious. There will be no fundamental difference, except that these same actors will be more overt and less hypocritical in their repression. Virginia Foxx, Elise Stefanik, and their ilk already had the cowards who run universities dancing to their tune, to the universal approval of donors and the media. I expect no fundamental change, simply a deepening and an extension of existing pernicious trends. More faculty and staff will be fired, discouraging others from acting in line with their consciences; more students will be disciplined and tried, more programs and departments will be closed, and more agents of repression will be hired to police the universities and even to “teach” in them. Apocalypse Light will simply become a fuller apocalypse.

O’Connell: Although it’s hard to imagine things being worse for Palestinians than they already are with Biden in the White House, do you foresee a deterioration in the situation of Palestinians with Trump in power?

Khalidi: It is impossible to say what Trump will do in foreign policy. A battle appears to be taking place between hawkish neocons and isolationists for Trump’s ear. How that will affect Palestine is unclear. Things that have been disastrous may get worse, or perhaps not. It is hard to think what Trump could do that would be worse than what Biden-Harris have already done for thirteen months, but as we learned in the 1970s and 1980s during the war in Lebanon, things can always get worse.

I doubt that Trump wants a war with Iran, or indeed wants the war in Gaza and Lebanon to still be raging when he takes office. However, that will not necessarily cause the Netanyahu government to change course. The tail has been wagging the dog very hard for quite a while, and the ability of American policymakers to believe, or pretend to believe, every transparent lie told by their Israeli interlocutors (“human shields,” “every precaution taken to avoid civilian casualties,” “no ethnic cleansing,” “no genocide,” “no intention to resettle Gaza,” etc.) appears limitless. I doubt that will change one bit under Trump.

O’Connell: Usually these kinds of conversations end with the interlocutor asking for some glimmer of hope. But given the current realities, I won’t insult you by even going there.

Khalidi: Well, if you did, I would say that the shifts in public opinion we’ve seen in the West where Israel and Palestine are concerned are a harbinger of change. That won’t be quick. It’ll be harder than Vietnam, harder than Iraq, harder than the change around apartheid in South Africa. The elites will fight tooth and nail to not change anything. But I think that this ongoing change offers a little bit of hope for the future. If you understand how the Israeli project is intimately and integrally linked to the West, then a shift in Western public opinion sooner or later is going to have an impact on Israel.

Israel has always benefited from wall-to-wall support in every Western country, with very few exceptions. It had never lost public opinion. It has now lost public opinion. That may change, and evolution is not inevitable, but if that trend continues, things will have to change for the better, however fiercely the pro-Israel elites resist. Israel cannot go on without the complete support of the West. It’s not possible. The project doesn’t work. We’re in a different world than the world we’ve been in for over a century. And that might be a source of optimism.