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

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Dec 13, 2024

Rashid Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and author of "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine," discusses the evolving Palestinian cause amid shifting Middle East dynamics. He critiques the limited support for Palestine from nations like Iran, emphasizing their self-interest. Khalidi also delves into the concept of settler colonialism, asserting it’s an accurate historical description of Israel’s actions, rather than an antisemitic slur. He highlights the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the need for justice and equality to achieve lasting peace.

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INSIGHT

Miscalculations of Hamas

The so-called Axis of Resistance primarily served Iran's interests, not Palestine's.
Hamas miscalculated the support they would receive from Iran and Hezbollah.

ANECDOTE

Hezbollah's Limited Engagement

Hezbollah's limited attacks on Israel suggest their reluctance to fully engage in conflict.
Their actions primarily targeted Israeli military installations, not civilians.

INSIGHT

Obligation and Avoidance

Hezbollah and Iran felt obligated to respond due to their commitment to Palestine.
Both actors, however, primarily aimed to avoid a major war with Israel.

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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.”