Historian Rashid Khalidi on Israel’s Long Reign of Violence

The civilian death toll wrought by Israel’s siege of Gaza is staggering. More than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed, nearly half of them children. More than 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. And President Joe Biden has presided over an open spigot of U.S. weapons and support for the war of annihilation being waged by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week on Intercepted, the esteemed historian Rashid Khalidi joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain for a wide-ranging conversation about the long arc of the history of Israel’s political, economic, and military campaigns against the Palestinian people. Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of several books, including “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.” Khalidi also discusses how the war on Gaza will impact Biden’s legacy and the role of the United States in facilitating the current war and those of the past 75 years. “Biden has done permanent harm to the standing of the United States in the world, in the Muslim world, and in the Arab world. Permanent harm,” says Khalidi. “He has alienated young generations that will think of the United States in terms of Gaza for a very long time.”

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. 

Welcome to Intercepted.

I’m Jeremy Scahill. 

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain. 

JS: Maz, I just wanted to start the show today by stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of what has happened inside of Gaza over the past six weeks. Since October 7th, in the aftermath of the Hamas-led raids into Israel that killed more than 800 civilians, that resulted in the deaths of some 350 Israeli soldiers and police, and the taking of more than 240 hostages, we’ve seen Israel first begin with a massive bombing campaign, and then follow it up with a full-on ground invasion of much of Gaza.

And, to date, what we know in terms of the numbers, the best estimates we have, is that nearly 1.7 million people have been displaced. These are Palestinians in Gaza. That’s three quarters of the entire population of Gaza. More than 13,000 people have been killed; that number is likely much greater because many people remain missing and stuck under rubble. Nearly 75 percent of the people killed in Gaza are children, women, or the elderly, and more than 5,500 children have been killed.

And I was remembering how, in the immediate moments after October 7th, in an effort to convey to the world the scope of the devastation to Israeli society, there were comparisons to how many Americans this would have been if the United States was attacked in this same manner. And so, I started looking in that context, in that spirit, because I think it actually does help for societies to understand how it would affect smaller countries like Israel, or like Palestine.

And if the events of the past six weeks in Gaza had taken place in the United States, that would mean that approximately 248 million Americans would right now be displaced. It would mean that 1.9 million Americans would have been killed. It would mean that nearly 75 percent of those dead Americans would have been children, women, and the elderly. And it would mean that more than 827,000 American children would have been killed.

You know, the United States has waged unjust wars. The United States has attacked countries repeatedly throughout history, but it’s almost never felt the effects of those wars on its own territory. But, if we did, that is the scope of what we would be facing. That is what the people of Gaza are facing right now.

And, in addition to that, we’ve seen more than 100 UN staff members killed, we have seen more than 50 journalists killed. Israel has repeatedly bombed refugee camps, schools, hospitals, morgues. The extent of the devastation and the killing of civilians is unprecedented in this narrow scope of time, and it truly just, and it must… It shocks the soul, Maz.

MH: You know, it’s very sobering to think, also, that the population of Gaza pre-war was only about 2 million, roughly. So, if we have, by some estimates, more than 20,000 people killed today, we’re looking at potentially 1 percent of the entire population of Gaza already killed in Israeli military attacks in the course of about a month, which is an incomprehensible amount of death, if you think about it. And you add wounded and bereaved and displaced on top of that, you’re thinking significant majorities of the population, in fact, have been directly affected.

People who have nothing to do with the Hamas attack. People, like you said, who are women, children, the elderly, who could not have anything to do with it just by their status of who they are, and so forth, as well, too.

And I think that, it’s interesting, if you look at the events of October 7^th — and there are many heinous things that took place on October 7^th — it was really a wartime atrocity by an armed group against a country that it was at war with. Maybe the war was nothing but in the shooting level at that exact day, but if you look at the history, on and off, the siege, the attacks on both sides, going back and forth, to retaliate in this indiscriminating way against an entire civilian population — people who were, in many cases, born into this siege that the Gaza was under — it’s really incomprehensible. It goes against anything that we understand about international law or human rights, and it suggests, if the U.S. is OK with this and signing off on it, which they seem to be, and even to the point of giving diplomatic cover to Israel, military support, and even saying that there are “no red lines,” quote-unquote, for the U.S. position on the Israeli response, it really, severely undercuts any sense that the U.S. can in the future claim to be acting on behalf of human rights or international law, and these universal principles which ostensibly justify U.S. foreign policy.

It’s a very, very ugly depiction of how these things work in practice. And the even most sobering part of this is that this operation, by all accounts, is only into early days. So, if one percent of the population has been killed within a month, and we’re nowhere close to the end of this, how far is this going to go? Is there any point at which the U.S. would have to say that we cannot continue to support this and sign off on it? And right now, it seems like there’s not, but we’re going to see how much more ugly it’s going to get in the months ahead.

JS: That’s right, Maz. And one final point on this: this Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is the farthest-right government that Israel has seen in its 75 years of existence. And you have government ministers, prominent members of the Knesset, making overt statements about repopulating Palestinians elsewhere in the world. Some U.S. figures like John Bolton have endorsed that; that, you know, ship the Palestinians elsewhere. And this kind of language, when taken in concert with the strafe bombing of civilian areas in Gaza, in a just world, would result in war crimes prosecutions.

To discuss all of this, and to really help walk us through the bigger history of this, we’re really, deeply grateful to be joined by one of the most esteemed Palestinian academics in the world, that is Rashid Ismail Khalidi. He is the Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, he’s professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, and author of several books, including “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”

Professor Khalidi, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted. 

Rashid Khalidi: It’s a pleasure, thanks for having me.

JS: Can you set into historical context this operation in terms of its scope, the level of civilian death in a very truncated amount of time, more children being killed than American soldiers who died during the invasion and occupation of Iraq? One in 200 people of Gaza being killed since October 7th. I mean, the numbers are just staggering.

I’d like you to set this in a historical context, comparing it to previous military operations of the Israeli government, or previous campaigns of attempted annihilation of the Palestinian people from their lands.

RK: On both sides, this war has set records. On the Palestinian side, the death toll, which is between 11 and 12,000 — we don’t know because reporting stopped on the 10th of November from Gaza, because they have no communications, the health ministry cannot collect statistics anymore — on the Palestinian side, the death toll, last reported I heard, was around 11,500 and the number of wounded was over 30,000. It may well be the second highest Palestinian death toll since the 1948 war.

During the 1948 war, 20,000 Palestinians were killed. Most of them civilians, some of them combatants. During the Lebanon War of 1982, about 20,000 people were killed, but about almost half of those were Lebanese. So, this is probably already the second highest Palestinian civilian death toll — or death toll including combatants — since the 1948 war. And we’re not at the end of this.

The number of people, the child mortality rate, the number of people who will die from disease as a direct result of this, is uncountable. And the war hasn’t ended. We don’t know if Israel is going to carry out its threats to bomb and occupy the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

So, that’s the Palestinian side. It is the second-highest death toll in the entire history of the conflict, as far as the Palestinians are concerned.

As far as Israel is concerned, the Israeli death toll of over 1,200 is the third-highest in the country’s history. The civilian death toll, which is over 800 people, is the highest Israeli death toll ever, including the 1948 war. 6,000 Israelis died in the 1948 war, that was the most costly war in Israel’s history. Most of those were military, most of those were combatants. So, this is the highest civilian death toll in Israeli history.

So, on both sides, we are seeing unprecedented death and suffering, and the precedents are grisly. If you go back to 1948, we’re talking about a war that stretched over the better part of two years. These are deaths in several weeks. If you’re talking about the Lebanon War, this is a conflict that stretched over ten weeks. We’re talking here about four, five and a half, six weeks.

JS: What is your analysis of the calculations Netanyahu made when all of this started to unfold on October 7^th? It seems like he certainly exploited the grief of the Israeli people. He has also, to an extent, I think, exploited the sentiments of Jews around the world in an effort to justify what he’s doing. But the scope of the destruction here is so monumental that even mainstream leaders who are very inclined to entirely endorse Israel’s mass acts of violence against the Palestinians are saying things like, you need to stop killing babies.

You had Justin Trudeau of Canada, you have Macron in France, not to mention that you had the leader of Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation in the world, the largest Muslim nation in the world, reading to Joe Biden, essentially, a condemnation of U.S. support for Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza.

Have you ever seen this level of opposition to actions by the Israeli government? Is there is there a precedent for this? Has there ever been something like this, where you’ve seen this level of condemnation of Israel’s action, including from heads of state around the world?

RK: The short answer to that question is no. I think that after a wave of global sympathy for Israel in the wake of the revelations, of the killing of so many Israeli civilians in the first day and a half, or day, of the war, there’s been a remarkable shift In global public opinion, and in the position of most almost every country in the world, except the United States, and one or two of its allies. And even the United States has begun to temper on its full-throated, full-spectrum, absolutely total support for Israel, with occasional bleating about civilians, even the United States.

I think this is unprecedented. It’s unprecedented in the Arab world, it’s unprecedented in the Muslim world, it’s unprecedented in the world, which is everything except the United States, Great Britain, and a couple of other countries that follow in the wake of the United States.

I would say, however, in terms of the first part of your question about Netanyahu and the Israeli government, that even though this is in many respects unprecedented, it is in a line of Israeli military doctrine that goes right back to the counterinsurgency strategies taught to the people who became the commanders of the Israeli army by British counterinsurgency experts back in the 1930s.

Absolute merciless attack on the enemy, delivering crushing blows, either preemptively or in a retaliatory fashion. This has been Israeli military doctrine ever since the beginning. It was the doctrine that was taught to them by the masters of British counterinsurgency. This is how Britain ruled the world, as Caroline Elkins described it. It was an empire of violence. And that strategy of overwhelming violence, when challenged, has been Israel’s strategy ever since.

So, there’s nothing exceptional about this in terms of doctrine. And it’s not Netanyahu who unleashed this; it’s the strategic elite, the military and the intelligence community and the pundits, and so forth, whose conventional wisdom is that the only thing the Arabs understand is force, and overwhelming force. This is where we get this.

And this is similar to, but much more extreme, than what was done to Gaza in every one of the previous wars on Gaza. Gaza has been a victim of particular violence on the part of Israel. After the occupation of 1956, hundreds of Gazans were rounded up and shot down, murdered. Killed in mass killings, as attested by the United Nations. The campaign that Sharon waged in the late 1960s against Gaza had similar characteristics to crush resistance after the occupation of 1967. And Gaza has been subjected to this again and again, but it is within the mainstream of Israeli strategic doctrine. There’s nothing new about it.

And it’s not Netanyahu. I mean, this is the whole Israeli military political establishment that worships at the altar of force, and that is addicted to this, to the exclusion, sometimes, of any politics. I mean, you wonder if these people have read Clausewitz: “War is an extension of politics by other means,” it would appear to be why you fight a war. This seems to be, war as an extension of war as the only means.

It’s perfectly unclear, reading the Israeli press, what their political objective is. I mean, ethnic cleansing. That’s not a political objective. They’re doing that. They’re driving the population of the Northern Gaza Strip into the Southern Gaza Strip. But what their political objective is, is, to me, entirely unclear, in the writings of, as far as one can tell, from the Israeli press.

MH: Dr. Khalidi, you wrote an excellent book — which I’ve been revisiting recently, and I recommend others to take a look at as well — “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 – 2017.” And, in that book, you outline six major turning points —you call them declarations of war — wherein the Zionist movement, or the nationalist movement, which gave birth to Israel, usually in alliance with some outside power, has waged offensive campaigns against incipient Palestinian nationalism. This happened over the course of 100 years, and it’s continued even to this day, you could say.

Do you see the current events as representing a new wave, or a new declaration of war, against Palestinian nationalism? And, if so, what are the potential consequences, or the connotations of that offensive, if we are seeing a major turning point that we’ve seen in the past, vis a vis this conflict?

RK: The last chapter of the book actually talks about the Gaza wars. So, in a certain sense, this is just an extension of the wars that were waged against Gaza starting in 2006. And they actually have a history, going back; Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French scholar, has published a history of Gaza in which he details that these wars on Gaza go back even before 2007.

I think that we may be seeing some changes. Or this, in other words, may be a new phase. Maybe there is a paradigm shift underway here. I think one can start with the civilian casualties. I think that the degree of suffering that was endured by Israeli civilians, and that — to twelve times as great an extent — is being endured by Palestinian civilians, may mark this as something new, may indicate a paradigm shift. It may change deeply held or conventional political views of Israelis and Palestinians. It may set them on a different course than they might have been on before the 6th of October.

I’m not sure about this. I’m a historian; I’m no good at predicting anything. But there is no question that this unparalleled level of civilian loss has unleashed anger, rage, grief, a desire for revenge, among Israelis. And, I would guess, probably among Palestinians. We may well be seeing that in the West Bank in the weeks and months to come.

The second thing that I think may be new is that this is a war, or a phase of this war, that took place entirely, or started entirely inside Israel. Israel has fought every war since 1948 on Arab soil. It fought the 1956 war in Sinai. It fought the 1967 war on Arab territory. It fought the war of attrition along the Suez Canal, 1968 to 1970. It fought the 1973 war in occupied territories. It fought the 1982 war in Lebanon. The Second Intifada took place inside the occupied territories from 2000 to 2004.

All of Israel’s wars since the 1948 war — which of course was fought inside Palestine, including in areas that later became Israel — all of the wars that Israel has been engaged in, all the major wars … I mean there have been attacks on Israeli civilians of various kinds, but all the wars, properly speaking, have heretofore been on Arab territory. This is the first one which starts inside Israel, with an attack on Israel by Palestinians, by Hamas, and whoever was following it. And which involved this extraordinary level of Israeli civilian casualties.

I don’t think, as I said, that Israel has ever suffered this level of civilian casualties ever before in its history. So, that’s a paradigm shift, perhaps. It hasn’t happened before.

There are other things that I think are unprecedented. One of them was reflected in a question that I just answered, which is the response globally to what Israel is doing. Now, whether that will last, whether that will have a political impact, I really can’t say. So, I think there are other aspects which mark this as different from what has gone before.

We’ll see. I mean, as I say, I’m no good at predicting the future. But there are things happening now that are different than anything we’ve seen in the hundred or so years that this struggle has been going on.

JS: This is a complicated question to even think of how to phrase, but I’m going to give it a shot: we don’t often hear in the Western press, or in the international press, what Hamas’s political objectives were, here. But they did have specific political objectives that had to do with the release of prisoners. There were civil and other components to their demands that are not being reported on.

But, certainly, Hamas understood that, particularly if they go into Israel, and they attack a kibbutz, or they attack a music festival, and they are killing civilians, and you have someone like Netanyahu in charge, you have this man in charge, that it would be very difficult, I think, to convince anyone that they didn’t know that the response was going to be overwhelming. In part because of everything you just laid out, that Netanyahu would have that on his record, that he stood by while the largest number of Israeli civilians were killed in a very, very, very long time. Certainly in a concerted, concentrated way, perhaps the largest ever since the 1940s.

However, what has happened as a result of it is that Israel has unleashed this, the ordinary Palestinians have paid the ultimate price, dying in just massive, unconscionable numbers. Is there an argument to be made that Hamas is achieving exactly what it wanted to achieve by murdering Israeli civilians inside of Israel, that this was part of the political objective, and Hamas was willing to accept 10,000 Palestinian dead or more, depending on how long this goes on? And the complete destruction of Gaza? And potentially losing Gaza, because, now, the Israeli ethnic cleanser crowd is coming in and saying there won’t be a Palestinian Gaza anymore?

Did Hamas achieve its objective already by doing this?

RK: I can’t speculate as to what Hamas’s objectives were. I can answer part of that question, which is that they had to know that the Israeli response would be more or less on the level which we have seen. They had to have known this.

They had experienced it before. The people who ordered it have lost members of their own families. You know, Mohammed Deif and the others, whoever actually designed this and ordered it. They had to have known.

Did they care? Clearly, they didn’t. This was part of what they envisaged, that there would be an overwhelming, brutal Israeli response. I have to assume it was intentional, what they did. They can’t have not known that, not just the killing of all of these civilians, but a military defeat of Israel on the first day of this war, where an entire division of the Israeli army is overrun, the Gaza division is 16,000 soldiers.

Now, they may not have all been there. Maybe half of them were on leave because it was a religious holiday. Three battalions had been sent to the West Bank, it was maybe an understrength division. But divisions of the Israeli army being overrun is not something that happens every day.

So, in addition to the large-scale killing of civilians, some at least of which must have been ordered, some of which may have been uncontrolled people who came in after the Hamas fighters and slaughtered people or took away captives. That’s not the point. The point is, there were large numbers of civilians killed, but also there was this incredible, unusual defeat of a major Israeli military formation. Its headquarters was besieged. The largest intelligence base in Israel was taken. The database in that military headquarters was apparently taken away. They had to have known what was coming.

Now, what were their objectives? Somebody argued — I forget who wrote this just the other day — this is a sort of a Jiu Jitsu move, [acting] in a way to cause the opponent to overreact. Now, that’s an incredible cynical maneuver where you’re talking about the lives of people, and the entire destruction of much of the Gaza Strip.

Are they cynical? I would guess that they are. Was this entirely their intention? Yes, I would guess that it was. Did they have a multiple set of objectives? Well, they certainly did. I mean, you could listen to the recording that someone who purported to be Mohammed Deif made on the first day of this attack, and he lists, release of prisoners. He lists al-Aqsa, the progressive transformation of the al-Aqsa mosque and its surroundings into a scene of mass Jewish prayer, which has been ongoing for quite a while now. He lists other things, the expansion of settlements, and so on and so forth. These were supposedly their objectives.

I would argue there were other objectives. One, clearly, was provoking an overreaction from Israel. Another was, clearly, making an effort in the rivalry with Hamas’s opponents, domestic Palestinian political opponents to establish Hamas’s political hegemony. Yet another was to change the dynamic in the Arab world, which treated the Palestinians as if they were irrelevant and unimportant, and which was moving towards a mass normalization with Israel while the Palestinians remain occupied, while their land is being taken for settlements. While they are provided with absolutely no political horizon, no possibility of self-determination or statehood.

And, in a couple of those respects, I think Hamas has achieved its objectives, if those were its objectives.

MH: You know, Dr. Khalidi, it’s very sobering to look at the history of the past century, because there have been all these different phases of Palestinian resistance to Israel, and it’s taken different forms in different generations.

Obviously, in the first early years, there was a nationalist competition between Palestinians and Zionists, and what became Israel and Palestine, later on. And then the wars between the Arab states surrounding Israel and Israel, and then non-state actors in Lebanon. And then, finally, the period of the Intifadas that have taken place for the last 20, 30 years, and those are the different tactics as well, too.

I was very curious about the last part of it, too, because between the First and Second Intifada, and then, now, this new potential phase of Palestinian resistance. There’s been a tactical shift, and the parties have changed as well, too, who are leading it. Can you talk a bit about how Palestinian resistance has evolved, and where you may see it continuing to evolve, given this potential paradigm shift post-October 7th?

RK: Well, it has certainly evolved. The original objectives of the political formations that later took over the [Palestine Liberation Organization] in the 1960s, the original objective was the liberation of all of Palestine. In other words, transforming Israel back into Palestine. That was what the PLO set out to do, and all the factions that constituted the PLO.

After the 1973 war, the PLO leadership realized that this was unrealizable. The Arab states were going to cut a deal with Israel. They’d accepted Security Council Resolution 242, land for peace. They got their occupied territories back, they were going to make peace with Israel.

The idea of the liberation of all of Palestine — i.e., of Israel — was no longer realistic, and they began to tailor their objectives to these reduced possibilities. The entire world accepted Israel as it was, at least within the borders of 1967. The entire world accepted the idea that the only legitimate objective was the restoration of Arab sovereignty over the territories occupied in ‘67. And that was the Arab objective, as from 1973.  Egypt and Syria went to war solely to liberate the territories that had been occupied in 1967, and the Palestinians began to tailor their objectives on that basis.

And so, you began to have the interim program of 1974. Each of these was a step towards acceptance of Israel, acceptance of 242, acceptance of a two-state solution, renunciation of violence. Which finally culminates in 1988 with the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, acceptance of partition, acceptance of a two-state solution, and so on. This is a popular option among Palestinians.

Now, Hamas arises at just this moment to take up the banner of complete liberation, and to take up the banner of violent resistance. And if you read the Hamas Charter of 1968 — which is a pretty bloodthirsty document — you can see that what they are doing is reprising the former position of the PLO with an Islamic flavor, with an incredibly forceful Islamist flavor. It’s worth looking at that document, and then looking at what was amended, much, much later by Hamas.

In any case, that was a very popular approach, the PLO’s approach, and Hamas was a tiny minority. Arafat and the PLO, as they went to negotiate — first at Madrid and Washington, and then at Oslo, and afterwards — had the support of overwhelming majorities of Palestinians. That support melted away when it became clear that the Oslo formula was designed and was leading to a reinforcement of occupation, not the end of occupation.

The walls, the barriers, the checkpoints, the restriction of Palestinians to Area A and Area B, Israel taking over 60 percent of the West Bank in so-called Area C; these are results of Oslo. Occupation becomes infinitely more onerous as a result of Oslo. Settlement expands. Rather than being restricted, the settlement process goes on steroids.

When we went to Madrid, I was an advisor to the Palestinian delegation, in 1991. There were around 100, 120,000 settlers. There are three-quarters-of-a-million settlers today. This is the Oslo process. And one could go on and on.

Palestinian GDP per capita has gone down since 1991, Palestinian freedom of movement has gone down since 1991. Palestinian public opinion? People are not stupid. They turned away from the PLO, they turned away from the Palestinian Authority, and began to contemplate other approaches, because this approach had, in their view, conclusively failed. And that’s the shift that you see towards Hamas, which, even then, never gets a majority of Palestinians from that point on, including in the elections of 2006; they got 42 percent of the vote for the Palestinian Legislative Council, having lost the presidential election of January, 2005, to Abbas.

So, they never were a majority party, but the shift towards them is a result of the perceived failure of the approach of the PLO and Fatah.

JS: One follow up on that: throughout the decades, you had major episodes where Arab nation states were in an open declared war fighting Israel. And, right now, at this moment, a lot of Arabs and Muslims who are watching the utter devastation and mass murder that’s happening in Gaza are wondering, where are the Arab and Muslim nations?

I mean, you have rhetoric from Erdogan and Turkey, you have the Saudis and others meeting at these conferences and issuing declarations. But if you look at it in the long arc of history, it seems like this type of mass slaughter of the Palestinians would at least raise the prospect of some Arab nations saying, we might get involved militarily if this doesn’t stop. But we’re not seeing that.

Describe how you understand that response — or lack of response — from supposed allies of the Palestinians, or other Arab nations in the region, and how they’re standing by and watching this.

RK: Well, most of the Arab governments are standing by and watching, that’s absolutely correct. The only folks who are involving themselves to a limited extent in this conflict are some Iraqi militias, Hezbollah — obviously, on a larger scale — and the Yemenis. Those are the only people who are actually engaged in any form of military conflict with Israel, alongside Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip.

The Arab-Israeli conflict — which is, to say, the state-to-state conflict between the Arab states and Israel — only lasted from 1948 until 1973. The last Arab-Israeli war, the last war between Israel and the Arab states, ended 50 years ago. The Arab states have been, effectively, at peace with Israel, even if they didn’t have peace treaties. The only time that Arab armies fought Israel was in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, and it pushed the Syrian army back. The Syrian army defended itself in Lebanon.

But, with that minor exception, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, as between the Arab states and Israel, ended in 1973. And then you had peace treaties with Egypt in ’79, and with Jordan in ’94. The Syrians and the Israelis came this close … I mean, literally, a few meters of mud on the eastern banks of the Sea of Galilee was all that separated them in the mid-1990s and at the end of the 1990s.

So, basically, the Arab-Israeli conflict ended. It’s done. Whether Iraqi militias, or Hezbollah, or the Houthis in Yemen are firing rockets at Israel, or whatever else they may be doing, doesn’t change that reality. Now, will that change? Again, I can’t predict anything. A lot depends on what Israel does. If they continue into the south of the Gaza Strip, if they try, in spite of the resistance of the Egyptian and Jordanian governments, to expel Palestinians into Egyptian and Jordanian territory, then I would say all bets are off.

I don’t know what will happen. Jordan has said that would be war, those would be acts of war. If Israel were to force Palestinians, were to instantiate another phase of the Nakba by forcing, expelling Palestinians into Jordan. And Egypt has been equally categorical. They’ve not said it would be war, but it would probably destroy the peace treaties between Israel and those two countries, and possibly have even further ramifications.

So, a lot depends on what the United States allows Israel to do … since nobody else seems to be able to say anything to Israel. I mean, Trudeau and Macron can bleat as much as they want. That and five cents won’t get you a cup of coffee. It’s up to President Biden. Who, so far, has shown no inclination to reign Israel in, parroting Israeli talking points, by rote, from the White House.

MH: In your book, and even now, you actually explain very, very well this manner in which Hamas has managed to take advantage of the deliberate weakening of the PLO by Israel. And, most recently, in the wake of Oslo, the way that the Israelis, sort of, did not adhere to the spirit or the tenets of the agreement, that have continued to colonize territories, which should be part of a Palestinian state in the future. And Hamas has taken advantage of that dissatisfaction to make its own star rise, [and use] various tactics.

You know, there’s a really interesting part of the book where you mention, in the ‘80s, a Pakistani anticolonial intellectual who’s very famous named Eqbal Ahmad visited the PLO, and he was somebody who was very much involved in supporting the FLN in Algeria and other resistance movements. And he advised them at that time that, because of the particular nature of Israeli colonialism, the tactic of using violence against Israeli civilians probably would not be successful, because it would further entrench certain themes of victimhood and solidarity among the Israeli public.

And he advised — not for necessarily legal or moral reasons, but strictly for rational, strategic reasons — to take a different tack in the PLO’s form of resistance against Israel. And then they did, the PLO actually adopted a nonviolent and more conciliatory — or, still a resistance format, but not using the same tactics they had before — and then, in abandoning that, their star continued to rise, and they became in a position to negotiate with Israel and the U.S. in later years.

But then, in more recent years, Hamas has picked up the mantle of violent resistance and specifically targeting Israeli civilians. And we saw that during the Second Intifada which, unlike the First Intifada, which was largely peaceful, in the Second Intifada you saw a lot of violence by Hamas. And then, now, more recently, in the events of October 7^th, and since then.

I was curious. What do you make of Ahmad’s analysis of Israel’s likely response to violence at that time? And do you think that his recommendations still hold today, in light of the evolving situation?

RK: I think it’s really well worth revisiting what Eqbal Ahmad said.

Eqbal Ahmad was not a partisan of nonviolence. He himself had been involved with the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale, in Algeria. He worked with Frantz Fanon in Tunis on FLN propaganda. He believed in armed struggle, actually. And he was an intellectual, he was working in propaganda, but he was not an apostle of nonviolence by any means.

So, when they brought him to South Lebanon to assess the PLO’s strategy, I think the PLO probably assumed, well, he’s going to tell us the best way to do this. And what he came back with was that, no, whereas violent resistance and armed struggle are perfectly justified in certain circumstances and necessary in others, against this specific enemy — which is to say, Israel, which emerges out of a specific history of the Jewish people — violence against civilians in particular is inadvisable. And he made that argument at a time when, actually, the PLO was having success only on the political level.

If you go back and look at the 1960s, 1970s, early 1980s, the PLO was enormously successful diplomatically in much of the world. The first time that a Palestinian addressed an international forum was Arafat’s address to the General Assembly in 1974. The PLO was recognized and had diplomatic missions in a hundred countries by the 1980s. I describe it in my book as one of the few successes of Palestinian nationalism, the PLO’s essentially diplomatic / informational campaign. Now, that was paired with a nominal strategy of armed struggle, and with attacks on Israel, including attacks on civilians, but the victories were really won on the diplomatic and the global and informational level.

The second great victory of the Palestinians was what you just mentioned, The First Intifada. Which, while it was not nonviolent, did not use arms or explosives. It was mainly demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, ingenious forms of organization to reject the structures of the occupation. It was an enormous political success. That’s the only reason that Israel shifted its policy and agreed to negotiate with the PLO in the 1990s, because it realized, because of the First Intifada, that it could not maintain the occupation in the form that it had once had.

Now, it is very hard to resist nonviolently against a colonial power that is willing to kill unlimited numbers of people who try to do that. Israel killed hundreds of Gazans during the so-called March of Return in 2021. Shot them down. Snipers killed them. It was almost entirely a nonviolent protest. It was basically people marching along the frontier between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other people were maimed by snipers who shot out their knees. That’s what happens when you nonviolently protest. That’s what happened at the beginning of the Second Intifada.

The Second Intifada, after Sharon went on to the Haram al-Sharif around the al-Aqsa Mosque in the fall of 2000, was mainly massive nonviolent demonstrations, to which the Israeli army responded with millions of bullets, eventually producing the effect of people firing back. And, eventually, suicide bombs against Israeli civilians inside Israel. By the way, launched, not just by Hamas, but also by Fatah and other groups.

So, I really think that, in light of these experiences, while following Eqbal Ahmad’s advice would be very, very hard, I think it’s well worth revisiting that, because he was talking about a specific mentality whereby certain kinds of attacks provoke reactions rooted in trauma among the Israeli public. And, clearly, Hamas doesn’t follow that approach. Clearly, they must have intended, to some extent, the massive reaction that their attacks provoked. Both because of the military defeat that Israel suffered on the first couple of days of this war, but also, and I think more importantly, by the enormous civilian toll.

As I’ve said, I think, probably, the largest civilian toll in Israel’s history.

JS: I wanted to ask you something that may just seem like a very simple question, but I think it’s really important, because this gets lost in our sort of short-attention-span-Twitter society. So, I’m going to ask it, because I think it would be helpful for people.

Can you explain how Gaza, as it existed on October 6th, 2023? Explain the history of Gaza, and how it came to be what it was as of October 6th, 2023.

RK: Well, I have to wind back. Gaza was a very prosperous part of Southern Palestine up to the 1948 war. Various kinds of barley are grown in the region that were very much in demand by brewers in England in the 19th and early 20th century. Gaza was a relatively prosperous city in various ways.

It was devastated during World War I, but the region remained agriculturally quite… It’s, just north of the line above which enough rain falls to permit permanent agriculture. You go 30 or 40 or 50 kilometers south of Gaza, and the line, the rainfall just decreases measurably, and you can’t grow anything, not regularly. So it was a relatively prosperous agricultural region. The city was — as were other towns and cities — relatively prosperous. That changes in 1948.

The population of the southern parts of Palestine, what becomes southern Israel after 1948, are driven out of their homes. From towns like Ascalon, which becomes Ashkelon, or other towns and villages in the region, and take refuge behind the retreating Egyptian army, which ends up controlling what we come to call the Gaza Strip.

So, a huge refugee population, the largest concentration of refugees anywhere, actually, in terms of total population. Seventy-five, 80 percent of the population of Gaza are descended from the refugees driven from the towns and cities and villages of Southern Palestine into the Gaza Strip, and they were administered by Egypt up until 1967 under a military regime.

Israel occupies, it finds intensive resistance in Gaza. Gaza has always been a hotbed of resistance to Israel. During the 1950s, there were attacks by Gaza-based militants on Israeli towns and villages, on Israeli civilians and soldiers from the Gaza Strip. And that continues, the resistance occupation continues in Gaza. Sharon crushes it in a particularly brutal fashion in the late sixties and early seventies.

Gaza is relatively … It’s hard to imagine this under occupation but, up until the nineties, Gazans enjoyed the possibility of employment in Israel. Gazans could buy and sell, and import and export, like other people in the occupied territory, and movement was completely free. I used to drive down to Gaza from Jerusalem without any hindrance, even in the mid-90s. There was like one Israeli soldier sitting, tipping back in a chair at a ramshackle gate, and he’d just look at your passport and wave you through.

That changes with the Oslo Accords, that changes with the beginning of the enclosure of Palestinians in smaller and smaller areas, and one of those areas is the Gaza Strip. Israel has established settlements in the Gaza Strip, which take up a large part of the Gaza Strip between 1967 and 2005. And, otherwise, the Gazans are fenced in increasingly, from the mid-90s onwards. After the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2007, this becomes a siege and a blockade.

And that is what Gazans have lived with ever since 2007, an increasingly harsh blockade, whereby entry and exit, whereby import and export, whereby the population registry is controlled by Israel. Even when Israel evacuated its settlements and removed its soldiers from within the Gaza Strip, it continued to occupy and control the Gaza Strip from without, including the Rafah crossing.

The Rafah crossing into Egypt is one that’s controlled electronically by Israel. People have to go through Israeli security checks, which are done invisibly, before they’re allowed to go through Egyptian security checks. Israel controls all exit, all entry, the airspace, and the seacoast of Gaza completely, and has done so since 2007.

MH: You had a really amazing reminiscence in your book of a time when you were a student in the United States, and you were attending a protest against the speaking engagement of Golda Meir, the former Israeli leader. And, at that time on campus, there were only a small handful, four or five people who attended this protest against her.

RK: Four of us. There were four of us.

MH: Four of you, yeah. And, meanwhile, there was massive overwhelming enthusiasm and support for her appearance that time. And, obviously, if you look today, the whole campus dynamic has shifted, so much so that there’s talk of making pro-Palestinian groups illegal in the United States, or otherwise putting legal and bureaucratic pressure on them, so there’s been quite a shift in public opinion, especially among the young.

I’m curious how you see the shift in opinion manifesting itself among young people, and as you’ve seen across your lifetime. And also, given this change of opinion, and given the new paradigm that’s developing in Israel-Palestine, do you see any possibility of a political horizon emerging out of these terrible events?

RK: Yeah. I think there’s been an enormous shift in the United States. There were literally four of us protesting Golda Meir’s appearance, and there were hundreds of people wildly enthusiastic about her coming to Yale. And that’s not at all the situation today on many campuses, perhaps most campuses. There is quite widespread support, not just among the relatively limited number of Arab or Palestinian, or Arab or Muslim students, but among broad swaths of students; Jewish students, minority students, ordinary, regular American white students, which is unprecedented. And, in the case of Columbia, led to a victory of the divestment campaign, both at Barnard College and at Columbia University.

Overwhelming majorities of both campuses voted in favor of Columbia University divesting itself from companies that support the Israeli occupation. That’s the majority sentiment on our campus, and has been; I think the votes were in ‘20 and ‘21, on Barnard first, and then Columbia. And that’s happened on multiple American campuses, and that’s an indication that you’re talking about a widespread shift. It’s not just a bunch of rabble rousers. In fact, it is, as far as votes are concerned, what appears to be a majority.

Now, why is that, and does that pretend some impact on our politics which, so far, has been utterly unimpacted by any shifts that may have been taking place? I think a primary cause has been the “de-intoxification” of younger people, insofar as the poisonous mainstream corporate media are concerned. They don’t listen to it, they don’t read it, they don’t believe it, they have contempt for it; much merited contempt, I have to say.

I have to say, reading the American press and watching American television is… I’m looking at more slanted and biased coverage than I get in the Israeli press. The Israeli press is more objective than the American press. I mean, I read the Yedioth in English, Ynet, I read Israel Times, I read the Jerusalem Post, and I read Haaretz in English. And I have to say, they cover this war better, for all of the extreme views you may find in these media, better than CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post. Far better.

So, I think the fact that young people get their news from social media and other nontraditional sources — The Intercept, things like that — is one reason that they don’t believe a single thing that President Biden believes in his bones, the things that he’s been taught to understand, ever since he went into politics, 50 or 60 or whatever years ago, or whenever it may have been.

And that’s true of the gerontocracy that controls our politics, that’s true of the gerontocracy that owns the media, the mainstream corporate media. That’s true of the gerontocracy of billionaires who control American private universities. These people learned about so-called “reality” back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, when their only source of information was essentially biased. It was an Israeli narrative, that’s all they had access to. Like the hundreds of people who rapturously greeted Golda Meir when she arrived on our campus in ‘68 or ‘69. That’s not true of young people or many other people in American society.

I mean, you look at the ad that was in The New York Times from Black churches calling for a ceasefire, you look at the Union of Postal Workers calling for a ceasefire. What is the makeup of those bodies? Well, you’re talking about Black churches, middle class Black people. Pastors, their pastors, have called for a ceasefire. One of the most diverse labor unions in the United States has called for a ceasefire. And if you look at the groups on campus that support the groups that have been banned by Columbia University or are being banned at other universities, they include every possible group on campus. So it’s not just young Palestinian, or young Arab, or even young Jewish students; it’s a broad swath of younger people, who I think have changed, and are much more open to multiple narratives. They’re not necessarily anti-Zionist, they’re not necessarily pro-Palestinian, but they’re at least open to narratives and knowledgeable in ways that their elders simply were not.

Will this have a political impact? Not in the foreseeable future. We have donor-based politics. The donors come from that gerontocracy of rich people who are completely, for the most part, committed to an Israeli narrative. Our universities are run and owned by those people. What are our boards of trustees? They’re hedge fund people. They’re big law firm people, they run big law firms. They’re real estate magnates. They’re corporate titans. Those are private universities, that’s what they are. They are not their faculty and they are not their students, they’re not even the administrators who do the bidding of these trustees and these donors. It is the trustees and the donors who own our universities, our private universities, and the politicians who own our public universities.

And at that high political and high societal level, of that elite, there’s been very little penetration of any narrative but the Israeli narrative, and I don’t know how long it’ll take for that to change

JS: Final question, because we only have a couple of moments left with you, but I wanted to ask about Joe Biden’s legacy on Israel-Palestine. As you mentioned, Biden’s been in politics for more than 50 years, he enters the Senate in 1973, on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war, the Yom Kippur war. And as a young senator, he goes and meets with Golda Meir. And Biden himself has exaggerated how important meeting her was to the Israelis, but for him, he said that it was one of the most consequential meetings of his life.

And you see that kick off this career, and you can just draw a line and put pegs in it; when Israel is operating at its most extreme, Joe Biden as a senator, as vice president, as president, was there to support and promote Israel. Sometimes in the form of making sure weapons sales and deals go through, sometimes in the form of offering them political support.

In fact, he’s even shocked some Israeli leaders at times with how extreme he is. There’s one episode — I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this — but, in 1982, he meets with Menachem Begin in Washington, D.C., just as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is happening. And there are other senators who are criticizing the Israelis for killing civilians and, according to Menachem Begin, he says that a young senator stands up and starts saying that, if it was his country, he thinks it’s justifiable to kill women and children.

And he goes back to Israel, then Begin says to the Israeli press, I told this senator, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is not what we believe, and that senator was Joe Biden. And — as you well know, you’ve written about it — Menachem Begin was the head of notorious gangs that were murdering Palestinians as part of the foundation of the state of Israel.

So then, you look at 2014, you look at 2021, and you look at right now, and it’s like, I don’t know that there is a more consequential president who has supported Israel at its most extreme, or politician in the United States, than Joe Biden. He calls himself a Zionist. He says he’s Israel’s best Catholic friend. At 80 years old, he may be presiding over his final act of devotion to Israel’s most extreme agenda.

Give us a political obituary or eulogy on Joe Biden’s history regarding Israel and Palestine.

RK: Well, I’ve heard Golda Meir speak, she was very… She’s very persuasive, she was very persuasive. She was a master politician. She understood America perfectly, because she had grown up in Milwaukee. She was born in what was then the Russian Empire, and she later emigrated to Israel, or to Palestine, as it then was. But she was a master communicator, and I have a feeling that Biden’s exaggerated memory of this encounter actually might have been significant for him.

I mean, she was an extraordinarily persuasive personality, as has been the case for many other Israeli leaders. And I think that Joe Biden drank in whatever she and other Israeli politicians told him, as well as many of his people in his circle, like his mother’s milk. He’s a true believer from way back when. I think you’re right to situate this back in the 1970s when he enters the senate, and perhaps even before; I don’t know, I don’t know much about the man’s biography, but I think that that, and many other encounters, are telling.

I don’t think that it’s anyone else in the administration who’s driving this. I mean, Blinken is a faithful servant of this policy, and he, perhaps, is a believer as well. But I don’t think Blinken is the powerful figure, or the masterful statesman that James Baker or Henry Kissinger was. He’s clearly just a functionary doing what the president tells him. Apparently not very well, but that’s another issue, as is evidenced by his reception in Arab capitals when he tried to sell the idea of Egypt and Jordan taking in Palestinians who are to be ethnically cleansed by Israel from the Gaza Strip. He got two slaps in the face in Riyadh, in Cairo, and in Amman, well-deserved slaps in the face; figuratively, of course.

As to what Biden’s legacy will be around Palestine? I mean, the war’s not over, things may change. Something beyond the myths of the 1960s and ‘70s may penetrate this 80-year-old’s consciousness. I doubt it, but maybe. You cannot exclude things. I would argue that, right now, Biden has done permanent harm to the standing of the United States in the world, in the Muslim world, and in the Arab world. Permanent harm. He has alienated young generations that will think of the United States in terms of Gaza for a very long time. I’m not sure how strong an impact that will have, but there is an impact there, and that is a disastrous, I think, outcome for the United States.

Secondly, I think he may have significantly harmed his own chances of reelection. The democratic coalition is composed of young people, minorities, and liberals and progressives, and every one of those bases — in the Jewish community, in the Muslim community, in the Arab community, in the Black community, in other minority communities — every one of those bases of the democratic party’s support and of Biden’s reelection has been alienated by his approach.

It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen almost exactly a year before a presidential election. Everything could change, the results of this war could change these things. But, as of right now, where Biden looks like he’s going to be decisively defeated, he’s going downhill with every one of those central groups to the democratic coalition. There are very large numbers of people who, if the election were held today, would not, under any circumstances, vote for Joe Biden. Large numbers of people, in every one of the communities that I’ve mentioned: progressives, young Jews, young Muslim and Arab communities, large swaths of minority communities, who are the heartland of democratic support in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. They’re not going to vote for the man today.

Now, that may change. That may not end up being his legacy. He may be reelected in spite of that, or he may be reelected because people swing back or forget what happened in October and November of 2023 when it comes to casting a ballot in November 2024. But right now, he has done harm to the legacy and standing of the United States. He’s done enormous harm to the Palestinian people, untold harm to the Palestinian people, and I think he may have even harmed his own chances of reelection. Time will tell.

JS: Dr. Rashid Khalidi, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

RK: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

MH: That was Rashid Ismail Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author of numerous books including, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”

JS:  And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review was done by David Bralow. And this episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and definitely do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

JS:  If you want to give us additional feedback, you can email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill. 

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.