Rashid Khalidi: ‘Israel has created a nightmare scenario for itself. The clock is ticking’

The story isn't Hamas, religion or terrorism. Rashid Khalidi, the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual of our time, is convinced that the Israelis simply don't understand the conflict - living in a 'bubble of false consciousness'

Itay Mashiach introduces the interview with Rashid Khalidi in Haaretz on 30 November 2024:

On May 1 this year, the day after the New York police, with the aid of stun grenades, burst into the building where pro-Palestinian protesters had barricaded themselves on the campus of Columbia University, Prof. Rashid Khalidi went to one of the gates of the university to talk to demonstrators. In aviator sunglasses and wielding a megaphone, the historian looked to be in his element.

“When I was a student back in the 1960s, we were told we were led by ‘a bunch of outside agitators,’ by politicians whose names nobody remembers today. We were the conscience of this nation when we opposed the Vietnam War and racism,” he told the crowd, adding that, “today we honor the students who in 1968 opposed a genocidal, illegal, shameful war… And one day what our students have done here will be commemorated in the same way. They are – and they were – on the right side of history.”

Khalidi has been described as the most significant Palestinian intellectual of his generation, as the successor to Edward Said, and as the preeminent living historian of Palestine. Last month he retired from Columbia after 22 years, during which he also edited or co-edited the Journal of Palestinian Studies. In his 2020 book “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” he summed up the conflict by way of six “declarations of war” on the Palestinians. Israeli readers would not consider some of the events described to be wars – the Balfour Declaration and the Oslo Accords, for example.

The declarers of the wars – Britain, the United States and, above all, Israel – are described as powerful oppressors who have repeatedly run roughshod over the Palestinians and quashed their rights. Are we again talking about Palestinians “wallowing in their own victimization” (in the words of Khalidi, who is well aware of this criticism, in the book), or about a different perspective on the subject? Judging by the book’s sales, his message is falling on receptive ears. After October 7, it catapulted onto the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there almost consecutively for a total of 39 weeks.

Khalidi argues that the present war is not the “Israeli September 11,” nor is it a new Nakba. While each of those events marked a historical rupture, this war is part of a continuum. Despite its anomalous level of violence, the war does not stand outside history, he believes. On the contrary: The only way to understand it is within the context of the war that has been ongoing here for the past century.

* * *

Khalidi, 76, is a scion of one of the oldest and most respected Palestinian families in Jerusalem. Its members have included politicians, judges and scholars, and it can trace its genealogy back to the 14th century. The family’s famed library, which was established by his grandfather in 1900 and resides in a 13th-century Mamluk building in Jerusalem’s Old City abutting the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), constitutes the largest private collection of Arabic manuscripts in Palestine – the oldest of them goes back about a thousand years. On the same street, Chain Gate Street, is another building, which also belongs to the family and was intended to house an expansion of the library. Earlier this year, Jewish settlers burst into it and briefly occupied the site.

Khalidi integrates family members into the history he writes, in some cases attributing extensive influence to their actions (the Israeli historian Benny Morris has characterized this “a species of intellectual nepotism”). His uncle Husayn al-Khalidi was mayor of Jerusalem briefly during the period of the British Mandate, and was exiled to the Seychelles in the wake of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. In 1948 his grandfather refused initially to leave his home in Tel a-Rish; the house is still standing, on the outskirts of the Neve Ofer neighborhood in Tel Aviv, thanks to the fact that members of the proto-Zionist group Bilu rented rooms in the building in 1882, making it a historic landmark for Israelis.

During the War of Independence, Ismail Khalidi, Rashid’s father, was a student of political science in New York, where Khalidi was born in 1948. It is not the only juncture at which his biography intersects with the history of the conflict, the subject of his research. He was teaching at the American University of Beirut when the Israel Defense Forces besieged the city in 1982. Because of his connections with the Palestine Liberation Organization, foreign correspondents covering the Lebanon war often quoted him anonymously as “an informed source.”

By mid-September, long after an American-brokered cease-fire and the departure of the PLO from Beirut, Khalidi looked with bewilderment at “a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity,” he writes in the book. The next day it turned out that the flares were intended to light up the way to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps for the Christian Phalanges.

From 1991 to 1993, Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks in Madrid and Washington. He elaborated on his criticism of the role played by the United States in the negotiations in an earlier book, “Brokers of Deceit,” in 2013. The American diplomatic effort in the Middle East had only made the possibility of peace more remote, he maintained.

“The Americans were more Israeli than the Israelis,” he says now. “If the Israelis say ‘security,’ the Americans bow down and bang their heads on the ground. And the most extreme form of this is Joe ‘Hasbara’ Biden, who talks as if he’s [IDF Spokesperson Daniel] Hagari,” he adds, using the Hebrew word for Israeli public diplomacy efforts.

However sharp his criticism of the U.S. and Israel may sound to Israeli ears, Khalidi has riled members of the younger generation and the more militant of pro-Palestinian activists in North America with his nuanced responses to events since October 7, 2023,. “I think many of them would disagree with all the distinctions I made about violence,” he says, adding, “I don’t care.”

At the beginning of the war last year, he was unequivocal in saying that Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians was a war crime. “If a Native American liberation movement came and fired an R.P.G. at my apartment building because I’m living on stolen land, it wouldn’t be justified,” he told The New Yorker in December last year. “You either accept international humanitarian law or you don’t.”

Today Khalidi is angry. People who were in contact with him in the days after October 7 said he was devastated. “It affected me like it affects everybody who has personal connections,” he told me. “I’m affected on every level.”

He has family in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Beirut, as well as students and many friends in Israel. When I asked him whether he was surprised by the level of violence, he paused for a moment to think. “Yes, I was surprised on October 7,” he said, and added, “less by the Israeli response.”

Throughout our conversation, conducted online in late October and mid-November, the importance he attributes to keeping an open channel with Israelis is apparent. Hence also his consent to be interviewed. In his view, it’s an integral element of the path to victory.

What would you say Palestinian society is feeling at the moment?

“There’s a degree of grief and pain that just doesn’t go away, when contemplating the number of people who have been killed and the number of people whose lives have been ruined forever: Even though they may survive, they will have been traumatized in ways that can’t be healed. At the same time, it’s happened before. I mean, 19,000 people were killed in Lebanon in 1982 – Lebanese and Palestinians. It’s horrible to say this, but we’re used to it; Palestinian society is inured to suffering and loss. We’ve experienced it before, every generation.

“I don’t think that mitigates the grief,” he continues. “It certainly doesn’t mitigate the anger, the bitterness. Everyone I know wakes up every morning and looks at the latest horrors, and again before going to bed. It accompanies us in our lives every day, all the time, even when we’re trying to avoid thinking about it.”

In Khalidi’s view, “Israelis live in a little bubble of false consciousness that their media and their politicians create for them, and underestimate the degree to which the rest of the world knows what’s actually going on. The shift in public opinion is a result of people seeing what’s really happening and reacting as normal people would to babies dying. You [in Israel] don’t see babies dying. You Israelis, you as a group, as a collective, are not allowed to see that.

“Or it’s framed in a way that says, it’s their own fault or it’s because of Hamas or human shields or some other lying explanation,” he notes. “But most people in the world see it for what it is. They don’t need some lying Admiral Hagari to tell them that what you see is not real.”

What surprised you about the level of violence on October 7?

“Like Israeli intelligence, I didn’t think such a huge attack could be mounted. You know, it’s like a pressure cooker. You put pressure on and you put pressure on, not just for decades but over generations. And sooner or later, it will explode. Any historian can tell you that the Gaza Strip is where Palestinian nationalism was the most developed, where movement after movement was created. The pressure being put on those people who are squeezed into that area, seeing their former villages right across the Green Line – any historian should have been able to predict it. It’s action and reaction. But I didn’t expect that level.”

Has Israel ever had a real opportunity to break out of this cycle of blood?

“I think this has been increasingly the direction [taken by Israel] for most of this century. The last Israeli attempt, the last sign of a willingness by an Israeli government to do something other than to use force, was under [former Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert. And I’m not suggesting that was an off-ramp [from the conflict]. But with that exception, it’s been an ‘iron wall’ since Jabotinsky [Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who coined the term in 1923]. Force and more force. Because you’re trying to impose a reality on the region, trying to force people to accept something that has sent shock waves throughout the Middle East since the 1920s and 1930s. I mean, you read the press in Syria and Egypt and Iraq in 1910, and people are worried about Zionism.”

At the beginning of “The Hundred Years’ War,” you quote from a letter sent by a member of your family, an accomplished Jerusalem scholar, to Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, in 1899. Zionism was natural and just, he wrote – “who could contest the right of Jews in Palestine?” But it’s inhabited by others, he added, who will never accept being superseded. Therefore, “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

“He saw it as clearly as I see you today. This reality has been causing shock waves from the beginning. You had volunteers coming to fight in Palestine in the 1930s from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt; and again in 1948. I see it as a continuum, but I don’t think it’s possible to see it otherwise, frankly. You have to pretend that history started on October 7 or on June 7, 1967, or on May 15, 1948. But that’s not the way history works.”

In your book, you describe 2006 as a potential missed exit. You argue that Hamas performed a surprising U-turn, participated in [Palestinian Authority] elections with a moderate campaign, and accepted implicitly the two-state solution. The “Prisoners’ Document” from that period, calling on Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join the PLO and focus the struggle in the territories across the Green Line, expressed a similar spirit. Do you believe Hamas was going through a genuine transformation that could have, down the road, led to an end of the violence?

“I have no personal insight into the hearts and minds of the Hamas leadership. What I can tell you is that within the spectrum of opinions, it had a resonance that I think is reflected in some Hamas statements and among some of the leaders. This encompasses, I think, the period before the Prisoners’ Document and the coalition government of 2007, and may even have included [Hamas founder] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who talked about a hundred years’ truce. Did they represent everyone? I don’t know. What was in their hearts? I don’t know. But there appears to have been something there that Israel rigorously chose to squash.”

How do you account for that?

“It’s perfectly clear that across the entire Israeli political spectrum, from end to end, there was no acceptance of the idea of a completely sovereign, completely independent, Palestinian state that represented self-determination. On the [Benjamin] Netanyahu end of the spectrum, that’s clear. But even [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin, in his last speech in the Knesset, said, ‘We are offering the Palestinians less than a state, we will control the Jordan River Valley.’ What does that mean? It means a continuation [of the occupation] in a modified form. That’s also what [former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak and Olmert were offering, with tinkering at the edges.”

In the negotiations held in Taba [2001] and in Annapolis [2007], there was talk of sovereignty.

“Excuse me. A sovereign state does not have its population registry, its airspace and its water resources controlled by a foreign power. That’s not sovereignty. That’s a Bantustan, it’s an Indian reservation. You can call it whatever you want, a mini-state, a non-state, a partial state or ‘less than a state.'”

Maybe the openness to a state would have developed further down the line. Rabin’s speech was delivered under tremendous political pressure.

“Maybe. If you didn’t have three-quarters of a million settlers, if Rabin hadn’t been assassinated, if the Palestinians had been much tougher in the negotiations. In Washington [1991-1994], we said to the Americans that we were negotiating about a pie while the Israelis are eating the pie through ongoing settlement. ‘You promised that the status quo would be maintained, and they are stealing.’ And the Americans did nothing. At that point it should have been clear that if we didn’t take a stand, colonization would continue, Israeli security control and occupation would continue in a different form. That’s what Oslo did.

“Part of the problem is that the Palestinians took the awful things that were offered to us in Washington. They gave 60 percent of the West Bank to Israel in the form of Area C. Those were concessions by the PLO, it’s not Israel’s fault. No Palestinian leadership should have accepted any such agreements.”

A colleague of yours, the Israeli historian Shlomo Ben Ami, explained the collapse of the Camp David talks, in July 2000, as a Palestinian leadership failure. In an interview in 2001, he said that the Palestinians “couldn’t free themselves from the need for vindication, from their victimization”; that negotiating with Arafat was like “negotiating with a myth”; and that “the Palestinians don’t want a solution as much as they want to place Israel in the dock.” Is it possible that the region missed a historic opportunity because of Yasser Arafat’s leadership?

“You want to take me down into the weeds; I want to get up and look at the rotting garden. [An American] president wasted seven and a half years of his presidency – before bringing, a couple of months before an election, when he’s not a lame duck but a dead duck, people to Camp David. You want to broker it? Then do it within the time limit set by the [Oslo] agreement you signed on the White House lawn in 1993. [The process] should have been completed by 1999. Barak had already lost his majority in the Knesset – another dead, or dying, duck.

“As for Arafat, where is he in 2000? I lived in Jerusalem in the early 1990s. You could drive anywhere with green plates from the West Bank – to the Golan Heights, to Eilat, to Gaza. You had 100,000 [Palestinian] workers in Israel, and Israelis shopping across the West Bank. By 1999, the Palestinian economy had been stunted. Permits, checkpoints, walls, blockades, separation. Arafat’s popularity collapsed.”

You’re talking about the deteriorating Palestinian economy in the 1990s, but another important and traumatic episode for Israel in that decade was the suicide bombings of 1994 to 1996, to which you devote little space in your book.

“The separation began before the first suicide bombing. The idea of separation was central to how Rabin and [Foreign Minister Shimon] Peres understood this [process] from the beginning. And separation means you wall off the Palestinians in little enclaves and detach them from the Israeli economy. All these developments were pre-planned. The excuse of the suicide bombings explains the specifics, but it doesn’t explain the idea.”

The suicide attacks were a significant factor in scuttling the process.

“Remember what preceded the suicide bombings.”

You’re referring to Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Palestinian worshippers in Hebron, in February 1994.

“Yes, and Rabin’s response to the massacre. He did not uproot Kiryat Arba [the urban settlement abutting Hebron], he did not pull the settlers out of Hebron, he did not punish the guilty – he punished the Palestinians. Then it became clear what Oslo was: an extension and reinforcement of the occupation. And Hamas took advantage of this. They saw that the whole edifice that Arafat tried to sell to the Palestinians was not going to lead to what he had claimed. That, along with everything else that was happening, gave them an enormous opening. The situation of the Palestinians worsened throughout the 1990s, giving Hamas tremendous ammunition.

“Looking back, from the 1973 war until 1988, the PLO moved away from [its declared goal of] the liberation of all of Palestine and from the use of violence. That is summarized in the PLO’s 1988 Palestinian National Council declaration in Algiers. Those who objected ended up in Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and so on.

“How could the first group have triumphed? They had to be able to provide their supporters with tangible evidence that their approach was succeeding. But they provided their base with nothing. Nothing. A worse situation than in the early 1990s. So, of course, the people who reject partition and insist on armed struggle and on full liberation are going to find support.

“My point is that there’s a dialectical process here, which on the Israeli side is driven by a failure to understand that you have to let go. And it seems impossible for Israel to let go: of land, of population and population registries, of security, of bridges, of the Shabak [Shin Bet security service] sticking its fingers up everybody’s nose. They wouldn’t let go – and that’s more important than myths about whatever Arafat would or wouldn’t let go.”

The question is whether the Palestinian national movement in the 1990s was capable of understanding that this letting go required an internal Israeli political evolution that would take a little time. And when you blow yourself up in the middle of Tel Aviv, that option of a shift of perspective loses in the elections.

“I know that the suicide bombings of the 1990s had an enormous impact on Israeli public opinion, but that really is beside the point. If the colonizer wants to decolonize, a decision is made to do so. There are two ways to make the colonizer realize that: when the cost becomes too heavy and public opinion at home changes; or when the colonized devises a strategy that works on multiple levels.

“The Irish figured out a strategy, so did the Algerians and the Vietnamese. The Palestinians, to my distress and sadness, did not. Neither for approaching the Israeli public over the heads of their leadership, nor for dealing with your metropole, namely the United States and Europe, without which you don’t exist as an independent state and you don’t have your bombs or your planes. The Irish, they’re brilliant; the Algerians, very smart; the Vietnamese, geniuses. The Palestinians – not so smart. If you want my critique of the Palestinian leadership, there it is.”

Your explanation for the rise of Hamas is essentially materialist: The PLO’s diplomatic alternative brought about worse living conditions for the Palestinians and left a political vacuum in the militant branch, which Hamas filled. But what about the role of religion and of Islamic aspirations in Palestinian society?

“Religion has been an important element in Palestinian nationalism from the outset, but its popularity fluctuates. In the heyday of the PLO, the Islamists were very weak – almost nonexistent, politically. So to say that Palestinian society is deeply Muslim and deeply Islamist, you have to explain several decades when that wasn’t the case. Hamas never won a majority among Palestinians. In 2006, they won 43 percent of the vote. I know Christians in Bethlehem who voted for Hamas because they were fed up with Fatah. So I don’t think even 43 percent represents their actual popularity at that time.”

You are critical of Israel for ignoring the possibility that Hamas underwent a change in those years. But what many Israelis ask themselves is why the Palestinians didn’t use the opportunity of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza to develop their society and build a peaceful alternative.

“Because the occupation never ended. That is a profoundly stupid question, which is put forward by people who are trying to justify a fundamentally false narrative. Gaza was never open; it was always occupied. Airspace, sea space, every entry, every exit, every import, every export – the f—ing population register remained in Israel’s hands. What changed? A few thousand settlers were removed. So instead of being in small prisons within Gaza, the Palestinians were now in one large prison in Gaza. That is not an end of occupation, it’s a modification of occupation. It’s not an end to colonization.

“You leave Gaza in order to intensify [your hold] on the West Bank. You have Sharon’s aide, Dov Weissglas, saying [in an interview in Haaretz in 2004, that Sharon’s disengagement plan], ‘supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.’ You think we can’t read Hebrew, for God’s sake? A state means sovereignty. And sovereignty doesn’t mean a foreign occupying military power controlling your population register. Think about that for two minutes. I mean, it’s like the United States Census Bureau being controlled in Moscow. Seriously? Imports and exports are decided by some corporal or some bureaucrat in some ministry in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem? I mean, seriously? And Palestinians are supposed to say, ‘Oh, let’s create a nice little utopia inside the prison’? What kind of nonsense is that?”

* * *

What do you think about armed struggle from a moral perspective?

“Let’s start with the fact that violence is violence; state violence and non-state violence are both violence. If we don’t accept those principles, we can’t talk. The violence of the colonizer is three to 20 to 100 times more intense than the violence of the colonized. So if we want to talk about violence, let’s talk about violence; if we want to focus on terrorism and the violence of the Palestinians, we’re not talking the same language.

“The second starting point is that legally, since World War II, it has been accepted that people under colonial rule are entitled to use all means for their liberation, within the limits of international humanitarian law. That means combatants and noncombatants, it means proportionality. It’s not morality, it’s international law.

“But that applies to both sides, to both colonizer and colonized, if they accept international humanitarian law. When you destroy a whole building to kill one Hamas person in Jabalya, clearly proportionality and discrimination have gone out the window.

“Who started it is not the point. Proportionality and discrimination don’t say that you don’t have to worry about these rules if the other guy is a bad guy and the other guy started it. And finally, you have the political aspect [of violence], which relates to the wisest way to achieve your aims.”

On this point, in your book you quote Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani intellectual who worked with Franz Fanon and the FLN, the Algerian liberation movement. In the early 1980s, the PLO tasked him with assessing their military strategy. He argued that unlike in the Algerian case, the use of force against Israelis “only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it [also] unified Israeli society.”

“Yes, and I think that is something extremely important. If you’re talking about the French [in Algeria], I would argue that placing a bomb in a café violated both moral and legal sanctions, it’s a violation of international humanitarian law. Two heroines of the Algerian revolution – Jamila Bouhired and Zahra Zarif – did that. At the political level, I think it’s debatable, because the colons [French settlers in Algeria, also known as the pieds-noirs], in the last analysis, have somewhere to go back to. They suffer what I call ‘colonial fear.’ They are terrified of the indigènes [indigenous population], because the indigènes outnumber them and they know the indigènes resent them.

“But they don’t suffer from a hereditary fear of persecution. They don’t have a mobilized narrative whereby every attack on them is placed within that context, rather than within the local context of Algeria. And ultimately, that violence is successful. Morally, the attitude toward indiscriminate violence is black and white. But it’s gray politically. What Eqbal Ahmed says about Israel is that because of the nature of Jewish history, a strategy of indiscriminate violence – which the PLO was then pursuing – is politically counterproductive.”

How do you assess the effect of BDS – the boycott movement against Israel – now, two decades on?

“Twenty years ago, BDS resolutions [by student governments] couldn’t pass on any American campus; today they pass easily. But no boycotts have been instituted, or very few; no sanctions have been imposed; and there’s been very little divestment.”

A failure, then.

“No! The point is that public opinion has changed. The point of BDS was to open a topic that the other side doesn’t want opened. Why are they [the Israelis] calling everyone who dares to speak about this genocide [in Gaza] an antisemite? Because they have no arguments, they have nothing to say; so shut them up with the most toxic accusation possible in the Western world. The point [of BDS], the way I looked at it, was not to bring about actual boycotts, divestment or sanctions. It was a lever to open up a subject that nobody wanted to discuss. And it was, in my view, enormously successful in that regard.

“Now you are beginning to have the Dutch, the Germans, the Spanish, the Canadians, restricting [certain] arms supplies to Israel. These and other moves are the result of a change in opinion in the Western metropole, and that’s largely due to BDS.”

And for you as a BDS supporter, it wasn’t an issue to be interviewed by an Israeli newspaper?

“No. I’ve published books in Israel. I think it’s important to reach an Israeli public. I know it’s a very diminished public, but the point is that you don’t win, you don’t bring change without understanding how to appeal to public opinion, over the heads of the governments and over the heads of the propaganda machine, whether in the United States or in Israel.”

In your book, you note that the Algerians and the Vietnamese did not pass up the opportunity to influence public opinion in the home societies of their enemies, and you argue that this was crucial for their victories. What should Palestinians do that they are not doing in order to reach Israelis, if that’s at all possible?

“The answer to that would have to come from a unified Palestinian national movement with a clear strategy – it’s not for Rashid Khalidi to give. One of the problems we have today is disunity and the absence of a unified national movement and of a clear, unified strategy. Without that, you’re not going to liberate anything. Public diplomacy – which you can call hasbara, or you can call it propaganda – is absolutely essential. Any liberation struggle succeeds only thanks to that. If the South Africans hadn’t had it, they would still have apartheid.”

What is the role of the Palestinian diaspora in this current leadership vacuum, and specifically the role of intellectuals like yourself?

“I think that the diaspora and a younger generation in the diaspora who are assimilated and fully acculturated and understand the political culture of the countries they’re in, will have an important role in the future. I think the role of my generation is pretty much over, myself included. We can’t benefit yet from the talent and the understanding of Western politics that the young generation possesses. That will come soon, I hope. But it requires an organized, centralized, unified national movement. We don’t have that now.”

What about the establishment of a government in exile?

“Historically, the [Palestinian] leadership was always outside. One of the many mistakes Arafat made was to take the whole PLO and bring it into the cage of the occupation. Who does that? When you liberate, you move part of your leadership, maybe – [but] he hadn’t liberated anything. They were so desperate to get out of Tunis and the other places they were in because of the mistake they made in supporting Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991, that they were willing to jump from the frying pan into the fire. It was a fatal mistake. Who places the whole leadership under the control of the Israeli military and security services? It’s mind-boggling. So, yes, you will need [leadership in] the diaspora, and it will end up being partly outside and partly inside in the future, one assumes. Like with Algeria.”

In the anti-apartheid movement, cooperation with white South Africans was crucial. What can be done in order to expand the Jewish-Palestinian alliance?

“That’s a tough question. Among many Palestinians, especially young Palestinians, there is a resistance to what they call ‘normalization.’ And that, to some extent, blinds some people to the need to find allies on the other side. In the end, you’re not going to win without that happening. It’s harder than any other liberation struggle, because it’s not a colonial project in which people can go home. There is no home. They [the Jews] have been in Israel for three or four generations. They’re not going anywhere. It’s not like you appeal to the French and they bring their colons home. It’s more like Ireland and South Africa, where you have to come to terms with what you see as a separate population, but which has now become enraciné, rooted, and which has developed a collective identity.”

Nevertheless, you analyze this conflict as a case of settler colonialism.

“You hear what the people in the right wing of the current government are saying about Gaza, you see what they’re doing in the West Bank, how they stripped people of their land and restricted them in the Galilee and in the Triangle [an area of dense Arab population in central Israel] after 1948. If that’s not settler colonialism, I don’t know what it is. Everything that was done from the beginning is clearly within that paradigm.

“But Zionism starts as a national project, and then they find a patron, and then they use settler colonial means. That is unique. None of these other settler colonial cases start as national projects. The settler colonial paradigm is useful only up to a point. And Israel is the most unique case imaginable. No mother country, almost the entire population is there out of persecution, and there is the link to the Holy Land – to the Bible, for God’s sake.”

You’ve explored the transfer of knowledge on counterinsurgency methods between Britain’s colonies, and described how the Zionist leaders adopted colonial practices from the British. What have you found?

“I’m actually working on that now. The British export [to Palestine] the entire Royal Irish Constabulary, following Irish independence, and form the Palestine Gendarmerie. When revolts break out, they bring in experts from elsewhere. They bring in General [Bernard] Montgomery, who commanded the brigade in Cork in 1921 [where reprisals were carried out against the Irish rebels]; he commanded a division in Palestine in 1938. They bring in Sir Charles Tegart, whom they had sent from Ireland to India, to build ‘Tegart Forts’ [here] – torture centers, which was his expertise. He comes to Palestine to impart this knowledge. And a fellow by the name of Orde Wingate whom every Israeli military expert knows intimately – the father of Israeli military doctrine.”

In an interview with the New Left Review, you described Wingate as a “cold-blooded colonial killer.”

“He served in the Sudan, God knows what he did there. I’d have to do some more research to find out. In Palestine he formed the Special Night Squads, consisting of chosen cadres from the Palmach and Haganah [Jewish underground forces] who were matched with selected British soldiers. He launched a campaign of night raids. Attacking villages. Shooting prisoners. Torture. Blowing houses up over people’s heads. Horrific stuff. I mean, the accounts that you have, he’s clearly a murderous psychopath. Moshe Dayan was one of his trainees, along with Yitzhak Sadeh [commander of the pre-IDF Palmach shock troops] and Yigal Alon. There’s probably a dozen senior officers of the Israeli army, most of whom reach the rank of major general, who were trained by this man. The Israeli army’s doctrine originates with Wingate.”

* * *

You finish your book by saying that “settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.” Which path are we going down?

“The extermination of one side by the other is impossible. The expulsion of one side by the other is – I would have said impossible – I think now possible but unlikely. So, you have two peoples. Either the war continues, or they come to an understanding that they have to live on a basis of absolute equality. Not a very optimistic answer, but the only answer. Let me add that this resolution [of the conflict] is much closer as a result of the present war, because Western public opinion has turned against Israel in a way that has never happened, since the Balfour Declaration [by Britain, in 1917, in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine] until today.

“Western public opinion was always unanimously sympathetic to Israel, with tiny exceptions. In 1982, when they saw too many buildings destroyed and too many children killed [in Lebanon], and in the first intifada [1987-1992], when there were too many tanks facing too many children throwing stones. But otherwise, wall-to-wall support. Elites, public opinion. Without exception, for a hundred and something years. That’s changed. This [shift] may not be irreversible, but the clock is ticking. Israel has created for itself, by its behavior since October 7, a nightmare scenario globally.

There are segments of the Israeli left that fantasize about an imposed solution from outside. Is that possible?

“It will be possible when and if American interests regarding Palestine change. The United States has forced Israel to do many things that the American strategic or national or economic interest dictated.”

During the Cold War, for example.

“Right. [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger forced disengagement agreements down the throat of the Israeli government. [Secretary of State James] Baker forced [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir to participate in Madrid [the 1991 peace conference]. Obama forced them to accept the [nuclear] deal with Iran. [President Dwight] Eisenhower forced them out of Sinai [in 1957]. It’s been our misfortune that Palestine doesn’t represent an important American national interest.

“The dictatorships in the Arab world suppress public opinion and are subservient to the United States; the oil regimes are dependent on the United States for their defense against their peoples and external enemies. If that changes, if things that Israel do harm the American national interest, that might bring about external coercion. I’m not holding my breath.”

The younger generation of pro-Palestine activists in the United States criticized you over the distinctions you make about violence. What do you say to them?

“I have no love for violence, but it’s very clear to me that violence has been an essential element of every liberation struggle. Against the overwhelming violence of the colonizer, there will be violence whether I want it or not. The Israeli [perception is that] if force doesn’t work, use more force. This is the result. You chase the PLO out of Lebanon and you get Hezbollah. You kill [Hezbollah leader Abbas] Musawi, you get [Hassan] Nasrallah. You kill Nasrallah, good luck with what you’re going to get. You kill [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar – wait and see what you get. That’s the nature of colonial violence. It engenders resistance. I would wish for the resistance to be intelligent, strategic, ideally also moral and legal, but it’s not going to be, probably.”

What do you wish Israelis understood better about the conflict?

“They need to understand something that’s very hard for them to grasp: how the Palestinians and the rest of the world see the situation. It’s seen from the beginning as an attempt to create a Jewish state in an Arab country. This is not some innocent bunch of refugees arriving in their ancestral homeland and suddenly being attacked by wild men and women. They arrive and do things that generate everything that follows; their very arrival and the structures with which they arrive create the conflict.

“Was there ever a Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in the 18th century, 17th century, 19th century, 15th century, 12th century? No. This is not a conflict that’s been going on from time immemorial. You have to put that self-justifying version of history aside. I mean, to understand that Palestinians, Arabs, the rest of the world, and now also Western public opinion see it this way. There are still the elites who will support anything Israel does. But the clock is ticking. Underneath, something is seething.”

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