Dec 23

Dec 23 The Ongoing Nakba: The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine / Rashid Khalidi

Professor and historian Rashid Khalidi joins me to discuss his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. Professor Khalidi weaves his multigenerational familial roots to historic Palestine with decades of academic scholarship to present a narrative that plainly addresses the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict for what it is. He addresses how Palestinian identity was catalyzed and formed over the past century, as well as the responsibility foreign interests have—historically and presently—in perpetuating the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.

In Rashid Khalid’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, each of the book’s six chapters tackles specific periods of time war was declared on the Palestinian people, beginning from 1917, all the way to the final period ending in 2014. Progressively, as you make your way through each of these periods, a comprehensive and clear trajectory of events is presented to the reader. It becomes abundantly clear how world-shattering and -shaping events, and the confluence of various rising and waning global powers, brought us to the situation playing out today.

With full, unyielding participation, the government of the United States is aiding the State of Israel in its months’ long bombardment of the population of Gaza, and stepping up its already horrific treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. As of the recording of this introduction, the official death toll in Gaza has reached over 20,000 according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, with over 8,000 described as “missing,” since the IDF’s campaign began following the events of October 7th. While this campaign is extraordinary, even compared to previous military incursions into Gaza, it is part of a larger project that has been ongoing for over a century.

Khalidi describes the nascent Zionist movement and its origins in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its aims to produce a Jewish majority nation-state in Palestine by whatever means necessary, with tacit approval and support from the British Empire. In the introduction, Khalidi quotes his great-great-great uncle Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi—described as a worldly, highly educated man—and his correspondence with the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, on the cusp of the 20th century. It is apparent, even at this point in time, that a settler-colonial and national movement was being cultivated, and that, if allowed to succeed, would require the expulsion of the Arab populations of historic Palestine. Even before the British formalized its support for the Zionist movement, its intentions were clear—or clear enough.

In this interview, Rashid Khalidi identifies the catalyzing events and social constructs that gave form to Palestinian identity, and how that persisted despite lacking modern statehood representative of that identity. He points to the transitional periods in the Zionist movement when it became more than just a para-state cultivated by the British Empire under the Palestine Mandate, but a highly advanced regional military power fully aligned with the United States and its hegemonic interests. But most importantly, at the center of this discussion is the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation from the forces that wish to eradicate them from their lands, and from the earth itself.

Bio:

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, and at the University of Chicago. He is past President of the Middle East Studies Association, and the co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Khalidi is the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, 2020, winner of the 2020 MEMO Book Award; Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, 2013, winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award and the MEMO Book Award; Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East, 2009; The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, 2006, winner of the 2007 Arab American National Museum Book Award; Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, 2004; Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, 1997, winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize, new edition, 2010; Under Siege: PLO Decision-making during the 1982 War, 1986, new edition, 2014; and British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914, 1980. He is the co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf, 1982, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, 1991, and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City, 2020, and has written over 110 scholarly articles.