Rashid Khalidi - The Hundred Year War in Palestine (2016)

Rashid Khalidi: And it is our great privilege and pleasure and my own personal privilege and pleasure to greet this evening Rashid Khalidi, who, as I mean, as you know, is the Edward Said Professor, the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and he is presently The chair of the Department of History there. Rashid has a prestigious academic pedigree. He's got his MA— his BA from Yale in 1970 and a DPhil from— well, PhD from Oxford University in 1974. And he has taught in very many places. In Lebanon, including the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, which was his main institution before moving to Columbia. He has been for a while president of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association of the United States, and is the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, which is known, I guess, to most of you. To mention the, just the main titles of his intellectual production, you have British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, which came out in 1980, then a book on the 1982 War Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the '82 War, which came out in '86 and was reprinted. One of the best-known books of Rashid Khalidi is Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, which is a book which has been very much quoted and used and is a landmark in its topic, which came out in '97, first edition, then reprinted. More recently, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, which came out in 2004. Then The Iron Cage, another famous book of Rashid, the story of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, 2006. Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East, 2009. And— 2009. The most, I mean, the latest one is Brokers of Deceit: How the United States Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, and that came out in 2013. And we're looking forward to Rashid's next book on which, I mean, he's working and which, on which, I mean, this lecture, on the research for which this lecture is based. So we are very much looking forward to listening to you, Rashid. So please join me in welcoming Professor Rashid Khalidi. Thank you. Thank you for that warm welcome. Thank you, Gilbert. It's a pleasure to be in London again. It's a pleasure to be in this lecture hall again. I remember now that my— the last time I spoke at SOAS was in this It's a particular pleasure to be at SOAS, where one of my daughters spent a rewarding year working on her MA. I want to thank Gilbert and his colleagues at the center and at the Middle East Institute for their kind invitation to deliver the center's annual lecture. Presumably next year you'll be spared another Khalidi giving the lecture. Hopefully. It's an honor and a privilege to do so. My focus this evening will of course be on Palestine. My title is The Hundred Years' War in Palestine. But you will notice that some of what I have to say will deal with Palestine in the mind of America and to a lesser extent Palestine in the imagination of Europe. I'll be covering large— Thank you. stretches of history. So afterwards, when we have time for questions, if there are things that I've unfortunately had to skip, you will have a chance to ask about that. Let me begin by saying that most of what most Americans think they know about Palestine is wrong. Yeah. That shouldn't be a surprise. Many of the images that Americans have of Palestine are derived from the Bible. This worthy document was set down millennia ago, and large parts of it have only a tenuous relation, if any relation at all, to historically provable fact. Even worse, some of their images of Palestine come from fictional works, like Leon Uris's multimillion-dollar— multimillion-selling novel, Exodus, or the Academy Award-winning Paul Newman film of the same name. If you ask an audience of Americans over the age of 40 or 50, how many of you have read the book or seen the movie, a majority will raise their hands. One of the most influential books, as far as Palestine is concerned, in terms of the American imagination. If they don't come from those sources, they come from other defamatory sources. Like Joan Peters' bestselling book From Time Immemorial, or from highly biased sources like the American mainstream media. In addition, the focus or the referent, the real thing that these things are about in most cases, is actually not Palestine. It's Israel or Jewish history rather than Palestine or Palestinian history. A typical example of such work that's had an impact in the present day would be Ari Shavit's book, My Promised Land. This is a bestselling book. It had a huge resounding success in the United States. It's written from a very personal angle. It's very well written. But it's a highly apologetic book written from an Israeli perspective, even though it purports to correct the historical record by chronicling some Israeli maltreatment of the Palestinians. So, I would say in fact that it's an understatement to say that most existing portrayals of Palestine in the American general culture, whether literary, whether scholarly or visual, do not reflect a Palestinian perspective. That's an understatement. One could be even more categorical. The Palestinians have in fact mainly been defined in the American public mind and in the West generally, though this is less true in this country and in Europe, by those who wish them ill, if they recognize their existence at all. Indeed, it's an article of faith for many opponents of the Palestinians that they do not even exist. This has been repeated again and again by leading American politicians, candidates for president and others, senators, congressmen. And this canard is the central theme of Joan Peters' book. which, when it was published, got plaudits from the good and the great luminaries such as Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Bernard Lewis, Alan Dershowitz— the good and the great in the American public pantheon. Although it was utterly discredited by every reputable scholar who ever reviewed it, without exception, everywhere, this book is still in print. If you Google it on Amazon, you'll see that it's— It's still selling. Selling better than most of my books or Gilbert's books or books by many of my colleagues and friends in this audience, no insult to any of us. And this 30 years after it was first published. Many more books like Peter's From Time Immemorial have appeared since then. And these are— this is what you might call denialist literature. It argues that there is no such subject as the Palestinians. The center that we established at Columbia, the center that has been established here at SOAS shouldn't exist. It's a non-topic, no such thing. In a sense, what I'm arguing is that the Palestinians have been elided from the historical record, or at least there has been an attempt to elide them from the historical record. In the words of Edward Said, they've been denied the permission to narrate. They cannot tell their own story, in other words. Even when they're allowed to appear on stage, in public forums, or in the media, they have to have a minder. That means, in the American context, Their appearance is carefully balanced with the opposing point of view. In other words, you can't say something about the Palestinians without having someone to say, well, this of course is not true, from another perspective. Such balance, I would note, is never required in the United States when an Israeli— or rarely required in the United States when an Israeli perspective is put forward. Now, what I want to do this evening is to turn away from all of these distorted ways in which the history of Palestine is usually depicted, whether that's from an Israeli point of view, whether that's from a falsely balanced perspective, or whether it's between a supposed conflict between 2 equal parties. I'm going to push all of those approaches, which are the approaches that are generally followed by most interpretations, aside. In their stead, in place of those kinds of approaches, I would like to put forward an entirely different perspective in order to illuminate the history of the past century in Palestine as the Palestinians have experienced it, and I would argue as most people in the formerly colonized world also see it. And that's most people in the world. I hope thereby to provide a richer understanding of the real conflict over that land today. Now, from this perspective, the one that I want to use this evening, The period since the Balfour Declaration of November 29th, 1917 has amounted to what— has witnessed, I should say, what amounts to 100 years of war against the Palestinians. Like many other long-lasting wars, this one has had long periods of apparent calm interspersed with paroxysms of violence. However, this war had a unique nature. It was formally sanctioned and authorized by the greatest powers of the day at different times over the past century. Indeed, this war could not have taken place without them, but it was mainly waged by others. I'm going to repeat that sentence. This war was formally sanctioned and authorized by the greatest powers of the day at different times. Over the past century. Indeed, this war could not have taken place without them, but it was mainly waged by others. An important feature of this long war, one which has been much distorted, has been the Palestinians' continuing resistance against heavy odds to what amounts to one of the last ongoing attempts at colonial subjugation in the modern world. Taking this approach is in— not in any way to chronicle the history of the Palestinians as one of their victimization. Indeed, it gives them full agency as people resisting a long campaign to remove them from their land and from history. Nor is it to whitewash the many grievous mistakes of Palestinian leaders. As I wrote in The Iron Cage, much of the history of the Palestinian people must be understood in terms of the very bad choices made by their leaders at different times, albeit often in the most difficult of circumstances. What the people of Palestine experienced as a continuous war against them since 1917 is still underway today. It thereby constitutes a global anomaly. All the other recent wars to uproot colonial settler regimes in the second half of the 20th century, whether this was in Algeria or Southern Africa or elsewhere, finally ended with the defeat of these regimes. This has not happened in Palestine. Instead, in Palestine, Israel has thus far been highly successful in forcibly establishing itself both as a colonial reality and as a powerful nation-state. in a postcolonial age. It has done this while always assuming a false posture of self-defense, which I'm sure will be familiar to most of you. The great historian and theoretician of colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, who sadly just passed away, wrote the following. I'm quoting Patrick Wolfe. Settler colonies were, in brackets, are, premised on the elimination of the native societies. The split tensing, were, are, the split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay. Invasion is a structure, not an event. He's thinking, of course, of Australia. You could say the same thing about New Zealand. You could say the same thing about Canada or the United States, but think of those words in regard to Palestine. In Palestine, both that structure and the war that resulted from it are still ongoing today after 100 years. It is a war that seems endless to the Palestinians themselves. Now, there have been repeated authoritative international pronouncements that amounted to declarations of war by the great powers that were sponsors of this long colonial campaign. against the Palestinians. The first of these was issued in November of 1917, November 2nd to be exact, on behalf of the British cabinet by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, the Balfour Declaration. British troops were then in the process of conquering Palestine. They occupied Jerusalem a couple of weeks afterwards, on December 9th of 1917. The Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations mandate that was later granted to Britain on the basis of this declaration, and which repeated the terms of the declaration in the preamble to the mandate verbatim. This declaration and this mandate arrogated national rights in Palestine exclusively to Jews, who were at that time, of course, a tiny minority of the population. It thereby denied the national existence and political rights of the vast Arab majority of Palestine's people. So the Balfour Declaration and the mandate said that there is one people in Palestine. There's one group with national rights. Neither the declaration nor the mandate ever named this population, which had lived in its own country for generations. So the word Arab or Palestinian doesn't occur in the Balfour Declaration. It doesn't occur in the mandate for Palestine. The Balfour Declaration has been considered historically in terms of various paradigms, mainly in terms of Zionist or British considerations. And there has been good work on both of these sides of it. However, it was in fact a quintessentially colonial proclamation by the greatest power of its day of that power's intent to replace an indigenous people with another people whom it proposed to bring into existence on that indigenous people's territory. For 2 decades without fail, actually for 22 years without fail, Britain carried out to the letter the terms of the Balfour Declaration and of the League of Nations mandate that defined and regulated British rule over Palestine while embodying and amplifying the terms of the Balfour Declaration. In keeping with the mandate, Britain supported Zionist immigration and land purchase and granted self-governing institutions and international diplomatic status to the Jewish minority. A para-state was created under the mandate by the terms of the mandate, while self-government and diplomatic status were refused to the Arab majority. Provoked by Britain's denial of their rights and indeed of their very existence as a people, the Palestinians belatedly rebelled in 1936 to 1939. They briefly liberated some towns and parts of the countryside, but the British Empire responded ruthlessly, employing over 100,000 troops and extensive air power to crush this uprising. In the process, the British killed, wounded, deported, or imprisoned 10% of the adult male population of Palestine. They also confiscated large quantities of weapons. They exiled or jailed Most leaders, and as I say, executed a very large number of them. This was the delayed military implementation of Britain's original 1917 declaration of war on the Palestinian people. I have stressed in what I've said so far the role of Britain. Hear, hear. And it's important that you keep your mind on that, because I'm going to follow up with a similar stress on other powers. Now, as any historian can tell you, the same dates, the same events, the same individuals can have a completely different valence for different people. There are battles that mean one thing to one group and something else to another group. Thus, for Israelis, Arthur James Balfour is a hero. There are streets named for him in Israeli cities. There's a town named for him, in fact. And the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 is an occasion for celebration in Israel. Balfour is obviously not a hero to the Palestinians. Why this was so can be understood from a close textual analysis of a number of key documents from this era, starting from the Balfour Declaration, which defined British policy really for the entirety of the mandate period. This declaration, as I've noted, Says that there's only one people with national rights in Palestine, the Jewish people. The Palestinians are, as I've said, described not by name or even as Arabs, but only as, quote, existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. So 94% of the population, never named, are not given national rights, and are described only as the existing non-Jewish population. This vast majority, majority of Palestine's population, is only guaranteed Civil and religious rights. They are not guaranteed political rights, and they are not guaranteed national rights. So, there's one community with national rights and the right to a para-state and other legal protections. Another community is simply given civil and religious rights. So, that's the first document, which I've already talked about. Second, I've already briefly talked about— which I haven't talked about, is Article 22 of of the Covenant of the League of Nations. This was issued in June 1919, and it described the Arab peoples of the regions of the former Ottoman Empire as independent nations. You would think, well, that means Palestine. It didn't mean Palestine. This article of the covenant, Article 22, which supposedly governed the entire mandate system, was consistently interpreted, both by Britain and by the League of Nations, to exclude Palestine. This did not apply to Palestine in the view of the British. In other words, Article 22, as far as Balfour and his colleagues were concerned, guaranteed self-determination to all Arab peoples who had formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire, but not to the Palestinians. Because in Palestine, self-determination was promised to the Jewish people. So that's the second document. There's a third. Which, if you examine it carefully, yields some interesting things. This is a confidential memo that Balfour wrote to his colleagues in the cabinet in August 1919, and it wasn't published for decades. It was first published, in fact, in the 1950s. And in it, Balfour was more candid than he ever was in public. He said, and I'm quoting from this memo, Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far greater import than the desires— you almost want to hear the mere desires, but he didn't say mere— than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now, just for the moment, inhabit that land. that ancient land. Balfour went on to say, I quote again, in Palestine, and this follows from what he just said, in Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. So that's the third document. The last one is the 1922 League of Nations mandate for Palestine. This reiterated the Balfour Declaration verbatim, as I've said, amplified the terms of the declaration, and it produced an operational plan for effectively eliminating an existing people and replacing it with another. If you read the mandate, it has 11 or 12 articles solely devoted to the establishment of a Jewish national home. The rest have to do with things like taxation. Nothing Nothing, in fact, deals directly with the political or national aspirations of the majority there. In fact, those aspirations are to be denied. That's what this document means. It's clear from all of these documents that Palestinians and their rights simply had no importance for British decision-makers, or for that matter, for decision-makers in the League of Nations. Taken together and read closely, these statements of policy, whether by Britain or the League of Nations, in effect constituted an international justification for politicide, meaning the destruction of the emerging Palestinian polity, to use a term that was coined by the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling. This politicide was implemented both by omission— Palestinians are never mentioned in any of the documents that governed their collectivity— Right up to 1948, and by commission, as these— as 3 of these documents explicitly declare that Palestine is to be transformed into a Jewish national home. In spite of the vague and ambiguous nature of this term, Jewish national home, British leaders understood clearly that it meant creating an ultimate Jewish majority in Palestine and thereby turning it into a Jewish state. This is not in the terms of the mandate. It's not in the Balfour Declaration. It's not even in Balfour's confidential memos. But this is precisely what Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and Arthur Balfour later privately told Chaim Weizmann, who of course was the leader of the Zionist movement, first president of Israel, at a dinner meeting in Balfour's house in 1929, which is recorded in the Weizmann Papers. They told him, this is what we mean. We mean a Jewish majority. We mean a Jewish state. That's what we mean Jewish national home to— that's what we understand this term to mean. These 3, 3 of these documents, in other words, constitute a slightly watered-down and more palatable version of the core Zionist objective of transforming Palestine into a Jewish state. a Jewish state from an Arab country. Now, I've mentioned that the military campaign which enforced these declarations of policy was prosecuted by the might of the British armed forces, especially during the period 1936-39, in response to the resistance of the Palestinians to British rule and to the colonial project that Britain supported. One of the clearest expressions that I've ever found of what was at stake was issued by Vladimir Jabotinsky in the '20s. Jabotinsky, as you may know, was the founder of the militant revisionist wing of the Zionist movement, out of which grew the ideological current that since 1977 has dominated Israeli politics with few interruptions. The current prime minister's father was Jabotinsky's private secretary. Jabotinsky was explicit in stressing the necessity of what he called, quote, an iron wall of British bayonets for the success of Zionism. He frankly recognized that, quote, in the history of colonization— this is Jabotinsky speaking— in the history of colonization in other countries, every native population, civilized or not, regards its lands as its national home. This is equally true of the Arabs. End of quote. Note Jabotinsky's frank use of the terms colonization to describe Zionist activity and the native population to describe the Palestinians. We don't get the same frankness after Jabotinsky in pronouncements by leaders of the Zionist movement. Jabotinsky concluded that overcoming the natural resistance of this population to their subjugation and displacement required, quote, an iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure. Of course, he was right. He meant at that stage the British. At later stages, that strong power was the United States, and at another stage, the United States and the Soviet Union. For 2 decades, it was Britain that provided this iron wall, without which Jabotinsky freely admitted that Zionist colonization could not have been successfully pursued. Now that they have been the targets of a long war, Is central to Palestinians' own understanding of the conflict. Older people inside Palestine, in the refugee camps, and in the larger diaspora, Palestinian diaspora, talk of the British or the Israelis or the Americans in almost the same breath, as if they're different faces of the same foe. In other words, they see things more clearly than a lot of scholars, just ordinary folks in the camps or elsewhere. Palestinians thus see their history since 1917 as involving their people being targets of this unending war to which they have offered continued resistance. For them, this history blends seamlessly into the present and unfortunately probably into the future. In their historical experience, the unceasing colonization of their country, which they see taking place before them every day in the West Bank or in Jerusalem and inside Israel, This unceasing colonization and the constant resort to violence that is required for its maintenance is, to reprise the words of Patrick Wolfe, a structure, not an event. Thank you. Now let me move in time, leaping forward. The superpowers of the post-World War II era, the United States and the Soviet Union, were responsible for 2 further authoritative international pronouncements endorsing the Zionist project and its transformation into the state of Israel that I am arguing amounted to declarations of war on the Palestinians. These were once again issued via the ostensibly neutral medium of an international organization similar to the League of Nations. This time it was the United Nations. This new world body gave the patina of legal sanction to further violations of the inalienable national rights of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. By this point, as you know, most of you, Britain had been weakened by the massive effort it had made in World War II and by the loss of India, while in Palestine it was being battered by attacks, by the attacks of Zionist terrorists, notably the Irgun and the Stern Gang, which later on gave leadership to Israel in the form of Of Menachem Begin and, and Yitzhak Shamir, prime ministers of Israel. In consequence of this, Great Britain was forced to abandon Palestine, throwing it into the lap of the United Nations, where the 2 new superpowers had predominant influence. The first of these 2 new declarations of war on the Palestinians came on November 29th, 1947, via UN General Assembly Resolution 181 for the partition of Palestine. This resolution was engineered entirely by the United States and the Soviet Union, which ensured a majority vote by their compliant allies and satellites. Resolution 181 handed over most of a majority Arab country to its Jewish minority without the consent of that majority. It thereby violated the principle of self-determination that had been enshrined in the U.N. Charter only 2 years earlier. This led in turn to the war of 1947-49, which devastated Palestinian society and caused the expulsion of more than half of that country's Arab population from their homes. As we all know, they were never allowed to return. Partition allocated nearly 55% of the territory of Mandatory Palestine to a Jewish state, which represented a realization of the Zionist dream of sovereignty and statehood in Palestine. The Arabs, over 2/3 of the population, were supposed to have a so-called Arab state divided into 3 segments, which together comprised later less than 45% of the entire country, which the Palestinians naturally saw as their own. For these contrasting reasons, the resolution was accepted by the leading elements in the Zionist movement and was rejected by most Palestinians and by all the Arab states, with the sole exception of Jordan. Palestinian and Arab disunity then contributed to the crushing defeat suffered first by the Palestinians themselves in the months leading up to the British evacuation of May 15th, 1948, and subsequently to the resounding defeat of the 4 Arab armies, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, that entered Palestine after the British withdrawal. Long before the British left, Long before May 15th, as many as 300,000 Palestinians had already been driven from their homes. In other words, the exodus began long before the state of Israel was actually established and long before the mandate actually technically ended. Some left because of things like unceasing mortar bombardments of urban areas. Others fled as news spread of massacres like Deir Yassin in April 1948. The city of Jaffa was overrun by Arab forces, by Zionist forces, and was emptied by most of its Arab population of about 60,000 in late April 1948. Those who were driven out before the mandate ended and before the state of Israel was formally established included most of the Arab residents of 2 of the 3 cities with the largest Arab populations. That is to say, Jaffa, Haifa, and the much of the Arab population of West Jerusalem. Palestinian society was thus effectively decapitated, most of its urban population forced to flee before May 15th, 1948. After that date, after the establishment of Israel, in the wake of further massacres and the defeat of the Arab armies, another 400,000 or so Palestinians were expelled. Several more cities were ethnically cleansed, as were 400 villages, and 78% of Palestine was forcibly transformed into the new state of Israel, which expanded from the partition boundaries. The destruction of most of their society has since been known by the Palestinians as Nakba, the disaster. Now, I'm arguing here that the partition resolution was a reiteration and updating by new powers of the 1917 declaration of war on the Palestinians, obviously in a different form, And obviously with different sponsors. After World War II, colonialism had become a bad word. You didn't hear reference to colonization or Zionist colonization, which people had no embarrassment in talking about before World War II. National liberation was in the air, and the Zionist project was repackaged as self-determination for the national movement of a people that had been cruelly oppressed. in Europe. This was an incontrovertible argument in the immediate aftermath of the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust. This time, however, the patrons of Zionism were the US and USSR rather than Britain. And once again, there was international cover for this action. UN cover rather than League of Nations cover. The only true concern of the superpowers that engineered the partition resolution was to complete Herzl's colonial project and create the state of Israel. Even though the creation of an Arab state is mentioned in this resolution, everything beyond the establishment of Israel was window dressing for them. The quick strangulation of the Arab state in its cradle through the well-documented collusion of Israel, Jordan, and Britain was met with indifference by the powers that had supposedly mandated the creation of an Arab state. They didn't care about that. That's not what they were interested in. They were interested in the Jewish state mentioned in the partition resolution. Now, in this phase, the actual acts of war against the Palestinians were carried out before May 15th by Zionist militias, and after that date by the newly established army of the State of Israel, with arms supplied mainly by the 2 superpowers. This is important. This marked a major shift From the previous phase, when most warfare against the Palestinians had been carried out by the British. So that's the first of these 2 new declarations of war. The other, the other superpower-mandated pronouncement amounting to a declaration of war on the Palestinians was UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, following the June War of that year. This resolution was supposedly meant to produce peace between the Arab states and Israel in return for evacuation of territory that Israel had occupied during the war. As some of you may have noticed, to this day that resolution has not actually produced peace, but that's what it was supposed to do. Instead, as far as the Palestinians were concerned, 242 consecrated the results of the 1948 war, both in terms of Israel's expulsion of Palestinians and its territorial aggrandizement up to 1949. The resolution never mentioned any of the basic political issues raised by the '48 war or that had been earlier mandated by UN resolutions, such as refugee return and compensation, or Israel giving up the gains of the 1948 war and returning to the lines laid down by the partition plan. Instead, 242 referred only to a just Settlement of the refugee problem. There was no specification of what this vague proviso meant, nor did it have any explicit political content. Resolution 242 thereby helped to further efface the Palestinians from their own country and from history. The green light which US President Lyndon Johnson gave to Israel for its attack of 1967 represented a turning point from the much more limited levels of US support that had previously been offered to Israel by earlier American presidents. Indeed, between 1948 and '67, Israel's main great power patrons were France and Great Britain. And it was mainly with French and British arms that Israel fought the '56 and '67 wars. Thereafter, the June '67 war marked the beginning of a full-scale US-Israeli alliance, which was forged in the circumstances of the Cold War, when Israel first came to be seen as a faithful ally against the Soviet Union's Arab proxies. As we all know, this alliance is still in existence a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War. Now, as I've suggested, 242 in fact represented yet another declaration of war on the Palestinians, this time by the superpowers and their allies. Like the Balfour Declaration, 242, which has become the universally accepted basis for a resolution of the entire conflict does not even mention the Palestinians as a people or as a party to the conflict. This is true, although they have always represented the core of the problem in Palestine, going back to their displacement in 1948 in order to create a Jewish-majority state in a country with a large Arab majority. By shunting the Palestinians aside with the wording a just settlement of the Palestinian— of the refugee problem, 242 treats the entire issue as one between the Arab States and Israel. It doesn't have a Palestinian component, 242. Like the Balfour Declaration, it completely ignores the ongoing colonial process in Palestine, in effect sanctifying it, a process that was exacerbated by Israel's occupation of the remaining parts of the country. 242 thus constitutes what I would argue is another great power act of Kimmeling's term politicide. Now, after these crushing defeats of the Palestinians in the '30s and then the '40s, it may have seemed as if the Palestinian people had disappeared. Looking at the Middle East in the 1950s, their traditional leadership under the discredited Mufti of Jerusalem had been shattered and dispersed. More than half of the Palestinian Arab population had become refugees, and most of the country had been absorbed into Israel. With Jordan and Egypt in control of smaller parts. The Palestinians seemed to have no voice, no central address, and no champions. Partisans of the Zionist takeover of Palestine and of the replacement of the country's indigenous inhabitants with a Jewish settler population had long fervently hoped for such an outcome. In 1969, Golda Meir told the Sunday Times of London, London categorically, there were no such things as Palestinians. Israel's prime minister thereby took the negationism that is characteristic of every colonial project to the highest possible level. For Meir, the Palestinians not only did not exist, they never had existed. Even as she spoke, however, events were proving that the Palestinians were still in existence. For after a hiatus that lasted for a decade after 1948, young middle-class Palestinian professionals inside and outside their homeland resuscitated their shattered national movement on a very different basis than the one that had characterized the elite-dominated Palestinian politics of the period before 1948. The 1967 war gave an enormous boost to these radical new groups which openly advocated and practiced what they called armed struggle against Israel. People all over the Arab world were galvanized by the reemergence of the Palestinian national movement represented by the rise of these armed groups like Fatah, the Popular Front, and so forth, which later coalesced into the PFLP. This rebirth of their national movement in a new form constituted another episode of resistance by the Palestinians to the long war against them. It was a reaffirmation that the Palestinians existed in the face of constant denial. This denial was evidenced not only by statements like those of Golda Meir, but by the demolition after 1948 of over 400 Palestinian villages whose populations had been ethnically cleansed. As grave as these Israeli actions— and I'm trying to stress this— as grave as these actions, the destruction of the villages, the refusal of permission for them to return, their populations to return. As grave as these actions was the considered decision of the United States, of the Soviet Union, of the other great powers, as expressed through Security Council Resolution 242, to ignore the Palestinians entirely. Not invited to peace conferences, not mentioned in international resolutions. They don't exist in practice. It was not only, therefore, against their dispossession, but against all of these denials and slights that the newly galvanized Palestinians reacted in the '60s and '70s. They did so by violently asserting their existence with a series of spectacular attacks inside Israel and abroad. The response in the United States, in Israel, and in parts of Europe to these Palestinian attacks was, of course, intensely negative. It stigmatized the Palestinians as terrorists. By this stage, at least in the mind of America, Israel had erased its colonial past and was instead seen in terms of positive images drawn from the kinds of sources I mentioned at the beginning of the lecture. Periodically, or I should say paradoxically, this period when the Palestinians were being demonized in some quarters was also marked by their success in internationalizing their struggle beyond the confines of the Arab world. In other words, at a time when people in the United States were thinking of the Palestinians intensely negatively, In other parts of the world, people began to think of them more positively. The PLO was recognized as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It garnered worldwide recognition. Yasser Arafat spoke before the UN General Assembly. The PLO opened missions in over 100 countries, and so forth. This was the greatest international victory in Palestinian history, this international recognition, after so many years of non-recognition. However, the main response to the PLO's armed violence and to the organization's growing international profile was a ratcheting up of the war on the Palestinians. Although Israel took the lead in this war, launching attacks on Palestinian bases and refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon from 1967 onwards, many other actors were also involved. And I want to stress this. Some of these actors were drawn into fighting the Palestinian resistance movement by unceasing Israeli military pressure, whose clear message was that if Arab host countries would not take on the PLO, Israel would continue to devastate their country. One of the first of these demonstration raids was the Israeli attack on Beirut Airport in 1968. It wasn't an attack on Palestinian camps. It wasn't an attack on Palestinians. It was an attack on Middle East Airlines and the Beirut Airport. A crucial early front in this war was in Jordan, where during what the Palestinians called Black September, Jordanian troops in 1970 crushed the PLO in Amman and other cities. Jordan was strongly backed by the United States in this effort. You can read it in Kissinger's memoirs, and you can read in the archival sources that are now available how extensive and how serious this support was. Right. support was. A few months later, in spring of 1971, Jordan completely expelled PLO groups from its territory. A 3rd front in this war on the Palestinians after 1967 was initiated by a series of Israeli attacks on Lebanon and on the Palestinian presence there. This pressure, subtly supported by the United States, eventually produced offensives against Palestinian refugee camps and PLO bases by by a variety of actors. The first of these attacks was launched by the Lebanese Army in May of 1973, followed by right-wing Lebanese militia groups in April of 1975, and by the Syrian Army in the summer of 1976, and concluded with major invasions of Lebanon by the Israeli Army in 1978, Operation Litani, and 1982. In all of this, the United States was far more than a mere onlooker. It was a broker. It was a supporter. It was a cheerleader. We have documents on much of this. American policymakers actively supported these new phases of the war on the Palestinians, often with arms and other forms of assistance, but always acting through proxies. No American soldiers were involved. Other powers were also engaged against the Palestinians at different times during this period. For example, the Soviet Union Supported the 1976 Syrian offensive against the PLO. The Shah's Iran, Saudi Arabia, France, and Jordan all supplied Lebanese militia groups like the Phalange and the Lebanese Forces during the civil war. While the great powers set the international framework for the war on the Palestinians, and there were Jordanian, Lebanese, Syrian, and other Arab combatants in different phases of the war, from Really, from 1947 onward, the brunt of the fighting was done first by the Zionist movement and later by the state of Israel. In all of Israel's military operations, without exception, the backing of external powers was as vital to its success as had been the might of Great Britain before World War II to the success of Zionism. In Israel's victory of 1948, for example, the diplomatic support of the United States and the Soviet Union were as indispensable as the weapons both superpowers supplied. Britain and French arms played a similar key role in the '56 and '67 wars. Israel could not have fought or won any of those wars without those weapons. Weapons are not sold simply to make a profit. They are sold as a political token of the outcome that a superpower, a weapons-producing power, wants to see. Thank you. Similarly, Israel's unbroken string of military victories over both the Arab armies and the Palestinians since 1967 was entirely dependent on the almost unlimited provision of advanced American weapons systems. Let me now talk about the 2 last phases of this campaign against the Palestinians. One of them took an ostensibly peaceful and democratic form, starting with the Camp David Accords. Thank you. of 1978. I have no time to go into this. I can go into it in questions. The key events in this peaceful phase were the bilateral 1991 to '93 Palestinian-Israeli Madrid negotiations and Washington negotiations, followed by secret negotiations in Oslo and elsewhere. Billed as an attempt to peacefully resolve the conflict, the objective of both Israel and the United States was in fact to manage the conflict. While allowing the extension into the unlimited— into the indefinite future of key aspects of a status quo of occupation and colonization. That is what Israel aimed to achieve. That is what the United States allowed it to do. That is what happened. Peace was not the outcome, as you may have noticed. In Washington, Oslo, and subsequent talks, the Palestinians, it turns out, were not in fact negotiating with Israel through a neutral American intermediary, But we're actually up against 2 opponents, Israel and its close ally, the United States. The opponents the Palestinians faced included, in fact, not only Israel and its American patron, but also the autocratic Arab Gulf regimes, whose feebleness vis-à-vis their domestic and— vis-à-vis domestic and external threats, and their dependence on the United States, ensured that they remained pliable and reliable American clients who could be counted on to put pressure on the PLO. I was involved as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the Washington negotiations, and at one sticky point, Dennis Ross said to us, you know, if you guys don't back down on this, we're going to get our Arab friends in the Gulf to put some pressure on you. He actually said it. This was not a secret. So, the Palestinians had a lot of people across the table from them, not just Yachim Rubinstein and an Israeli delegation. Right. The problems of the Palestinians included as well the incompetence, the lack of legal knowledge, and the ignorance of conditions inside occupied Palestine of the PLO leadership in Tunis, which in fact endorsed and was responsible for the 1993 Oslo Accords. These officials accepted terms at Oslo and in subsequent negotiations that had earlier been rejected in Washington by the Palestinian delegation from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. In fact, West Bank and Gazan leaders proved more realistic than the PLO leadership in Tunis about the Americans and about Israel. In consequence of all of these factors, and most importantly because of American-Israeli collusion and the failures of the PLO leadership, the regime that emerged from the 1993 Oslo Accords had the effect of denying Palestinian self-determination while allowing the expansion of colonial settlement and occupation. The occupation is far more entrenched today than when we went to Madrid in 1991. Settlements have expanded. The proof of this is that we are going to go into the 50th year of that occupation in June of this year. The proof of this is the growth of numbers— in the number of Israelis living illegally in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. When we went to Madrid in 1991, there were 200,000 of them between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. There are close to 600,000 of them today. The settler population has tripled during the so-called peace process. This peace process, in effect, constituted another phase in the American-Israeli campaign against the Palestinians. Thank you. Its primary aim, continuing to this day, is to bring the Palestinians to accept their defeat in the long war that has been waged against them since 1917. I could talk about another international declaration of war on the Palestinians over the past decade. And this would have to do with refusal by the United States and the EU to deal with the entirety of the Palestinian national movement, including Hamas. I could explain the reasons for it to you. But the main reason I'm going to skip over is to, in my view at least, is to split and weaken the Palestinian national movement, in keeping with a policy, a classic colonial policy of divide and rule, whereby the Palestinians have been physically divided into those in the West Bank, those in Gaza, those inside Israel, those in East Jerusalem, and those outside of Palestine. The actual acts of war in this last phase have been carried out mainly by Israel, but it was fully supported in this by the United States, by the EU, and by several Arab governments, notably the government of Egypt. These included a brutal siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip, periodic massive attacks on Gaza, all of them with the usual horrendously lopsided casualty. Figures. This suppression of the Palestinians has taken place with the collusion and collaboration of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority that was created by the Oslo Accords, and that was mistakenly thought by some Palestinians to be the first step towards an independent state. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. It was always essentially intended by Israel to protect the security of its occupation and colonization enterprise. The PA is a body which has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that which is allowed it by Israel. Even today, the PA continues its close security cooperation with the army of occupation and with the Israeli intelligence services. Now, this is the argument that I've tried to lay out this evening. You can see from what I've tried to put before you, that the— what has been going on in Palestine for a century has been completely mischaracterized. I think this long war on the Palestinians should be seen in comparative perspective as one of the last major colonial conflicts of the modern era, and as the last one devoted to the establishment of a colonial settler state in the non-European world. In this endeavor, the United States and Europe in effect serve as the metropole, with their extension Israel operating as a semi-independent settler colony. None of this is any less true because over time this war has evolved into a national struggle between the indigenous Palestinian people and the Israeli Jewish nation-state that has grown up and thrived in Palestine. However, the deceptive way in which this conflict is often depicted as a tragic struggle over the same territory between 2 peoples with equally valid competing leading claims has in fact served to obscure its essentially colonial nature. It in fact can be both things: a struggle between 2 peoples and a colonial settler war. The veiling of this basic reality also elides the fact that like any colonial entity, Israel could never have been successful without the indispensable support of external powers, whether the old colonial powers of Europe, or the United States and the USSR. In conclusion, notwithstanding the great strength of the international and regional actors that have been waging this century, century-long war on the Palestinians through proxies, I would argue that they have been trying to do the impossible. They have been trying to impose a colonial reality in Palestine in a post-colonial age. Thank you. This was as true of Balfour and Lloyd George, of Truman and Johnson, and as it was of Clinton, Bush, and Obama, who've all extended full backing to Israel at different times. Were the Palestinians as few compared to their colonizers as were the native peoples of Australasia and the Americas, and were we in the 18th or 19th century, there might have been a chance of successfully implanting a colonial settler society in place of the indigenous one. But in the words of the late Tony Judt, Zionism has, quote, imported a characteristically late 19th century separatist project into a world that has moved on. It has done this by exporting this colonial Euro-American project to a non- European locale, one with a large existing population. In view of the persistent stubborn resistance of the Palestinians to their displacement and to their erasure from history, such a project simply cannot succeed in the 21st century. It cannot succeed even though the basic colonial nature of this encounter has been veiled from most Americans and some Europeans. I will leave you with 2 questions. Yes. Tonight, in light of this history, how can the true colonial nature of the ongoing struggle in Palestine be made clear and all of these, these distractions be swept aside? And secondly, how can these 2 peoples, the Palestinians and the Israelis, transit to a peaceful, post-colonial, post-Zionist future in which one of them does not use constant violence and massive external support to oppress and try to supplant the other, and in which the Palestinian people finally achieve the self-determination that has been so long denied them. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rashid, for this magisterial survey of this century of war. I was thinking, listening to you, to the fact— I mean, this relativity of history, starting from the same year, 1917, someone has seen the century as the short century, And from the point— from the angle of Palestine, it's a very long century indeed, and it's still carrying on. So we have some time for discussion. Be taking 3, 4 questions at a time, and we'll— well, we have— I mean, if needed, then we'll see when to stop. But for the time being, we have some time. We have— Thank you. Half an hour, I would say. So I see— well, I mean, I will try to not take the speakers in the same spots. So one here, the person there. Anyone on the periphery? Yes, and person here. Yeah. Yes, please. Please introduce yourself when speaking. Hi. Hello, Professor Khalidi. My name is Jasmine. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Being and Nothingness, notes that to have, along with to do and to be, are one of the 3 categories of human existence, and therefore a Palestinian homeland is not tradable. So— Is not? Tradable. Do you— would you agree that the Palestinian cause needs to be changed from a state-driven movement to one— to a human rights-driven movement? Because as we can see, that it's been, like, 100 years since the war in Palestine, and a state hasn't come about. So perhaps the technique in order to get a Palestinian state Thank you. Rashid, hello. David McDowell. Thank you very much for that talk. But I want to throw that last question back to you. How do you see the Palestinians prevailing if you view the colonial settler project as bound to fail? How will the Palestinians succeed? And what part can other people play in it? Easy question, isn't it, Rashid? Third, yes, the person here, please. Moin, Yasin. On projections, my focus is on projections which you haven't obviously touched but which are inherent. One is, is design as project Inevitably geared towards destabilization of the region to survive. You didn't touch that. And secondly, based on your talk, you talked about powers interfering, sustaining, nurturing this creation. Mm-hmm. You know, there's always opposites in science and human history. Isn't it inevitable other external parties will intervene? Thank you. I haven't seen any other hands, so we can start— Take these 3. Yes, start with this. I'm gonna take them from here, if you don't mind. Yes. Okay. First question, Jasmine? Um, yeah, you're asking whether the Palestinian cause needs to be changed from state-based to human rights-based. Um, I think that the state-based approach, which has been the obsession of the Palestinians for reasons that have to do with their statelessness, um, is perhaps understandable, um, and I think is not something that's going to be easily overcome. Whatever one might say as to what might be the best approach to this. But there is an argument that is increasingly being made for a rights-based approach. I wouldn't say human rights because, you know, we don't want to go back to the language of civil and religious rights. We want to talk about national rights, political rights, equal rights if we're going to talk about rights. Because there's a national community. There's a Israeli Jewish national community there, and there's a Palestinian Arab national community there. So you can't just talk about human rights. Human rights, in fact, is language which, as a distinguished academic sitting somewhere here has written a book about, can be used for rather nefarious purposes, and quite frequently are in the modern world. So I would stay away from human rights. And there has been an argument An argument made by many Palestinian Arab citizens of the state of Israel, that absolute equality in national terms and political terms has to be granted in any future scenario, whether there's some continuation of a state of Israel in a different form, or whether we're talking about other Palestinians. And I don't wanna opine about this, but I would suggest that it's very hard In a world in which the nation-state has far, far, far, far more strength than anybody realizes— I'm going to give a talk in a couple days where I'm talking about Sykes-Picot and how perhaps more— how much more durable those frontiers may be than anybody thinks. It's going to be very hard to wean Palestinians away from wanting a state, or at least national expression. For their right to self-determination. I would argue it would be equally difficult to wean Israelis away from some national expression of what has developed into a people. But I'm very sympathetic to the argument on the basis of rights. But rights, national, political, equal. You can't have rights for one people which are dependent on the denial of the same rights to another people. That's not— that's— That's— Something different. David's question, how do I see the Palestinians prevailing, and what role is there for others? Well, I'm gonna answer this question, I'll start my answer to this question and to the question from the gentleman in the back by saying, by training I'm a historian, and by inclination I'm a historian, and the job description of a historian does not include predicting the future, so. I am just as unqualified as every single person in this room. To tell you what I think is gonna happen. I don't know how, or for that matter, if the Palestinians will prevail. I think they will, and I said why I think they will, but how? What I will say is that I think that you can see in the direction in which Israel has moved in recent decades, in the way in which that is increasingly being perceived in the places which are essential for the maintenance of this status quo, which is, say, the United States and Europe, that people are not quite as tolerant of, or as deluded by, the way in which Israel presents itself. There's a huge effort in the United States to maintain a positive image of Israel. I mean, really enormous efforts are being made, very expensive efforts. The numbers don't look good. Fred Luntz, Republican pollster, has done enormously important work for various major Republican candidates. L-U-N-T-Z. Google him. Has done a poll which he discussed at a conference, some Israel, pro-Israel conference recently, in which he said 38% of young American College-age Jews who were surveyed feel that it's difficult or impossible to defend Israel, that it's indefensible. I mean, that's a striking and strange number. And obviously, the American political reality doesn't reflect that. Obviously, American media doesn't reflect that. And neither of them will for a very long time. But if that's what's happening at the base, if that's how people perceive— Right. And we're not talking about an uninformed public. We're talking about college-age kids. Then there's going to be— there are going to be some serious problems for this project, because it is utterly dependent on this link to the United States and Europe. It's a nation-state. It's a powerful state. It's a nuclear-armed state, and so on and so forth. But it's very unlike any other state in the modern world, in that it is completely dependent, in certain ways, on the United States. Right. on external support. And the 2 sources of that support are here, in Europe, and in the United— more importantly, in the United States. And as that changes, there's going to be increasing difficulty for that project. As that project becomes, for example, less democratic, as that project becomes more overtly racist, as the rule over what will become an Arab majority by a Jewish minority— the obsession of Zionist leaders in the '20s and '30s was a majority. Right. They achieved it through war. They're losing it. There is now, or will soon be, an Arab majority between the river and the sea, over which a Jewish majority rules. It determines everything. And that will increasingly be hard to defend as the 21st century goes on. How that will affect politics, I can't say. Last question about... Is the Zionist project increasingly geared to the destabilization of the region to survive? To be very frank, the region does very well destabilizing itself. And I think that it's very easy to blame Zionism, Israel, the great powers, the United States. I mean, I've written a book about what the United States did in Iraq. I think it was folly. I think it was criminal. I think it involved disastrous decisions for which we're paying and will pay, but especially the Iraqis and people of the Middle East will pay for generations. And there are people who would say, oh, yes, well, it was the neoconservatives who did this. It was Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, for reasons that had to do with all kinds of American calculations. But the agency was also Iraqi. Nobody made Saddam Hussein attack Iran. Nobody made Saddam Hussein occupy Kuwait. Nobody made Saddam Hussein try to destroy the Kurds in the north. Nobody made Saddam Hussein put down the Shia in the south. So you had Middle Eastern agency in each of these catastrophes, with which, obviously, the agency of the superpower was, in many ways, even more involved. Has Israel tried to destabilize? Of course it has. I mean, you can see this in Lebanon. You could see it in Lebanon. You can see it today in Syria. They're backing groups that are up against the Golan Heights, almost overtly, which are among the elements destabilizing Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra, possibly even Daesh, has little pockets right up against the Golan Heights. Their only source of supply is the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Their only source of supply. Is this destabilizing? Of course it is. Right. But when one compares this to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United States, it's not the major destabilizing agent. So, yes, Israel is thrilled that there is no strong nation-state in the Arab Mashriq, and that Egypt, since Camp David, since the peace treaty, has basically been politically castrated. It has almost no will. Thank you. weight in the Arab world. In fact, that goes back to things that also involve Egyptian agency. Nobody made Abdel Nasser intervene in Yemen. Okay? That's where Egypt lost its primacy in the Arab world. So, yes, the answer to your question is, I would argue, of course Israel would love to see increased destabilization, but it doesn't— it doesn't need Israel for that. Now, you've asked another question, a sort of balance of power question. About other powers that will intervene. The problem is, both in the pre-World War I, World War II period, and since the Second World War, we haven't really had much of a balance of power situation in the Middle East. Britain was the hegemonic power between the World Wars. It determined outcomes more than any other power, more than France, Certainly more than Germany or Italy or the United States or the Soviet Union. And even in the postwar period, when we had an American-Soviet Cold War, look at outcome after outcome after outcome. The United States was really the dominant power. The Soviet Union, in fact, was often a sidekick of the Americans, as far as actions on Palestine were concerned. '67, 242, that was not an American resolution. It was a British-drafted, American-Soviet-supported resolution. Right. 1947. 1947. American, Soviet. The British did not vote for partition. The British had nothing to do with it. In fact, they were not in favor. They were so angry at the Zionist movement at that stage, which had been blowing up the King David and murdering, killing, bombing British officials, that they wanted nothing to do with Zionism at that stage. It was the United States and the Soviet Union, which, for their own reasons, decided to do this. But in fact, we've had In the Middle East, what in effect has been an almost unipolar situation. Will that change in the 21st century? Again, I can't predict the future. It could. We've seen something happening in Syria which certainly involves a return of Russia in a way few people would have predicted. I have no idea what that will— how that might develop. But if that were to happen, it would change things, perhaps. Thank you. Remember, this is a dynamic situation. You have an Arab world not only fragmented, completely leaderless, completely rudderless, led by people who, frankly, I wouldn't want to work as concierges or— —bawabin, in terms of the qualities that they've demonstrated of leadership. And you have, in Israel, a country that, for all of the mistakes that it may be making in terms of its own self-interest, has developed very close relationships with what might be the major powers of the 21st century: India, China, and Russia, as well as other major countries like Brazil and so on and so forth. So to say that there will be other powers is not necessarily to say that things will change in the direction one might think. Sorry that they're so long-winded. No, no, no, thank you very much. I have one person here, one person there, And one at the back. So we'll start with the person here. Thank you so much for this wonderful presentation, Professor Khalidi. Thank you. Talha Çiçek, my name. My question is about the date that you begin with. Why 1917? The Zionist movement Began long before that date, and with the support of the Greek powers, they suppressed the Ottoman government. And Ottoman Empire also struggled against the Zionist projects, Abdul Hamid and Young Turks, and even Jamal Pasha as Safah. Yeah, I got it. Why didn't you? Thanks. Thank you. Good question. Where was the— see somebody over here? Hello, thank you again for all this wonderful information. Speak in the mic, please. My name is Lina and my question is— Lina? Lina. Lina. And my question is the elements that— of the relationship between America and Israel in particular, what are the possible— what can destabilize those? I mean, I'm not asking you to predict the future, but From what is perhaps obvious, or what will it— what are these elements that can be destabilized and what can be logically predicted as an influence on Israel in the future? Thank you. Thank you. I see a question over here. Yes, the gentleman there in the back. Up there in the back. Yes, please. Thank you. Hi, my name is Bilal. Hi. I— yes. Like, well, first of all, I was wondering if you could, like, talk a bit more on this question of, like, state culpability, because it sounds like the Iran-Iraq War example makes it seem like you're saying that, like, nobody made Saddam Hussein, like, attack Iran. But of course, like, there was a lot going on, like, that supported him through that war, like, from the beginning and through 1984, when American assistance became a lot more intense. And I was also wondering if you could touch on this question of Israel and Palestine being the site of the last major ongoing colonial conflict, because it sounds like you're taking it out of this category of postcolonial. And I'm curious as to why, because surely There are ongoing, like, colonial fragments in many countries, like the sedition law in India, like Pakistan's behavior in the Northwest Frontier, and so on and so forth. Yeah. Thank you. I've seen the lady there. Sorry? Or no? You don't want to? No? Okay. So, yes. And then we go back to you, Omar. Okay. Hello, Dr. Rashid. This is Omar Masri visiting from Jordan. First name? Omar Masri, your buddy from Amman, and a big, big fan. Dr. Rashid, I would like to know from your point of view, where does the BDS movement fit into the Palestinian struggle? Thank you. Okay, please give the mic to the lady there. And yeah, so it goes— My name is Rose Young. Dr. Rashid, where does the 2-state solution debate come into this? Surely there's a time for the Palestinian Authority to throw in the towel, to call a spade a spade and to say, forget it, we're occupied, this is a colonial project, we disband. Israel, get on with it and pay for it. And enough of two-state debates. Thank you. Thank you, Rashid. Okay, I'll try and answer these more briefly than I answered the first 3. To the questioner here about why 1917, because my focus is on international sanction for this project. The project, of course, exists before. 1917. First Zionist Congress was in Basel in 1897, and Herzl was shopping the project to the courts of Europe for years before finally Weizmann, you know, landed the British in 1917, for reasons that had nothing to do with the brown eyes of Chaim Weizmann, by the way, for reasons that had entirely to do with British strategy. I mean, there was sympathy for Zionism, there was Philosemitism. There was antisemitism as a motivation for the British decision. The British decision was an imperial decision taken for strategic reasons that went back long before 1917. I wrote a whole book about this. In fact, my first book. And that's why I start with 1917. Okay. Lina, what could destabilize American-Israeli relations? Well, I actually touched on this in my— and I think my last answer. I think that as Israel evolves more and more to being a discriminatory ethnic state that privileges its Jewish character over a state that purports to be democratic, it's gonna be harder and harder to sell that project in the United States. There's gonna be less and less sympathy. Now, that may take decades. It depends on many, many factors. It depends, among other things, on the shrewdness and the tactical intelligence of people behind campaigns like BDS, which is one of the major elements in educating people, at least in the United States, about some of the realities of the conflict. But it seems to me that that will be the factor that will destabilize things. It is going to take a lot longer for people in the United States to understand how much American support for Israel harms American interests, partly because some of these interests are not things that ordinary people really care about. Their imperial interests, their economic interests that are of concern only to American elites. Ordinary people don't know about them, don't care about them. But something like this, overt racism, discrimination, ethnic supremacy, those are things that people can relate to. Denial of equality, ordinary people can relate to. And those are things that one can see changing on college campuses already with remarkable rapidity. 20 years ago, you did not have what you have today. Right. On many American campuses. The pushback is enormous. The resistance is great. The strength of the campaigns against BDS, against groups like Students for Justice in Palestine or against groups like Jewish Voice for Peace or against BDS campaigns is ferocious. And it takes all kinds of shapes and forms, legal forms and so on and so forth. But I would argue that's how this would develop if it in fact does develop. And that has to do with Ahmad's question from the back. Right now, BDS is the only horse there is that's out there. BDS, of course, only is talking about a few basic principles. Equality, for example. One of the core arguments of BDS is there has to be equality. There has to be equality in rights for all the citizens of Israel. There has to be equality in terms of people's ability to go to their homeland. If Jews can come to Israel, why can't Palestinians? Palestinians go back to Palestine. Those are the kinds of arguments that are being made by BDS. And this is an incredibly good tool for educating people. It's not a substitute for what has to also happen, which is the Palestinian people managing to resuscitate their national movement, developing a reasonable and sensible and realistic strategy, and having, for the first time in their modern history, a serious attempt to explain and carry that strategy to the rest of the world. Okay. Those are the things that have to happen, really, for some of these things to change fundamentally. State culpability, the question that Bilal asked in the back. There you are, you moved. Well, I mean, I don't wanna really talk about— I brought up Saddam just to argue for agency outside of the superpowers. The superpowers, of course, encouraged Iraq. At least the United States did, and the Soviet Union supported it as well. Iraq was supported also by the Arab Gulf countries. So it was overdetermined. But the decisions were made by Iraqi leaders. Now, it was a horrific dictatorship. The Iraqi people don't deserve to suffer for the criminal and imbecilic actions of their leaders, and they have suffered. But it was an Iraqi decision taken by Iraqi leaders, and there's culpability there, criminal culpability. And you think that the U.S. should have intervened? In my view, culpability. The other part of your question about Palestine as a site of the last colonial conflict. India or Egypt are countries which you can talk about in terms of post-colonial situations. In other words, these are situations where the heritage and legacy of colonialism is still working itself out. Right. I agree with you if that's what you're suggesting. Palestine is not in a post-colonial situation. Go to the West Bank and you will see an active colonial settler situation. It's not in the past working out a legacy. It's in the present. Go to Hebron, best place. Go to Hebron. Khalid, spend one day and you'll see. It's just, it's, it's— It's a nightmare. Immediately apparent to anyone with the eyes to see and the sense to understand. One cannot misinterpret it. And so Palestine is not in a post-colonial situation. Palestine is in a colonial settler war ongoing. You can talk about South Africa as a post-colonial world with all of the traces of colonialism still there, with all of the problems Moved into another phase. You can't talk about Palestine in that way. Rose's question, Rose Young, last question. Where does the 2-state solution, and when will the PA throw in the towel? Well, firstly, I will always argue with anyone who still advocates a 2-state solution that I'd love to see how they would argue for it coming about. Given everything that Israel has done to make a 2-state solution impossible over the past many, many, many decades. Israel didn't want a 2-state solution in 1947. It wanted a Jewish state in Palestine. That's all it wanted. It did everything it could to make sure that there wouldn't be a second state. Of course, there was British collusion in that. There was Jordanian collusion in that. It did everything it could in 1967 and has done everything possible since 1967. And They have determined most of the outcomes. There's still Palestinian nationalism, there's still Palestinian resistance, but the possibility of a 2-state solution, I would argue to any advocate of such a solution, seems to me to have been reduced almost to nil. So, that's the first part. The second problem, of course, has to do with my first answer. That doesn't deal with the desire of the Palestinians for self-determination and statehood. To say that a 2-state solution is impossible doesn't speak to this desire of Palestinians who've never had a state to have a state. Thank you. So there's a paradox there. The second thing I would say to you, when will the PA throw in its towel? When people with deep vested interests decide to become idealists or are forced to do so. You have in Ramallah, in the bubble of the Green Zone, the most privileged class in Palestine outside of— or I should say within the occupied Palestinian territories. Yes. You have people who are living the life of Riley, as we say in the United States. I don't know if that expression is used in this country. Yes. You have people who are living in where all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Their contracts are getting them profits, their salaries are paid, their Audis are humming beautifully, their children go to universities like this one. They have no problems. As long as the donors keep donating to maintain the status quo of colonization, settlement, occupation. So there has to be pressure on them. And that actually has to be pressure either from the donors, i.e., you or us— it's my tax dollars, it's your tax dollars that underwrite this colonization project— and the Palestinian Authority, which is a prop of this colonization project. Or from the Palestinians themselves. And I don't know when that will come. It may come sooner than we think. I mean, we don't know. We can't predict the future. You want to take one or two more, or are we done? You want one more round? This woman has been raising her hand. Yes, absolutely. Let's let her. Maybe two more, her and him. Please, the lady here. Hi, my name is Ozzy. I'm actually an American going to school here. Audrey? Ozzy. Ozzy? Yes, Ozzy. As in Ozzy and Harriet? Just like that. Gotcha. None of you understood that reference. I have— I'm going to shoot 2 quick questions at you. A, what do you think about J Street? I worked with NIAC last summer and did a lot of— You worked with? NIAC. And did a lot of advocacy work with them for the Iran nuclear deal and all that. So I'd like to know what your take is on what they're doing on the 2-state solution. And then, what are your thoughts on change of behavior in the administration if Bernie Sanders was to get elected president? A minor question. And, well, the 2 gentlemen behind, since you are there with the mic, thank you. Thank you very much, Flori. Thanks very much. Irad, please. Yes. Can you hear me? I can. Irad Bagherzadeh. I know. But they should know you. In the often unpleasant world, but always real world, of realpolitik, The situation of Palestine always needs to be assessed in the context of real political situations. And amongst this, we have to look at the issue of Palestine's leadership and leaderships. And you, as a historian, I would like to hear what you have to say as a historian about the quality of Palestinian leadership over the last 50, 60, 100 years, and whether you feel that this quality of leadership has actually contributed to the problems that Palestine has today, and would the situation today actually be better if we had more Rashid Khalidis operating in the leadership situation? Thank you, Irad. The last thing you want in political leadership is academics. Louise, please. There's one. This will be well. Okay, one more. And yeah, كيفية كيف جيد بقى كيفية كيفية كيفية كيفية. It's enough. It's enough. Let me just answer these. That's enough. You can ask me questions afterwards. You won't have the microphone. So yeah, indeed. We we don't have much time. Okay, the Aussie. J Street. J Street. What J Street did on the Iran nuclear deal was actually very good. It helped to do something that was much needed, in fact. And it does a couple of other good things. I've had friends who've been taken to the occupied territories by J Street, and they've been dumbstruck. They turned from, you know, soft liberal Zionists into anti-Zionists, and that's a good thing. People really see the reality And they— it becomes harder and harder for them to maintain some of the misconceptions that they have. I've had many friends who've done that, influential people in some cases. So it's good work. I think that what I said about the 2-state solution, I would say to any advocate of J Street. If you want a 2-state solution, figure out how you're going to undo decades and decades and decades of Israeli policies designed to prevent, under any circumstances, a 2-state solution. They're the main obstacle. And so that's what J Street should be working on, if you want to follow that course. As far as the change of behavior in the United States if Bernie Sanders became president, I knew well a politician who was a local figure in our community and who became the president of the United States. Yeah. And what I sort of knew as a historian, I learned from personal experience, which is that when you put the robes of the emperor on, you become emperor. Whoever you are, you know, Caligula made his horse a god. And, you know, emperors can do what they want, but they are constricted and constrained. Same is true of a king in an absolute monarchy. And the United States is the most powerful state on Earth, and it has very powerful interests. And I think we've seen perfectly well, whatever his intentions may have been— and I won't even speculate on that— With this president, or with other presidents, like, I would argue, President Carter, who have had ideas that were different than the outcomes, how limited the ability of an American president, within the constraints of the American political system, are to change things. That said, it's not clear to me what Bernie Sanders would do on Palestine. Right. Um, it's not clear to me in his record that he would necessarily be fundamentally different than other Democratic presidents, uh, who, in my view, have done great harm, uh, over the years, going back to Harry Truman and right up to Barack Obama, each in his own way. Um, perhaps not as great harm as Hillary Clinton will do— —if she's elected, and certainly not as great harm as the current Republican candidates will do. But that's not saying much. And so I really don't know. I think we really have to see how he will— how— whether— I mean, chances of his becoming the president are, I would say, limited. But if he does, we'll see. 2008 negotiations, Olmert. Arthur, I think you should read my book. I hate to say this to somebody, but you might have a look at my book, Brokers of Deceit. Which actually doesn't deal with the 2008 negotiations. It doesn't. But I suggest you look at it, because what it argues, based on the work of one of my former students who's in this room, is that in fact the basic outlines for everything that Israel and the United States have done were laid down in Begin's conceptions for Palestinian autonomy, as determined in 1978, before and during Camp David. Israel was not willing to limit its colonization and settlement of the West Bank under any circumstances. It was not willing to limit its control, its essential control, under any circumstances. I don't think that any Israeli prime minister has gotten far beyond those boundaries. You may argue Olmert did more, or might have done more, Barak might have done more. I doubt that in both cases. But have a look at that, 'cause I think that those are constraints. I mean, I talked about the constraints on a US president. I think these are constraints in terms of the structure. Thank you. That we're stuck with. And I'm dreading the Obama administration imposing something which will, in essence, be based on Madrid-Oslo, which is based in turn on Begin's ideas for Camp David. I would love to see anybody breaking out of those constraints, but I just don't see that happening. Realpolitik. Yeah. Well, I actually— again, it sounds immodest, but I actually wrote a book in which I spent a lot of energy and time saying some very critical things about 2 or 3 generations of Palestinian leadership, going back to the leadership, the elite leadership of the '20s and the '30s and the '40s, which failed in a number of ways. And where had— almost all the choices they faced were bad choices. So the question is, what would have been the least bad choice they could have taken? Why? Because they were trying— first of all, this was an era in which no people, with the sole exception of the Irish, between World War I and World War II, were able to achieve any measure of self-determination. Right. This was still a colonial world, governed by old colonial powers. What the Palestinians could have done was necessarily limited by that. The British poured huge forces into Palestine in '37, '38, '39 to maintain their control of that country. If the Palestinians had revolted earlier, maybe there would have been a different outcome. Maybe they would have gotten the limited self-government that the Iraqis got. in 1921, or that the Egyptians got in 1922. But that's a big if. Within those constraints, I think the Palestinian leadership made terrible choices, in many cases. Terrible, terrible choices. They were extremely limited in their understanding. They didn't understand that their problem was Britain. They kept thinking their problem was the Zionist movement. Their problem wasn't the Zionist movement. The Zionist movement was nothing without Britain. Their problem was Britain. Which meant an entirely different strategy. Which meant understanding how to deal with Britain, not sending your wives to have tea with the wife of the high commissioner, not, you know, going to London and beseeching the British colonial secretary. A completely different strategy was called for. The Indians had a better understanding, both of Britain and of their situation, in the interwar period. Every variant of Indian— the Indian national movement had a better understanding of their predicament than did the Palestinian leadership. So it was terrible. I would say the same thing about Palestinian leadership in the recent era, from the '70s onward. The decisions that were taken, one by one, one by one, one could go through them, were often— not all of them, many of them— often decisions that were really quite misguided and were based on serious miscalculations of the international balance of forces, of how to deal with Israel, of how to deal with the Arab environment. I must repeat, in every one of these cases, the Palestinians were dealing with very unfavorable circumstances. I've been criticized by people near and dear to me, in some cases, for being too harsh on the Palestinian leadership. I don't think I was too harsh. But one has to admit that these were not easy decisions. These were often a decision in which, if you took the least bad alternative, the outcome might not have been very good, but it would have been better than the outcomes that we've had. And in fact, I think this is the crux of the problem. The Zionist movement has had some quite extraordinary leaders. The Palestinians have had some extraordinary leaders. Many of them ended up dead, however, assassinated in most cases. In the coming period, if the fundamentals of this situation or to change, some part of this is on the Palestinians themselves. And just to conclude, you don't want academics as political leaders. Trust me. Trust me. You want people who have the ability to do hard and sometimes nasty things, and people who are able to move lots and lots and lots of people, not in a lecture hall, in a much larger— on a much larger stage. You're also making people