“Violence Is Bred by Occupation:” Historian Rashid Khalidi

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, what will America’s Unwavering support for Israel mean for long-term peace, as we’ve been discussing? In a recent “New York Times” opinion piece, Palestinian American historian Rashi Khalidi raises his concerns over U.S. policy. And the Columbia University professor talks to Michel Martin about how this could go on for many more years. And a note, this conversation was recorded just before the hospital blast in Gaza last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Khalidi, thank you so much for speaking with us.

RASHID KHALIDI, EDWARD SAID PROFESSOR OF MODERN ARAB STUDIES, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND AUTHOR, “THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ON PALESTINE”: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So, can I just start with the human question? You know, how are you?

KHALIDI: I’ve been better. I’ve been through a war in Lebanon for nine or 10 years. So, I’ve had the experience close up. But when I’m hearing from family in Palestine and what I’m hearing from my students is very distressing. But we’re managing, so far.

MARTIN: Could you just give me a sense of just what your reaction was? What went through your mind when you heard of the events of last week? As we are speaking now, we are a week — about a week or so past the attack, which sort of set off this current — the current situation that we’re here to talk about. Could you mind just telling me what went through your mind?

KHALIDI: Well, I was shocked and surprised when it started, obviously. I was horrified by the initial accounts and the images that came out of Israel, initially. And I began to fear for Gaza, people in Gaza, because I knew that what would follow would be hellish and it has been. And it’s extended now to other areas so far in a limited way, but I’m very, very fearful for what may be to come. So, one of the reasons we called you is that you are a historian and I think that — and you’ve also written a piece in “The New York Times,” an essay, which people can read if they are so inclined. At the core of it, from my read of it, is that you want to make the point that history didn’t start last week. So, as briefly as you can, what would you say were the seminal events that are relevant to our understanding of what is happening now?

KHALIDI: I’ll try and be brief. But very simply, the bulk of the population in the Gaza Strip are not from Gaza. They are refugees who were driven out of their homes in the southern parts of what is now Israel. So, the settlements that were overrun on Saturday in many places are in place of Palestinian towns and villages. That these people whose parents and grandparents were driven into the Gaza Strip. So, this is a refugee population, made refugees by the Nakba of 1948, in the great majority. The second thing I would say is that they have been imprisoned in a sort of open-air prison camp since 2007. There’s been a siege and a blockade. Most people in the Gaza Strip have not been able to leave the Gaza Strip in that time. Most people in the Gaza Strip have been basically subjected to this for much of — if not most of their lives. About half of them are children. And so, they’ve lived their entire life blockaded in an area a little smaller than Detroit, 2.2 or 3 million people. And that’s some of the history. There’s a much deeper history to the failure, the utter failure of the United States to do anything to resolve this, the efforts of the ’90s failed and nothing has been really done since then. There is the failure of the Israeli government to offer any political horizon to the Palestinians over a very long period of time. There are many other things.

MARTIN: Why now? And I just want to emphasize again for people who just may be joining our conversation that you’re not a spokesperson for Hamas. You’re not a part of it. Hamas is a political party with a military wing. It’s a political movement. And you know, but you’re not a spokesman for them. You’re not a strategist for them. But I am interested, as a historian, in what is your take on why this happened now? I mean, there are those who argue that this is because the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia have been part of these talks to, you know, consider normalizing relationships between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and that this was meant to disrupt it. You know, the people, you know, don’t think that’s true. And other people say this is just this is just another example, you know, of Hamas is kind of suicidal, you know, tendencies.

KHALIDI: The first thing is, it would really be worthwhile for the people who babble on about Hamas’ essential nature to do some reading into the history of Hamas. It’s gone back and forth in different ways. At one stage, it was supported by and encouraged by the Israeli Intelligence Services as a counter to the PLO back in the 1980s when it was founded in early ’90s. Israeli analysts have talked about that. There’s a lot of information about that. Secondly, it has evolved over time. It has all kinds of elements that I personally find objectionable in their politics and in their practice. But they have changed in various ways over time. The third thing that I would say is, I don’t think we should look at what happened starting a week ago, Saturday, as the beginning of this. They have been planning this for a while. And the reasons that they gave — their military commander gave a statement early in the morning of Saturday, October 7th, where he said, Jerusalem — what’s happening in Jerusalem, settlements, what’s happening in terms of the expansion of settlements and what Israeli settlers in the West Bank are doing, and other things are the causes for this. I think the causes go deeper. So, I can’t say why they did what they did at the time that they did it. But I certainly can say that there have been evolutions in the policy of Hamas. For example, they joined a coalition government after the elections of 2006, and they said they would allow the PA to negotiate with Israel, and that they were offering a 100-year truce. Now, that may not have been satisfactory to Israelis, but at least exploring that, which the United States and Israel refused to do, might have been better than are going down the path that we’ve gone down since 2006.

MARTIN: What do you think is your role right now?

KHALIDI: I’m a historian. I believe that context is important. I believe that history is important. I believe that if you see what happened — the – – what happened in Israeli settlements on the day and days immediately after this attack, what is happening now in Gaza, and you just look at that, you won’t understand anything at all. And if you don’t understand something about urban warfare and about warfare in heavily populated places, and what that does to people, you will understand nothing. What is happening and is going to happen in Gaza is sowing the seeds of things that we’re going to deal with in the two 2020s and ’30s. And I don’t see the military strategist, American or Israeli, thinking about that. I don’t think Hamas cared about that, frankly. That wasn’t — that — I don’t think that was it. And that’s to me, obviously a tragedy. But — as a Palestinian and as a person with family there. But I think that it is now incumbent on American politicians to think not just of the next election, of course, that’s what they think about, but to think about where does this lead, this part of the world, on the day after whatever Israel decides to do? And I don’t think there’s been enough thinking about that. And looking at the history of the United States in the Middle East, what happened in Iraq, for example, should lead us to think a little more carefully, perhaps.

MARTIN: You mentioned, you know, elections. You said people should think ahead to the next elections. One of these sorts of ongoing issues here is that, you know, Hamas has been sort of in — sort of titular control of Gaza since, you know, 2006, you know, 2007. They haven’t had elections in that time. What — they could have, they didn’t. Why — how should people think about that? I mean, can you argue that they have a mandate from the Palestinian people for what they’re doing now? And if that’s not the case, then how should we think about that?

KHALIDI: I don’t think they, any longer, have whatever mandate they might have gotten in the 2006 elections. And of course, there should be elections. This has been a demand of Palestinian civil society for a very, very long time. I support that. There should be a democratically elected and an entirely new Palestinian leadership. One of the problems that Palestinians have had historically is that their leadership has often been unrepresentative and it’s often been tone-deaf. Two really important things. And I think that’s true of all the leaderships today. And I — it’s a tragedy for the Palestinians above all, but it’s a tragedy for everybody in the Middle East, including Israelis. I won’t say anything about Israeli leadership, but certainly, I will say about Palestinian leadership that this has been a longstanding problem. The United States has done nothing to foster elections. Let’s — let that be clear, when there was an effort to have elections recently, the United States came down against that and has not — has done nothing when an elected government was produced in 2006 to try and see if it could deal with that elected government. Instead, the United States went in another direction, which is a terrible, terrible mistake, in my view.

MARTIN: So, there are two points that I want to sort of rise from the piece that you just posted in “The New York Times.” There are two points that I think that you’re making. One is, you just talked about the role of the US. government, you had a lot to say about that. I mean, you said, it’s past time for the United States to cease repeating empty words about a two- state solution while providing money, weapons and diplomatic support for systemic calculated Israeli actions that have made that solution inconceivable, as it has for roughly half a century. As you and I are speaking, President Biden is, in fact, heading to Israel. Your thoughts about that. Now that he is going, what role would you like to see the U.S. play now?

KHALIDI: What I would like to see this president or any American president do is to say the political horizon for the Palestinians includes an end to occupation within X months, not in never, never land, not in final status talks that will never take place. That’s what we were told when I was negotiating in Washington in ’91 to ’93. Oh, there’ll be final status talks. We’ll deal with that later. No, end of occupation. Why not? There has to be an end of occupation. Violence is bred by occupation. Anybody who doesn’t understand that, doesn’t understand anything. Secondly, an end to settlement expansion and rolling back of settlements. If you don’t tell the Palestinians, we’re going to stop this, you’re not going to have an end to violence because when people’s land is taken away and they’re not given rights, of course, they’re going to rise up sooner or later. And finally, I think the United States has to look at the Palestinians as if there are people equal to any other people. They need to have the same rights as Israelis or any other people on Earth. If we support democracy for Ukraine or wherever it may be, we should be supporting democracy for Palestinians. And if we support self-determination and it end occupation, we should be supporting it for Palestinians as well.

MARTIN: But how do you then address Israel’s legitimate security concerns? I mean, the fact of the matter is that there were six openings from Gaza to Israel at the beginning of the withdrawal of Israelis from the Gaza Strip. And in the wake of repeated suicide bombings, that’s why four of the six were closed and limited to two. And you talked about sort of the open-air prison, that is it part — why that decision didn’t happen in a vacuum.

KHALIDI: I mean, we are now so far down the road from where we were in 2005 when Israel withdrew and built its system of control of Gaza from without. We’re so far down the road from the 2006 elections or 2007 when Hamas took over Gaza. And a lot of water has flown under the bridge. But I think we have to step back and say, where are we going? Is Israel going to permanently occupy Gaza? Is anybody going to do that for them? If not, what do you do? You have to address the political problems at the root of this. If you just apply security band aids and periodic bombings of civilians, which is basically all Israel has offered for the better part of the decade more, you will get more violence. Violence produces violence. Massive violence produces massive violent reactions. I mean, this is not, how should I say, rocket science.

MARTIN: But the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected the peace proposals that 1991. I mean, is it — how should we think about that?

KHALIDI: Well, there’s proposals and there are peace proposals. If you’re talking about a peace proposal, you’re talking about a proposal which involves sovereignty, statehood, and independence for the Palestinians. No American proposal has ever led to that or been meant to lead to that. I mean, I was sitting there in Madrid, and I was sitting there in Washington, and from a distance I watched the Oslo process. At no stage did that process definitively say we are going to end occupation, we’re going to roll back settlements, and at the end, you will have an independent Palestinian State. If you don’t do those things, those are not peace proposals. Those are proposals to put the status quo in formaldehyde. That’s what the United States and Israel have done, ever since Madrid. Those were not peace proposals. Unless you mean the peace of the dead or the peace of people who submit to not having equal rights, to not having sovereignty, to not ending a foreign military occupation that’s gone on for 56 years. I don’t accept that those were peace proposals. Even what Rabin said. Rabin went further than any Israeli leader. A couples — a couple of others got up to that point. He said in his last speech before the Knesset, there will not be an independent Palestinian State. That was a time before you had suicide bombing, by the way. That was a time when Arafat and the PLO were wildly popular among Palestinians. And an agreement could have been sell sold effectively. The United States and Israel just didn’t take that option of really pushing the thing to the end. How do you deal with Jerusalem? How do you deal with refugees? Nobody ever came up with a with a proper solution to these core problems. So, they were not peace proposals. They were proposals. There was a process. There was no peace.

MARTIN: One of the significant points in your piece, though, is the level of violence, the level of carnage that is now being visited upon the people of Gaza, many of whom, as you point out, you know, are children. And I note that you point out how unequal the death toll is.

KHALIDI: Yes.

MARTIN: And I have to ask about that. We know that somewhere between 1,200 — perhaps 1,400 people who are on the Israeli side were killed in the Hamas attacks. We know that around 200 people have been taken hostage. We don’t know how many of them survive. And you also point out that 3,000 Palestinians have died in these attacks. But the numbers, I mean, is the — is that really where this argument lies? Is that a moral argument?

KHALIDI: No, no. No, it’s not a moral argument, obviously. I mean, any civilian death. I’m not talking about a combat death. Any civilian death is a moral tragedy, obviously. But I think that numbers come in not as a moral question but simply there are ways of making war, which advanced technological societies employ, which involve the killing of huge numbers of civilians who are never somehow counted in the calculus. Oh, that’s collateral damage. Oh, we didn’t mean to do it. If a pilot does it from 1,000 feet and kills 50 people or some somebody with a gun comes in and murders 50 people, there is a difference, obviously. But, in the last analysis, if this is a violation of the rules of war, on the one hand, it’s a violation of the rules of war, on the other hand. If it violates our ethical and our moral standards, on the one hand, it does on the other. I’m not suggesting that a higher death count means a higher morality, I’m simply saying, one kind of killing of civilians is only and only that kind is called terrorism, and another kind of systematic killing of civilians with much higher death tolls is simply ignored.

MARTIN: I mean, is it honestly being ignored? You don’t think — or is it that you feel that the president and others representing the administration have not sufficiently noted the cost?

KHALIDI: The language. This is terrorism. This is self-defense and security. I mean, the very language indicates this is morally abhorrent. And if you don’t say that it’s morally abhorrent, you’re not allowed to speak. And this, well, this is bad, but understandable, and we want to limit it. That will not wash with me. If this is abhorrent, this is also abhorrent. This form of making war, which kills — I mean, they’ve killed hundreds of children. Now, many children were killed in Israel. That’s abhorrent. But isn’t the killing of children in a certain kind of technological warfare also important as an inevitable result? Dozens, hundreds are killed for every one supposed target that they’re going after. And this is not new. This has been happening in the case of Gaza for a very, very long time.

MARTIN: So, before I let you go, is there anything that gives you hope in the moment, that there will be a better day?

KHALIDI: It’s a very grim, dark, bleak moment. And it’s really hard to find any hope. I’ve seen shocks like this change opinions. I’m hoping that a shock like this will change opinions about getting to the root of things and not just dealing with security situations. Security situations emerge from deeper issues. Crime is not just crime. Crime is a deep social issue. Terrorism is not just terrorism, there’s issues there. And if we don’t address them, we’re condemned to go through this again and again and again, like a terrible nightmarish horror movie. And I hope that we’ll move away from that. I hope that people will understand they have — everybody has to have equal rights. Everybody has to have equal security. Israel’s security, security of Israelis, but what about the security of Palestinians? And I hope and pray that we can go in that direction, even though I think maybe what’s just happened starting a week ago, Saturday, has made it a little harder, perhaps.

MARTIN: Rashid Khalidi, thank you so much for speaking with us.

KHALIDI: Thank you.