Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

(I have copied the entire NYRB interview in this thread. It is worth reading.)

The historian Rashid Khalidi has, for many years, been a preeminent Arab-American intellectual and among the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the aftermath of the armed incursion by Hamas and other militant groups on Israeli territory on October 7 last year, and of the ongoing Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon that followed, Khalidi and his work have only increased in relevance. His book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), which frames the history of Palestinian dispossession as a settler-colonial project dependent on elite support in the West, has been a fixture on the New York Times best-seller list for much of the past year.

Khalidi was born in New York City, where his Palestinian father was a member of the United Nations Secretariat. While relating the history of Palestine through six major acts of war on its people, his book draws on the archive of his father’s family. It begins, for instance, with an extraordinary correspondence in 1899 between his great-great-great-uncle Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, who had been mayor of Jerusalem, and Theodor Herzl, the progenitor of modern political Zionism.

Khalidi recently retired from Columbia University, where he was Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies in the Department of History. In the past academic year, he was a prominent faculty supporter of the student protests at Columbia. We conducted this conversation, via e-mail and over online video chat, in late October and early November of this year.

—Mark O’Connell

nybooks.com/articles/2024/… via @nybooks Mark O’Connell: I wanted to begin by asking what your initial reaction was, both as a Palestinian American and as a historian of the Middle East, to the attacks on October 7 of last year.

Rashid Khalidi: I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I’ve always expected that the intensity of Israeli repression would eventually produce a response, but I was certainly surprised by the extent of that response. The overrunning of Israeli military bases and border settlements was something I certainly did not expect.

That was my first reaction. My second reaction, when the reports began to come in of the extent of civilian casualties, was shock. And I was deeply concerned: I knew that it would have an enormous impact here in the US and would lead to an absolutely ferocious Israeli military response.

O’Connell: Has anything about the scale and ferocity of that response, or the reaction to that response in the West, shocked you or surprised you in the course of this past year?

Khalidi: No. The savagery of what Israel has done, its intentional targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure, is routine. The level of it was unprecedented, obviously; the Palestinian death toll and now the growing Lebanese death toll are beyond what we’ve seen before. But that they would attack desalination plants and sewage plants and universities and demolish mosques and so on didn’t surprise me in the least.

If there was anything that was unexpected, it was the participation of the US government on every level, and its complete unwillingness to restrain Israel in any significant fashion. And by participation, I mean a repetition of Israeli lies. The idea that Israel was not trying to kill people on purpose; the idea that every time Palestinians were killed, it was because they were being used as human shields; completely ignoring the purposeful destruction of infrastructure in order to make life impossible; the fact that the US government repeated every single Israeli justification for the unjustifiable: I found that over the top, frankly. This administration has done less to restrain Israel than pretty much any administration, except perhaps the previous one, the Trump administration.

In other words, you go back to Eisenhower, or Reagan, or anybody, and they were always complicit. They were always involved. They always supported Israel up to a point. But that point would come after months or weeks. And here we are in month thirteen. That point has not come.

O’Connell: And so at what point do we stop talking about America’s “complicity” in this slaughter, and begin to talk of America as an antagonist, of America being at war with Palestine?

Khalidi: That has always been my view. When we were negotiating with the Israelis in Washington, I realized that actually the Americans and the Israelis were really on the same side, opposed to us.* It was in effect a joint delegation. Now you actually have revelations in the American press of joint targeting, and of intelligence operations to find and kill leaders of Hezbollah and of Hamas. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the United States is actually directly at war. It’s an intense, high-level collaboration in planning and targeting. Not to speak of the fact that virtually every shell, every missile, every bomb is American, and that the Israeli army couldn’t go on for more than three months without those hundreds of airlifted shipments. So it is participation at an active level without, for the most part, boots on the ground.

5 takeaways from Israel’s killing of Nasrallah

1. This is a turning point for the region and the axis of resistance. Israel has made a stunning show of its power, intelligence capabilities, and of Western technological and military superiority. If anyone had any doubts about Israeli power after Oct 7, those doubts have been dispelled. Iran turns out to be the paper tiger that many said it was. 2. The root problem of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians has not been solved, indeed, it will only get worse. There are 7 million Palestinians living in historic Palestine. The 5.5 million living in the occupied territories have no rights, no sovereignty, no hope of self-determination. Netanyahu will come out of his Lebanon gambit a towering hero, who has secured his legacy and life’s work, which is to frustrate the two-state solution, ensure that no Palestinian state emerges in any part of historic Palestine, and that the occupied territories become Israeli territory. It is a great day for the messianic wing of Israel. Israel is likely to lurch to the right, disregard Palestinian hopes, and exacerbate its infractions of international law and norms.

Why would @CAIRNational support sanctioning 17 million more Muslims?

The US #Sanctions are designed to keep #Syria in ruins and to stop reconstruction of the country, and stop foreign investment.

There is no U.S. plan to get rid of Assad or his security state.

This bill… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… To understand what's wrong with this bill you have to put it in the context of our current (failed) policy on #Syria

This two minute explanation by Dana Stroul gives a good summary of the policy



As Sproul says, the Assad-controlled areas of Syria are… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

WSJ claims that “The Arab League’s about-turn, en­gi­neered by Riyadh, co­in-cides with Wash­ing­ton’s wan­ing in­flu­ence in the region. “

Why?

B/c the “U.S. has of­ten pressed for de­moc­ra­tiza­tion.”

But this is wrong. ==> 🧵 wsj.com/articles/syria… US policy makers had decided by 2013 that they did not want to see the Syrian military destroyed b/c they feared that the opposition was dominated by radical Islamists & the country might fall apart.

The US chose Assad over the alternatives.

Blaming Russia is disingenuous

Jordanians want sanctions on Syria lifted

Jordan's exports to Syria increased by 23% during the first 7 months of 2022, but are not close to prewar levels.

Jordanian economists demand that the Caesar Act that disrupted trade be lifted.

ammannet.net/english/jordan… “The international sanctions on #Syria must be lifted, and Jordanian-Syrian economic relations must return to the status quo ante,” wrote Musa Al Saket, a member of the Amman Chamber of Commerce.

US tries to thwart Turkish invasion of northern #Syria again

But with no long-term Syria policy, everyone sees the US commitment to the Kurds as weak and vacillating.

SDF Commander Mazlum Kobane insists that the US must do more: =>🧵

al-monitor.com/originals/2022… via @AlMonitor Russia wants us to seek an agreement #Syria, Kobani told Zaman

“As for the U.S., they need to articulate a policy on Syria. They have no strategy beyond fighting [ISIS] and have failed to formulate a clear policy with regard to the future of the areas under our control.

Shifting energy import patterns enhance China’s clout in the Middle East

China became in 2016 the largest investor in the Arab world with investments worth $29.5 billion, targeted at infrastructure, industrial parks, pipelines, ports, and roads. Total bilateral trade b/n Saudi Arabia & China grew from $42.4 billion in 2010 to $76 billion in 2019, quickly making China the top trading partner for Saudi Arabia.

In 2020, China replaced the European Union as the GCC’s largest trading partner.

agsiw.org/growing-china-…

The logic of Turkey and Syria returning to the Adana Agreement of 1998 or something approaching it is overwhelming.

Both Turks and Americans are learning that ruling hunks of Syria and unruly Syrians, is a thankless task that will sink them into ever growing trouble.

https://twitter.com/Karam__Shaar/status/1557324981163286529

1. Idlib & N Aleppo cannot be made into a viable state. Neither can Kurdish led N.E. Syria.
2. ISIS is strengthened by Syria's partition into 3 waring parts.
3. There is no internat'l legitimacy to the N. Syrian statelets, which means that no oil company will undertake repairs.

I am linking to two videos made by a graduate student in Great Britain, Jalal Imran, as a part of his research on #Syria

Jisr video 1 t.me/WaR2011sl/6 (On Telegram)

This videos covers the violent episode in Jisr al-Shughour area in Syria in early June 2011.

Thread => This early phase of the Syrian conflict was characterized as a period of peaceful and spontaneous protests. The videos contradict this narrative.

The 1st video shows that large-scale violence in Jisr (dozens of Syrian security forces were killed) was the result of

Syrian Kurds seek Damascus's support against Turkish military action

The SDF & the Syrian gov forces are negotiating a joint operations command room, a Kurdish leader said.

"Our military coordination with the regime is developing.”

By @AlkanjSultan

al-monitor.com/originals/2022… Syria's Kurds have no where to turn but to Damascus & Russia to halt Turkey's expansion of a buffer zone.

The U.S, the traditional defender of the Kurds, seems to have accepted the Kurdish-Damascus rapprochement as the best outcome.

The US needs better relations with Turkey.

The connectedness of the Syrian & Lebanese Pounds until 2021

When Syria cut subsidies.

worldbank.org/en/country/syr… The depreciation of the Syrian pound gained momentum with the start of the Lebanese currency crisis in late 2019. Following the onset of Lebanon’s financial crisis, the correlation between the movements and volatilities of the Lebanese Pound and SYP increased.

The best way to stop the Captagon trade of Syria is to engage #Syria gov economically & diplomatically.

That is how the Lebanese Hashish trade of the 1980s was stopped.

That is how the Turkish heroin trade of 1960s was stopped. 80% of heroin used in US came from Turkey.

https://twitter.com/M_Alneser/status/1540659755244523521

Syrian gov is happy to sell drugs to KSA b/c it can sell nothing else.

It is humiliating to deal with Assad, but it is the best way to fight the drug trade

Chaos & poverty also lead to illicit drug trade.

Lifting sanctions & negotiating w Damas is perhaps the best way forward

'Al Qaeda Is on our Side': How Obama-Biden team knowingly empowered terrorists in Syria.

This article by @aaronjmate is a tour de force.

Thread =>

mate.substack.com/p/al-qaeda-is-… 1/9 The only element missing in @aaronjmate 's excellent article on how the US partnered with al-Qaida in Syria is the CIA's strategy

Two interviews explain CIA strategy. It was to force Assad's exit without destroying the Syrian military.
cbsnews.com/news/the-brief…

Police in Addis Ababa have begun going door to door, searching for Tigrayans who may be sympathetic to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The TPLF dominated the country’s politics for 30 years before Abiy took power, & are resented by non-Tigrayans.

washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/… the U.N. predicts hundreds of thousands of refugees may try to enter Djibouti, Kenya and Somaliland, an autonomous region of Somalia.

Addis Ababa, home to around 5 million people.

Hunted by the Taliban and lacking income, members of Afghanistan’s disbanded security forces are enlisting in ISIS, the only resistance movement fighting the new rulers - not unlike Iraq’s disbanded security forces when the US put their enemies in charge. wsj.com/articles/left-… The number of defectors joining the terrorist group is relatively small, but growing, according to people who know these men, to former Afghan security officials & to the Taliban. Importantly, these new recruits bring to ISIS critical expertise in intelligence-gathering & warfare

Afghanistan is on the brink of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the un said on October 25th, exceeding even the misery in Syria and Yemen.

A new report from un agencies estimates that some 23m of the country’s 38m people will not have enough food. economist.com/asia/2021/10/3… The un estimates that half of Afghanistan was living on less than $1.90 a day when Kabul fell. By the middle of 2022, that may rise to 97%. “We’ve not seen this level of near universal poverty in any country in recent history,” said Kanni Wignaraja of the un

HUNGER by @AbuJamajem

A record 12.4 mil. Syrians are now “food insecure.”

That's 4.5 million more people than before the Lebanon bankruptcy. Syrians depended on Lebanon's banking system.

Hunger is a regional phenomenon, not just Syrian.

Fixing it requires a regional response

https://twitter.com/AbuJamajem/status/1402092314005286912

Hunger in Syria seems to be primarily a result of “access” problems—the Syrian public’s destroyed purchasing power, & its immiseration generally.

Yet Syria also has “availability” problems with key imported goods, including wheat & fuel, that reverberated through the economy.

The Jihadist, al-Jolani, on PBS TV

Martin Smith does a fine job of outlining America's dilemma in Idlib

A top US policy maker calls al-Jolani the "least bad option" for Idlib.

Oddly, CIA Chief Brennan said the same thing about Assad.

See thread =>

disq.us/t/3xdadyn in March 2015, months before the Russians stepped in to defend Assad against al-Jolani & Caliph Baghdadi, Brennan explained that the US did not want to see a collapse of the Syrian regime as it could open the way to Islamist extremists taking power.

timesofisrael.com/cia-us-does-no…

Turkey's mob boss Peker: Turkey diverted aid and Military Weapons originally meant for Syria's Turkmen to 'Nusra' and allied extremists militias.

By @sfrantzman

jpost.com/middle-east/mo… Peker confirms that Albayrak managed the illegal oil trade with the terrorist group Al-Nusra. This was already known from Russian sources and should finally be accepted by Western analysts.

https://twitter.com/MartinGlasenapp/status/1398895509885030406

The Syrian Elections are not about popular sovereignty. Everyone knows the outcome.

They are about Assad declaring victory in the war - his wish that the revolution be seen to be over.

His unstated opponent is the Syrian opp., who argue that the revolution can still succeed.

https://twitter.com/WataniS/status/1397125821115125761

These videos of supporters, like his main election slogan - "Hope is in Work" - are meant to convince people to put their heads down and go back to work - to accept the reality: the uprising is over & Assad remains.

The opposition states the opposite.

https://twitter.com/ibrahimbinmasud/status/1397272452540084232

A Saudi-Syr-Dutch firm has partnered with a French firm to build in Syria.

This is much needed to alleviate Syria's crisis. Building on two major electric plants in Syria has come to a stand-still because of US's latest sanctions.

Will US Treasury stop this effort?

https://twitter.com/Karam__Shaar/status/1385497285979635716

Here is the news on how sanctions are keeping Syrians in the dark - many with only 1 or 2 hours of electricity a day.

https://twitter.com/joshua_landis/status/1381805583582564360

If one believes that sanctions will force Assad to step aside, the suffering & privation caused by sanctions may be worth it.