Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity, The Construction of a Modern Consciousness Movement (Columbia, 1997), was a major contribution to the contemporary historiography of the Palestinians. Grounded in the study of primary sources in Arabic--many housed in the Khalidi library in Jerusalem--along with interviews and detailed documentation culled from more than two dozen Arab newspapers and magazines, the book presents the “other side of the story,” and in effect an irrefutable argument: that the Palestinian people not only exist, but have had a consciousness movement nearly as long as Jews have had Zionism.
National identity, however--for Israelis and Palestinians--is not a fixed monolith, as Khalidi notes; his work is based on the premise “that national identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendant given, as the apostles of nationalism...claim.” Nonetheless, the current crisis, with the collapse of the Oslo accords and a peace process which appears all but buried, has roots in the parallel struggle of the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine to forge a new identity in the aftermath of the second World War.
Jordan Elgrably spoke to Rashid Khalidi in October during a visit to Los Angeles, where he delivered his lecture, “The Emergence of a Nationalism in the Modern Middle East.” Khalidi asserted that most conflicts in the region are no more than 100 years old, even though Western rhetoric invariably uses the “age-old conflict scenario” to justify Middle East policy. Rashid Khalidi is Professor of Middle East History at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Center for International Studies. He has taught there since 1987. Previously he spent more than a decade teaching at the American University of Beirut, witnessing Lebanon’s Civil War. Khalidi was one of the early Palestinian negotiators during the Madrid talks, 1991-1993. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, and he writes regular op-eds for he New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Nation.
Elgrably, an Arab Jew, is a writer and an activist who founded the Sephardi/Mizrahi organization Ivri-NASAWI in 1996, and Open Tent Middle East Coalition in 1998. He interviewed Khalidi from an essentially empathetic position--that of a Middle Eastern Jew who argues that Jews have an organic role to play in the region, and that peace is possible between partners who not only evidence mutual respect, but abide by international law and the principles of democratic states.
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How do you see this sort of third wave of resistance, a second intifada as it were, reshaping Palestinian identity?
RASHID KHALIDI: I don’t think it’s going to reshape Palestinian identity, I think it’s going to reshape the course of the so-called peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. I think it’s really brought an end to the Oslo approach, the nine years that we’ve been engaged in since Madrid. It has bypassed Arafat and his whole take on things; sooner or later it will force, I think, the Israelis to come to terms with an issue that they’ve refused to come to terms with, which is removing settlements and ending occupation. I donít think you can negotiate while settlement building continues and while occupation continues.
I was watching Ephraim Sneh last night on Charlie Rose; clearly the Israelis think they can bully the living bejesus out of the Palestinians and at the same time dictate terms to them. This intifada has signaled that that approach, ultimately, will not work.
At times Israel reminds us of apartheid-era South Africa: draconian special emergency laws, pass laws and codes against both Palestinians and Israelis in the peace camp; in fact a great number of Israeli activists have been tossed into jail merely for cooperating with Palestinian activists. Why do you suppose American Jewish supporters of Israel fail to recognize Israel for what it is? Why do they support it so reverently?
RK: The mental framework in which they operate won’t allow them to see what’s happening. They can’t accept that this is basically an apartheid system in creation. They’ve been brainwashed into forgetting that there’s been an occupation of 90-odd percent of the West Bank, if you take Area B and Area C, i.e. the Israeli Army has utter and absolute control over 90% of the West Bank: thatís occupation, and yet they don’t see that, because they’ve been told that through the Oslo peace process, Israel has withdrawn its forces, and 97% of the Palestinian population is under the PA’s administrative control. These things are true, but the mindset that they have leads them to believe a whole set of things, which in fact are demonstrably false.
There is one other aspect that has to be put here, which is racism. The kinds of things Israeli Jews would never accept for their own children, i.e. shoot at them if they throw rocks, or beat them senseless, are perfectly good for Arabs. You have a dual standard in Israel, when religious Jews throw rocks at police, block roads, set fires, in Jerusalem say, in Mea Sharim, over grave yards. They’ve done it dozens of times in the past thirty or forty years, that I know of. People donít shoot them. But when Arabs in the Galilee--where the are no guns (and the pretext of firing by the demonstrators doesnít operate)--13 people were killed, and dozens, perhaps hundreds were wounded. These are double standards, and that is basically racist. People hate to be told that, and it’s a nasty, loaded, weighty word, but there’s no other way to explain that what you would never accept for your own children, you not only accept, you condone. You have advertisements in the papers, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, supporting the shooting of children, because theyíre throwing rocks. I don’t think somebody can find another word for it, but I would certainly call it racism.
Palestinians have not been successful in either military or political terms in achieving the aims of Palestinian national identity. What force could help them to achieve their dreams of an independent state with respected borders---last night you mentioned the importance of third-party negotiators? (Canada for instance.)
RK: I think the main problem is internal, but there is a need for fair negotiations between the sides. If anything, you should have the United States at the negotiating table on the Israeli side, and then it would be clear: youíd have the 900-pound gorilla and Israel together at the table, so they’re one party. Then have the Palestinians and the European Union on the other side, and the United Nations in the middle. That would be a fair way to negotiate. The point is, end the farce which would have that the United States is in the middle; the United States is not in the middle. The United States is actually worse than Israel on some issues. Israelis are easier to talk to about some issues than some American government officials are.
Palestinians have to have a completely different approach. They have to understand what they want, they have to focus on it, they have to put that message across to Israel, and they have to put that message across in this country. I mean look at the way apartheid was ended; apartheid was ended because what was happening in South Africa was coordinated with a whole diplomatic campaign. The ANC was watching abroad, it was one seamless message, one seamless campaign; everybody was doing the same thing towards the same end. Thatís not the case with the Palestinians. Specifically you have to decide: how are we going to achieve independence, well, we have to end this occupation. That should be the focus.
Are you suggesting that they should use the power of the media outside of the region?
RK: They should be speaking to the United States public and they should be speaking to the Israeli public. Those are the target audiences.
How can they do this when the mainstream media is often closed to alternative messages, platforms?
RK: If Israel has its deputy defense minister--at the “time of greatest peril in Israel’s history” if you believe the hysterical outpourings in the synagogues and the newspapers--waltzing around the media in the United States, obviously thatís the most important thing that Ephraim Sneh, whoís the head of the whole Israeli security establishment under Barak, could be doing. What’s the most important thing that some Palestinian leaders should be doing? There should be people out here; you can get access, itís not true you canít get access. The media is like a prostitute in the sense that the picture will carry the day, even if the picture isnít favorable to the biases of the editor. Take the picture of that guy with blood on his hands; look at the way the Chicago Sun-Times, which is owned by Conrad Black (the most extreme Zionist in public life, he also owns the Jerusalem Post and the Sun-Times reflects his editorial policy), handled that picture. The bias of the Sun-Times put it full front page, with inflammatory headlines second and third page, tabloid format. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune came across as neutral on these issues, but all three ran the picture of the guy with blood on his hands.
What I sense from Arab American leaders and activists, here in L.A. and in Washington, is that they often feel a kind of powerlessness---less access to the chambers of politics and media---and they are less well organized, having been here less time than the organized Jewish community for example.
RK: I think that that’s a big part of it. I think the other part of it is that weíre not being supported from back home. I mean there is no official Palestinian support for anything like this. And it can only be done to a limited extent from here, in my view. The Edward Saids of this world, and people like me are really very few and far between; our energy is limited, and we have only a limited authority. Weíre essentially outsiders. What you need is a reinforcement of that from within, from the inside of core Palestinian national identity, which is there, not here.
Would a national tour by Hanan Ashrawi with an Israeli like Uri Avnery have an effect?
RK: It can’t be a one-shot affair; it has to be systematic and on going. It has to understood that the battlefield is the streets of Jerusalem, the hilltops of the West Bank, and the American and Israeli media, and the publics of these two countries. Everyone else is with us; literally, every other single place on the face of the earth is in support of the Palestinians, yet all of them together arenít a hill of beans compared to the United States and Israel, because the United States and Israel can basically do anything they please. They are the world superpower, they are the regional superpower.
Everywhere we look today--in the Third World as well as in democracies such as the United States--the power of the people on the street, the protesters, is challenged; in fact protesters everywhere routinely get beaten, shot and thrown in jail. Haven’t democratic movements or expressions been severely curtailed by the power elites, by capitalism or multinational corporations?
RK: I would not under any circumstances under-estimate the value of people making sacrifices in the street, protesters, who are beaten up in places like Seattle and L.A. and Prague, to take one movement, or the West Bank. That sacrifice is not in vain, in the sense that it forces an issue. You should listen to the way that people who are supportive of the IMF and the World Bank talk about the way these protests have forced them, fundamentally against their will, to reorient themselves, to deal with issues, to face things, and how these issues are put on the national, political and media agenda. What you say about the power elites is entirely true; what you say about the kids getting their heads beaten in is true. And yet you would not have the discussion of the Palestine question, you would not have the word “occupation” in public discourse, were it not for [200] people killed. Now Iím not saying the sacrifice is a welcome thing, Iím not saying that people in L.A. should have their heads broken open. It shouldnít happen. But sometimes the only way to bring an issue forward is to be willing to make that kind of a sacrifice. And basically in the Palestinian case, this is not a rational calculation. People have just had it; theyíre fed up. Itís like “I wonít take it anymore,” literally, to the point that tens of thousands of people are willing to go out and risk death, to make that point.
Aren’t there too few groups or people with financial means offering support; don’t they lack backing? I mean the $800 million that is going to maybe come from the Arab League is not going to go to finance this new Intifada, or a social movement, or the kind of civil society that someone like Hanan Ashrawi is working hard at helping to establish, is it?
RK: No. No, it wonít. But Iím not worried about civil society in the Palestinian case. Iím really not. Palestinian society is what comes through during these uprisings; itís civil society that carried the first uprising. The PLO really smothered it. And the PA represents the antithesis of what is needed. Civil society pokes its way up through the concrete. Our problem now, in this community, is to figure out how we can reach “out” of the Arab community. The Arab community has been energized by this month; the trouble is the focus and the emphasis has been entirely inwardly directed. I mean you have some people saying “haiba, haiba, ya yahoud, jaich Mohamed sai yahoud,” meaning the battle in which the prophet is supposed to have defeated the Jewish tribe, the army of Mohammed will return. You have people saying “Allahu Akbar.” Now these are wonderful slogans if youíre in a mosque--"haiba haiba” is not a wonderful slogan, but Allahu Akbar is. But if youíre in the street, youíve got to be saying something to Americans that can bring together a coalition of people who understand that what is being done in the name of the United States is against the interests of the United States, is morally wrong, and is something that we should be opposing. And thatís a pretty simple message. If you’re not saying things which reach an American audience, you may as well not be on the streets. Go and demonstrate in your own community if you want to mobilize your own community.
So you first of all have a problem of political enlightenment. You have some very backward and reactionary elements in the Arab community, you have some racist elements in the Arab community as well (I have trouble with that); and you have people blind to politics--they donít understand even if theyíre not backwards or reactionary or racist or blind that you have to build a coalition or you may as well not do it. The Arabs by themselves, Muslims by themselves cannot be a force alone, they have to be a force by linking up with other people. Look at apartheid. Apartheid was defeated because the ANC understood how to make coalitions in Britain and the United States and other countries; they did it and they won. They won at home and abroad.
Part of the problem which makes negotiating between Jews and Arabs thorny is that Israel narrates itself as a country of the West, rather than an organic part of the Middle East; Rabin said once that Israel was part of Europe, and Ben-Gurion famously railed against Levantine Jewry. This has produced an internal struggle among Arab or Middle Eastern Jews who haven’t, until recently, had very much power in Israel. Today the president, Moshe Katsav, is Persian; Shaul Mofaz, another Persian, is an army general; and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was born in Morocco, is acting foreign minister...The question is, are these Middle Eastern Jews able to articulate their identities from a truly Mizrahi position, or have they been coopted by an Eastern European elite, which fundamentally asks them to reject their cultural baggage as Middle Easterners?
RK: They’ve all been Ashkenazified if they are in leadership positions.
They may have to be to get there, but we’re talking about the future, not the present. If Israel can renarrate itself as an organic part of the Middle East--in part because of Middle Eastern Jews--do you suppose this will make any difference in dealing with the Palestinian question?
RK: If it could, it would. But I wonder whether it could. Israel is not a Jewish project? I said this last night? Israel is an Eastern European Jewish project. Zionism did not come out of the needs of Middle Eastern Jews; they were dragooned, drafted, dragged unwillingly into being canon fodder for an Eastern European project. It can be argued that the Eastern European project was justifiable, given the Holocaust, even given what was happening before. I mean Herzl came out of Vienna which had a mayor who was an anti-Semite; thereís still a statue of the son of a bitch, Carl Juger Platz, itís right there, I was in Vienna the other day, I saw it. Herzl went to France and was transfixed by the Dreyfus trial, by anti-Semitism, which is still operative there. So it’s not like we’re talking about an imaginary problem which Zionism was the answer to.
Now, neither in North and South America, nor in the Islamic world was there or is there the same fundamental, historical problem. European anti-Semitism is a thousand, eight hundred, nine hundred years old, it goes back to the beginnings of Christianity and the Roman Empire, itís not something new. My point here is that Zionism as a project is very largely affected by those roots. I wonder to what extent the North and South American Jewish community has been taken over by Zionism in terms of their mindset. They now narrate their history as Jews and as Jewish communities in terms of experiences which are not theirs. We donít have the success of American Jews in museums in Washington and New York; we have Holocaust museums in Washington and New York. Now, thatís understandable, everybody whoís in those cities and all over the United States had relatives who died in the Holocaust, or many of them do. But the American Jewish experience is an overwhelming success story about integration and assimilation, or acculturation.
Nor do we have museums that narrate the Middle Eastern Jewish experience, and the Sephardic one in Spain, which were a formidable segment of Jewish history.
RK: Precisely. It was Jewish history. The only positive aspect of Jewish history for seventeen hundred years is the Sephardic and other Mizrahi Jewish experience. That was Jewish history. The rest is misery and oppression in Europe, that’s it, those are the two capstones of Jewish history.
If you study the history of the past several hundred years, you find that over ten million Jews have been killed in Europe, by Europeans, whether as a result of the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms or the Nazi Holocaust; while during that same period, an estimated 5,000 Jews were killed in all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa.
RK: And Jews probably faired better in the Middle East than other minorities, or they were treated no worse than anybody else, including majorities.
Yet you have American Jews, whose support dictates the course of affairs, thinking that all the Arabs want to do is “destroy us and throw us into the sea.”
RK: That’s the paranoia which has successfully massaged and fueled and manipulated the Israel government’s spinmeisters.
There is, however, a small progressive wing, which includes some Middle Eastern or Sephardic Jewish activists in the U.S., who want to counteract that, and it’s an enormous myth to fight.
RK: I understand that. Well what you have to do is analyze reality. The reality is that you had a whole long period when the Arab world, the Islamic world, were clearly willing to accept Israel. This outburst, you can [either] see in terms of essentialism or primordial hate, or you can see it as a response to what Israel does. Thereís a three-page piece in the Economist that does a good job of analyzing why people are angry with Israel. It has nothing to do with primordial hate; it has to do with what Israel does. Itís enough to show what Israel does to show that for most people in the Arab world--there are people who primordially hate, letís start with that, but if you look at numbers, the number of people who support Hamas or Islamic Jihad is 12%, 18%, 15%, 7%, 9%; okay, thereís 10 or 20% of Palestinians who irremediably hate Israel. And then thereís 20 or 30%, who wouldnít be willing to compromise under any circumstances, and then you have the floating middle, those are people who do not advocate terrorism. I mean these are numbers that have been polled and polled and polled, these are these solid, clear numbers, from the West Bank and the Gaza strip. That is fact, that is truth, if you understand it properly.
How people in the middle move is a function of how many Palestinians Israelis kill, how many hundreds of Palestinians are humiliated on a daily basis by Israeli border guards who slap them upside the face, kick them, and tell them that theyíre “khleb,” tell them that theyíre “hallanet,” tell them that their mothers are going to be screwed by them, and thatís what people are told daily, at road blocks, thatís what people are told daily when their kids are stopped on the way to school. That happens every day; itís been going on since 1967. That finally boils up--it has nothing to do with some essentialist Islamic hatred, it has nothing to do with some primordial dislike of minorities, it has nothing to do with anti-Zionism, it has nothing to do with anything except finally the pot boils over. You can take just so much. All you need to do is analyze what is actually happening on the ground, humiliation and so on, and you see where the reaction comes from. Now, it drives some of these people into irrational hatred, yes, thereís no question, but that is and has always been a minority, that is a fact. That minority can sometimes lead, and could be provoked into leading. I mean thereís nothing to say that the Arab world will continue to be basically accepting of Israel. Israel is perfectly capable of provoking the Arab world further, but thatís Israel that’ll be doing it, itís not some irrational, inevitable basic hatred, that will dominate finally as these analysts suggest.
Assuming Arafat passes away and there is not an autocratic take-over but a referendum or democratic elections: could Hanan Ashrawi ever win, and if so, what kind of Palestine would she govern over?
RK: I don’t think Hanan could win an election. I come from Chicago, where political machines win elections---unless you have a popular uprising of some sort, as in Serbia. And there are other reasons she won’t win. I think there will be a take-over by the security services immediately after Arafat’s death, the question is, what then will happen. It won’t necessarily be Hanan, but there are a lot of people who could win, depending on how the Palestinians push their domestic regime. I think that the street is strong than the state. We’ve seen that: Arafat didn’t want this uprising, Arafat didnít organize this. Arafat followed this, and could not have stopped it had he wanted to. Thatís why he didn’t stop it. He couldn’t stop a mass movement, and [yet] he has credibility, he has enormous legitimacy. I mean the man still has nearly 40% support among Palestinians, even though he seems to be failing. There is no [other] Palestinian leader with that kind of legitimacy or credibility. And naked force--as the Israelis have learned over 33 years--doesn’t work against the Palestinians. They will not just lie down because somebody shoots at them. They showed it in Beirut and they showed it the West Bank and Gaza strip repeatedly, over years.
I think that ultimately, probably, you will have a democratic transition of sorts, but who will come up? It depends on who has a better political organization. Probably Fatah will put forward somebody, because they have the best political machine.
Edward Said, as you know, is now a proponent of a one-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians would live and govern together. Let’s jump ahead 25-50 years: can you imagine it working?
RK: Oh god, that’s a hard question. I think it will take a lot more than 25 years, it will be very difficult to dismantle any state...In the Arab world not one of the artificial state structures set up in the wake of the mandates and the post-World War I settlement has dissolved. States are very hard to dissolve. I think that dissolving the state of Israel is not in the cards in one or two generations, frankly. This is not an ordinary state; this is a very powerful state, with enormous capability to indoctrinate, enormous capability to mobilize. If you look at the money that they are able to bring in, you look at the size of the economy, you look at what they are able to sell, if you look at their naked power, I mean the Internet, IT, avionics, Israel leads the world. This is not just some banana republic. This is one of the most powerful states in the world. And it is integrated into the American political system. It is not just sitting out there in Bora Bora; itís in New York and itís in Palm Beach and itís in L.A., in a profound, functional way. It’s a state of multi-millionaires and the multi-billion-dollar corporations are here and there. Intel is here and there, and it’s not just there because it decided to make an investment; the people who decide to make that investment are profoundly in tune with Israel, some of them [are] Israelis. And this transnational Israeli community is an enormous strength; and it’s not just the Jewish community, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis in America, maybe a quarter of a million, maybe half a million. Nobody knows those numbers. And finally you have the infusions of capital they are able to mobilize, so talking about the dissolution of any state, anywhere, under any circumstances, historically speaking, is a profoundly complicated business. This state ain’t dissolving soon, folks.
During your talk last night, you spoke of the inherent lack of ethnic or cultural homogeneity in most parts of the Middle East. What I wonder is, have nationalisms forever canceled out the possibility of a more pluralistic Middle Eastern society, a quilt if you will, of distinct yet inter-dependent entities, or can we hope to recreate a sort of Levantine, live-and-let live multicultural environment?
RK: You can’t eliminate nationalism; at least there’s no historical model in the modern world the last two hundred years for eliminating nationalism. You have to transcend it. And there are ways it can be transcended. Europe is an example; there are other parts of the world that go beyond nationalism. And that’s what will have to be done in the Middle East. But for the moment we’re stuck with it. There’s no other game in town. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. And the ways to transcend it have to do with education, with economic interests, with all kinds of things, some of which are not very nice. People giving up aspirations--I mean there were once a lot of Germans who really wanted Alsace-Lorraine back, and now they just don’t care. The Palestinians may want things, the Israelis may want things, but if there’s going to be peace between these two peoples, they’re going to have to give up on some of their aspirations.