Alsheikh: Now More Than Ever, We Need Rashid Khalidi

This Monday, as news of the hostage-prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas was met with glowing praise throughout the world, the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi sat down for an interview with freelance journalist Fariba Amini. In it, he was not so optimistic. 

“It is not a peace accord,” Khalidi said. “It is a ceasefire accord, a hostage exchange and a temporary lifting of the blockade of Gaza, which may be followed by other steps, but which does not contain any of the elements of a real peace deal. That would necessarily be based on completely equal rights for all individuals and both peoples.”

It was a rare, sober look at the events  in Israel-Palestine. Despite President Donald Trump treating this as a “historic dawn” for the Middle East, the reality is that virtually none of the hot-button issues necessary for a long-lasting peace in Gaza — much less all of Israel-Palestine — have been addressed. It is unclear whether Hamas will disarm; Israel still occupies most of Gaza and is already refusing to allow full humanitarian aid in; negotiations on phase two of Trump’s deal, which would see partial Israeli withdrawal in exchange for a transitional government replacing Hamas, are unfinished. 

This is to say nothing of the continuing colonization of the West Bank as Israel rapidly remakes the territory in its own image, demolishing Palestinian homes en masse while clearing the way for unchecked Jewish settlement, all while sponsoring record levels of settler-terrorism against Palestinians. 

Khalidi’s words reflect an uncomfortable truth: we are farther now more than ever from peace and justice in Israel-Palestine. This clear-sightedness is precisely why we here at Dartmouth ought to give Khalidi our fullest attention when he delivers his virtual seminar today in Kemeny Hall 008 at 5:00 p.m. More broadly, the work that Khalidi has done as America’s foremost scholar of Palestine — particularly his vision of a resolution based on equal rights between Israelis and Palestinians — ought to guide how students and faculty around the country engage in discussions on Israel-Palestine moving forward.

Key to Khalidi’s importance as a scholar is his grounding of settler-colonialism at the forefront of his historical work. Khalidi has been open and explicit about his viewing of Zionism — the political movement behind the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine — as “a national movement whose means were explicitly settler-colonial.” 

Khalidi’s identification of Zionism with settler-colonialism provides a framework for his history that cogently explains the events that have led us to the present day in Israel-Palestine. As he writes in the introduction of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” one of his most well-known works, “The modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will” — a reading which, looking at how Palestinians today are being rapidly fragmented and dispossessed in the West Bank and Gaza, seems to hold more and more true with each passing day.

Though this presentation might seem reductive to some, reading the history of Israel-Palestine in this way has led Khalidi to several productive takeaways — chief among them his vision for a “postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.” In turn, this vision has led him to insist that any peaceful resolution to the question of Palestine must involve "absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political and national rights” between Israelis and Palestinians. 

In his view, this future necessarily involves “uprooting the systemic inequality inherent in Zionism,” evident in such measures as Israel’s Nation-State law, which gives the right to self-determination only to Jewish people, although Israel controls a territory with a population roughly half Jewish and half Arab. At the same time, Khalidi’s vision for the future also requires Palestinians to see past their colonial encounter with Zionism to recognize that Israelis are real, living people who deserve equal civil and national rights. 

These positions, rooted in a fundamental respect for human rights, might seem trivial to outsiders. Still, they are unfortunately all-too-rare to find among scholars of Israel-Palestine — even those who are renowned. Take, for example, Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian who, despite his groundbreaking scholarship that determined Israel committed ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in 1948, has nonetheless justified it, going as far as to argue that all Palestinian-Arabs should have been expelled from Israel-Palestine.

For a scholar like Khalidi, with his own personal family history in the region, to survey something as long and painful as the last one hundred years of violence in Israel-Palestine and walk away with calling for equality and equal rights is far from trivial. Whether or not one agrees with all of his historical theses, it is undeniable that Khalidi is one of the most powerful voices calling for justice and accountability in the region today, and that his scholarly work has had a transformative effect in shifting conversations about Israel-Palestine from stereotypical tropes to principled discussions about an equal future. 

I encourage all my fellow students to hear Khalidi’s perspective out today in his seminar with the History department, and to engage further with his work outside of the classroom as well. As a scholar and activist, Khalidi is a historian of remarkable principle and achievement from whom we can all learn. As Gaza faces an uncertain future and violence continues to disfigure the landscape of the Holy Land, voices like Rashid Khalidi are exactly what we need in this present moment. 

Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.

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