Modern Zionism “is a self-described colonial-settler project,” stated Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi on last month at Washington, DC’s Politics and Prose bookstore before a standing-room-only audience of about 120. This Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies distorted history to delegitimize Jewish self-determination in Israel upon the basis of his latest book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.
This former Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) spokesperson had a largely uncritical, receptive audience for his talk. Attendees included well-known, interrelated activists from the capital’s anti-Zionist scene, including Shelley Cohen-Fudge from the fringe organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). She sat beside Jamal Najjab from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an organization ideologically tied to Hamas, and near Zeina Azzam, a former director of the Israel-bashing Jerusalem Fund. Steve France joined his fellow Episcopalians Tom Getman, a former World Vision executive who played a key role in turning that Christian charity against Israel, and the Palestinian-American Philip Farah.
Khalidi seemed to invalidate his entire thesis as he conceded that “Zionism is one of the most successful national movements in modern history.” Zionism, he said, “is based on a real, legitimate, ancient, biblical connection between Judaism and Jews and the land of Israel.” Thus “Zionism could plausibly claim to be not just settling somewhere, but reviving Jewish polity in the land of their forefathers rather than establishing an entirely new entity.”
While acknowledging the historic connection between Jews and modern Israel would seem to refute Khalidi’s premise of Zionism as a colonial enterprise, he remained undeterred. Khalidi sophistically noted a historic Zionist self-conception as colonists, beginning with Theodor Herzl overseeing the first Zionist congress in 1897 and continuing until after World War II, when “colonialism came out of fashion.” This analysis confuses Zionist “redemption” of a Jewish homeland through settlement, a means, with an illegitimate end, namely colonialism, a form of imperialism.
His ominous reference to the 1891-founded Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) as an agency that purchased land for Zionist settlement in Palestine further revealed his fallacies. JCA originally sought to create agricultural communities for oppressed East European Jews in places like Brazil and the United States and only later became involved in Zionism. By contrast, the Zionist movement under Herzl founded in 1901 the land-purchasing Jewish National Fund, a self-proclaimed “vital part of Zionist history.”
Khalidi’s sly distortions also slander Herzl, as Khalidi claimed that Zionism’s founding father had written in his diary that that any Arabs in a Jewish homeland would be “spirited away.” Khalidi thereby reiterated a common anti-Zionist canard that involves a deeply deceptive mangling of an 1895 Herzl diary entry that did not support any idea of ethnic cleansing, which he had consistently opposed. Likewise Khalidi emphasized that right-wing Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky had written that an Arab “indigenous population will fight us” in “our country,” but Khalidi omitted how this classical liberal envisioned integrating Arabs into a Jewish state.
Examining a “settler-colonial conflict,” Khalidi inverted traditional conceptions of a small, beleaguered Israel and argued that the “Goliath in this story is a constellation of forces, mainly international,” facing a Palestinian “David.” He argued that the world’s fickle great powers always supported Israel, even though the United Kingdom’s relationship with the Jewish nation has varied widely since the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Soviet Union similarly critically aided Israel’s birth in 1947-1948 before later becoming a key enemy, while France abandoned its longstanding military relationship with Israel in 1967 in order to curry Arab favor. Although Khalidi said the “United States has been a full party to” an Israeli war against Palestinians since the 1967 Six Day War, the American-Israeli strategic relationship has developed over time, and not without complications.
The absence of “Palestinians” in the Balfour Declaration or the post-World War I League of Nations Palestine Mandate under the British further exposed Khalidi’s reliance on anachronisms. He considered it a “declaration of war” to “say to a people, ‘you don’t exist, we are not mentioning you, we are not consulting you, and your country is to have self-determination for another people.” Yet Arabs among the originally sparse population in the Palestine Mandate’s territory did not regularly claim a unique Palestinian identity until the 1960s.
Khalidi also complained that in UN Security Council Resolution 242 following the 1967 Six Day War, Palestinians or Arabs “don’t even merit mention” in the resolution’s context of a “refugee problem.” He favored a “right of return” for millions of Arabs descended from refugees since Israel’s 1948 independence war, a demand that even the New York Times reviewer called “fanciful.” Yet the resolution’s drafters intended to include both these Arab “refugees” as well as Jewish refugees who fled persecution in Arab countries in the decades following Israel’s creation.
These and other historically pro-Zionist Mizrachi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa now form about half of Israel’s population, yet Khalidi falsely asserted that Palestinian “history is determined by what Hitler does.” Referencing European antisemitism leading up to Nazi genocide in World War II, he claimed that Zionism results from “a specific set of persecutions in a specific place, not Palestine, and those traumas are then moved to Palestine.” He thus exclusively focused on European dangers to global Jewry (to which Muslims contributed during Nazism) while ignoring Islamic antisemitism, and overlooking Jewish attachment to Zionism beyond self-preservation.
These and other misrepresentations riddled Khalidi’s presentation, but, fortunately for him, the audience consisted primarily of fans and fellow anti-Israel activists, not objective observers. The prevalence of individuals like Khalidi in Middle East studies not only corrupts academia, but abets falsifications that make achieving peace with the Jewish nation-state harder. As even the New York Times’s review argued, in following people such as Khalidi, given his uncompromising hostility toward Israel, the Palestinian conflict with Israel “is likely to be an eternal one.”
Andrew E. Harrod is a Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter at @AEHarrod.
RichardL says
He is a Muhammadan. He has a sponsored chair named after Edward Said. He hates Jews. He is working for a leftard university.
mortimer says
A ‘Leftard’ is one who uncritically accepts a melodramatic, ideologically-slanted ‘narrative’ based on selective data and distortions of words, motives and events, and who uncritically quotes and distributes such inaccuracies in order to virtue-signal, so as to be congratulated for this blinkered, doctrinaire compliance by other Leftards in the Leftist echo chamber.
Blinkered doctrinaire compliance is always an enemy of the truth. Truth is what exists independent of narratives.
James Lincoln says
Excellent definition of “Leftard”, mortimer.
Rob Miller says
He was and is an intimate friend and mentor of on Barack Hussein Obama. Virtually all of his mentors and influences were anti-semitic and Israel haters, including Edward Said.
mortimer says
Islam is a self-described colonial project.
Islamic Political Expansionism:
“…a ‘Muslim Party’ will not be content with the establishment of Islam in just one area alone –both for its own safety and for general reform. It should try and EXPAND IN ALL DIRECTIONS. On one hand it will spread its ideology; on the other it will invite people of all nations to accept its creed, for salvation lies only therein. If this Islamic state has power and resources it will FIGHT AND DESTROY non-Islamic GOVERNMENTS and establish Islamic states in their place.”
Islam “is not a missionary organisation or a body of preachers or evangelists, but an organisation of God’s TROOPERS.” – Maulana Maududi, 1964, Haqiqat-i-Jihad, page 58, Taj Company Ltd, Lahore, Pakistan
Tony Naim says
In service of the truth, unbiased review of history,
If Mr Khalidi considers himself an honest scholar ,
He would better have focused his effort to translate:
“Kitab Ahkam Ahl Al-zoumma “
( Statutes of dhimmis in Islam)
Written by ibn Al-Kayyem al-jouziyya, a 13-14th century imam, and pupil of another radical Islamist, ibn Taymiyya ( who remains the father of modern radical Islamic movements)
Then Western readers would CLEARLY understand the status of DHIMMITUDE Islam reserves to the people of the book and their savage treatment under Islamic law.
Only then his readers will understand, the Arab Israeli conflict can only be resolved with the abolition of Dhimmitude as a legal institution in Islamic law.
mortimer says
Muslims like Khalidi have to ignore about 80% of Sharia law (which is Allah’s eternal law code) in order to continue the sham that they adhere to Islam. Muslims like Khalidi have created for themselves a watered-down, pick-and-choose, self-selective Islam, rather than the classical, codified, objective Islam of Islam’s ‘CONSENSUS’.
The whole argument of Khalidi is based on the very subjective question of ‘WHO IS AN ARAB PALESTINIAN?’
The very first Arab to use the word ‘PALESTINIAN’ in print was Khalid Beidas (1898) and Beidas was the son of two LEBANESE Arabs.
Most ‘Palestinians’ have names that describe their ancestral origins and reveal the family’s recent arrival in Israel:
“Masri” or “al-Masri” = from Egypt. Hamas member of Parliament in Gaza, Mushir al-Masri is from Egypt (the word “Masri” literally means “the Egyptian” in Arabic).
“Khamis” = from Bahrain “Salem Hanna Khamis.”
“al-Ubayyidi” or “al-Obeidi”= from Sudan “al-Ubayyid.”
“al-Faruqi” = Mosul, Iraq.
“al-Araj” = Morocco, a member of the Saadi Dynasty “Hussein al-Araj.”
“al-Lubnani” = the Lebanese.
“al-Mughrabi” = the Moroccan (“Maghreb,” meaning “West” in Arabic, and usually is referring to North Africa or specifically to Morocco), “Dalal Mughrabi”
“al-Djazair” = the Algerian.
“al-Qurashi” = Saudi Arabia “clan of Quraish.”
“al-Azd” = Yemen “Azd tribe.”
“al-Yamani”= the Yemeni “Issam Al Yamani.”
“al-Afghani” = the Afghan.
“al-Sidawi” = from “Sidon” Lebanon.
“al-Fayyumi” = from “Faiyum” Egypt.
“al-Hijazi” or “Hijazi” = present-day Saudi Arabia “Ahlam Higazi, a “Palestinian” artist from Hebron.
“al-Hindi” = the Indian “Amin al-Hindi.”
“al-Tamimi” or “Tamimi” = from the tribe or clan of Banu-Tamim “Azzam Tamimi.”
“Hamati” = from Syria ( Hama city).
“Omayya” = from Saudi Arabia “Banu Omayya tribe” “Omayya Joha” “Palestinian artist.”
“Othman” = Turkey.
“Murad” = Yemen “Murad tribe.”
“Alawi” = from Syria (minority religious group in Syria).
“Iraqi” = from Iraq.
“Halabi” = from Aleppo, Syria.
“Dajani” = from Saudi Arabia.
“Mattar” = from Yemen (the village of Bani Mattar).
“al-baghdadi” = from Bagdad, Iraq.
“Tarabulsi” = Tarabulus-Tripoli, Lebanon.
“Hourani” = Houran, Syria.
“Zubeidi” = from Iraq “Zubeidi tribe” “Zakaria Zubeidi.”
“al-Husayni” = Saudi Arabia.
“Saudi” = Saudi Arabia.
“Metzarwah” = Egypt.
“Bardawil” = “Salah Bardawil” Hamas legislator in Gaza, Egypt “Bardawil lake” area.
“Nashashibi” = Syria.
“Bushnak” = Bosnia.
“Zoabi”= from Iraq “Haneen Zoabi.”
“Turki” = Turkey “Daud Turki.”
“al-Kurd” = Kurdistan.
“Haddadins” = Yemen, descended from Ghassanid Christian Arabs.
“Arab Abu-Kishk” = Egypt (Bedouins).
“Arab al-Shakirat” = Egypt (Bedouins).
“Arab al-Zabidat” = Egypt (Bedouins).
“Arab al-Aramsha” = Egypt (Bedouins).
gravenimage says
Mortimer, I would not assume that Rashid Khalidi is a good-hearted Muslim who is just in denial of the vicious aspects of Shari’ah law–seems a lot uglier than that.
mortimer says
Response to the issue of ‘dhimmitude’ : Khalidi is, in fact, creating a ‘dhimmi’ history of Palestine. Prior to the British defeat of the Ottoman colonizers of the Holy Land, it was part of the Ottoman Empire and everyone in it was a subject of the Empire, and those subjects moved from one part of the Empire to another.
They were not identified by a nationality usually, but by their religion which placed everyone in a separate category of human rights and civil liberties. Dhimmitude was indeed practiced in the Ottoman Empire.
Arabs would accept Jews living in the Holy Land as long as they are dhimmi Jews, paying jizzya and living in complete subservience to their Muslims superiors. All Muslims, even the humblest, would be superior to a dhimmi, no matter how exalted or accomplished the dhimmi might be.
Muslims who object to Israel, merely want a reveal of Dhimmitude in the Holy Land.
When you have Sharia and Dhimmitude, there is no place for egalitarian democracy.
mortimer says
correction: merely want a REVIVAL of Dhimmitude …
Tony Naim says
I agree with every word you said.
One simple correction: Khalil Beidas was NOT a Lebanese. He is a Greek Orthodox Christian born in Nazareth and died in Jerusalem. Greek Orthodox in Arab countries are remnants of the Byzantine Empire. Some of their educated elites attempted to promote the idea of Nationalism as a means of integration in societies with Muslim majorities. They thought nationalism would provide a platform where they can coexist with Muslims as equal. Another Lebanese Greek Orthodox by the name of Antoun Saadeh, created the Syrian Socialist National party for the same purpose. Michel A’flak, an Iraqi Christian is the father of the Ba’ath party.
All these parties promoted secularism, therefore, they remained on the fringes of Arab polity, mostly because of what you said: Muslims can never accept Dhimmis as equal.
Dhimmitude is at the root cause of Muslim resistance to the rebirth of Israel.
It is also at the root cause of destruction of Lebanon, the only non Muslim country in the Middle East ( besides Israel)
Tony naim says
One more correction: there are NO Arab families with the last name Al-lubnani. None.zero.Zilch
mortimer says
Rashid Khalidi is a coward who can only speak in the leftist echo chamber or Muslim echo chamber.
In a scheduled debate, Robert Spencer would defeat him in less than five minutes and his reputation would be finished for good. He knows that.
Everyone knows that, Mr. Khalidi. You are truly a coward.
James Lincoln says
mortimer says,
Regarding: Rashid Khalidi:
“In a scheduled debate, Robert Spencer would defeat him in less than five minutes”.
Correct, I would say closer to three minutes…
No way would Rashid Khalidi put himself in that losing situation.
mortimer says
The historic facts refute Khalidi’s case and he indeed refutes quotes them and refutes himself. His case depends on the existence of a separate, distinct ‘Palestinian Arab’ ethnicity … but other Arabs deny such an ethnicity means anything besides ‘Syrian’ or ‘Lebanese’.
Khalidi will concede that the Jewish people exist, that they existed as Israelites in the land of Israel prior to the Roman expulsions of the late 1st century, that the Koran commands the Banu Israil to ‘dwell in the land’ of Israel, that returning to Zion is the age-long dream of Jews, and that the Zionist project is seen by Jews as reviving their connection with the land of Israel and reactivating their claim to it.
However, Khalidi’s case depends on the existence of a nationality called ‘Palestinian’ which is not mentioned by any Arab before 1898 (cf Khalid Beidas).
The problem with the term ‘Palestinian’ is that Arabs strongly disliked this term before 1967, since ‘Palestinian’ was seen by Arabs as a term that applied to a Jewish homeland designated by the League of Nations as such.
The term ‘Trans-Jordan’ clearly designated the boundary of Jewish ‘Palestine’.
Kepha says
Islam itself is a self-described Arab colonization project.
gravenimage says
Rashid Khalidi Twists History to Delegitimize Israel
……………….
What a thug.
Matt McLaughlin says
The Military Governor, Colonel (later Sir) Ronald Storrs, commented 1920:
“Palestine, up to now a Moslem country, has fallen into the hands of a Christian Power which on the eve of its conquest announced that a considerable portion of its land is to be handed over for colonization purposes to a nowhere very popular people.”
OLD GUY says
Another islamic lie, that’s the one thing you can count in from islam.
Norman Gardner says
You have these Muslim spokesmen who speak of Israel being a colonial state. We know half of Israel`s population is Sephardic who are the Jews expelled from the Arab countries. So these Muslims have come from their ancestral homelands to live in the US., and they are now colonizing the US. So it is okay for them to be colonizers but not for Jews to live in their ancestral homeland. What a bunch of lying hippocrates.