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For the Review’s Holiday Issue, Mark O’Connell interviews the historian Rashid Khalidi, who this year announced his retirement from Columbia University after twenty-one years, where he has been the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and “among the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine.”
Over the course of a few weeks this fall, O’Connell and Khalidi wrote to each other and spoke on the phone to discuss October 7, the complicity and antagonism of America’s foreign policy, and the parallels between Ireland’s experiences under English rule and the atrocities Israeli forces are committing in Gaza.
Below, alongside O’Connell’s essay, we have collected four essays from our archives about the history of Palestine.
Mark O’Connell
Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi
The scholar of Palestinian history talks about what has and has not surprised him about the world‘s response to Israel‘s assault on Gaza.
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Ruth Margalit
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew
Arabesques is Anton Shammas’s lament for the catastrophe of 1948 and his paean to Hebrew and Arabic, languages he has spent a lifetime navigating between.
—April 20, 2023
Rashid Khalidi
The Neocolonial Arrogance of the Kushner Plan
“It is no secret that the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government are marching in lockstep, both regarding Palestine and a confrontation with Iran, but what is startling is how much of the White House’s Middle East policy, including the Kushner plan itself, has effectively been outsourced to Netanyahu and his allies in Israel and the US.”
—June 12, 2019
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Edward Said
Leaving Palestine
Only once did my father elucidate the general Palestinian condition: “They had lost everything”; a moment later he added, “We lost everything too.”
—September 23, 1999
Anton Shammas
A Stone’s Throw
“There are still no Israelis in the nonconstitutional Israel. The rubric of ‘nationality’ (in Hebrew, Leom) on Israeli identity cards reads either ‘Jew’ or ‘Arab.’ The two words ‘Israeli nationality’ do not exist in any official document of the State of Israel; like the Soviet Union, it is a country where nationality does not coincide with citizenship.”
—March 31, 1988
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