Rashid Khalidi: Biden Deserves an “F” on the Middle East

After a brief pause, Israel is now looking to expand ground operations across the Gaza Strip. On Saturday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement that “under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.”

Palestinian civilians are stuck in a dire situation. And already, global media and public attention on the Middle East seems to be declining. To understand what might happen next, I spoke with Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab affairs at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance. He was briefly an advisor to Palestinian negotiators in the 1990s.

Subscribers can watch the full interview in the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: The last few weeks have been awful, and you have family in both Gaza and the West Bank. I just want to start by saying I’m sorry for everything that’s going on. I hope you and yours are holding up okay.

Rashid Khalidi: My niece’s in-laws in Gaza are living through hell and the situation has gotten catastrophically worse. One only hopes that they’ll be okay.

RA: I’d like to take us back to Oct. 7. It didn’t happen in a vacuum, but it’s why we’re here today. And the attacks of that day were just horrific. I’m curious what your initial reaction was when you learned about what happened that day and whether you were surprised by Hamas’s ability to conduct this attack and catch Israel so off guard.

RK: I was surprised. Everybody was surprised. I would guess that even Hamas leaders who planned this might have been surprised by the extent of their success and by the collapse of Israeli defenses. I was in Palestine last March, and I could tell that things were at a boiling point. The situation was completely untenable. I wasn’t able to go to Gaza, but I was in the West Bank. I was in different parts of Israel. The pressure on the Palestinians was so intense that it was clear that something had to give. But I certainly didn’t expect this.

RA: Then came the Israeli response, which has now killed many thousands in Gaza. But Hamas must have known that Israel’s response would be harsh and that the Palestinian people would suffer tremendously as a result of its attack on Oct. 7. Do you think Hamas’s acts have harmed the Palestinian cause?

RK: There’s no question that what Israel has done is entirely disproportionate. As to what Hamas expected, any leader who launched an attack of this sort must have known that Israel’s response would be ferocious. I’m positive that they knew that. I can’t imagine that they didn’t expect an absolutely disproportionate response because the Israelis have said that: That’s their doctrine. It’s called the Dahiya Doctrine and is explicitly disproportionate. Hamas had to have expected this.

RA: If Hamas had a sense that the response would be disproportionate, do their actions set back the work of all the people who demand a Palestinian state but oppose Hamas?

RK: There have been no negotiations for the better part of two decades. A two-state solution is basically a chimera, a little something dangled in front of gullible listeners to conceal the fact that the United States and the international community are indifferent to the fact that Israel has made a two-state solution impossible for 56 years.

There hasn’t been a possibility of a real two-state solution involving Palestinian sovereignty, statehood, viability, or sustainability for at least two decades. So, Hamas did not destroy anything that existed. But it may have destroyed other things. It’s harmed the image of the Palestinians.

Internationally, though, there is a flood of support for Palestinian rights generally, which in many cases acknowledges that what Hamas did was awful in terms of atrocities against civilians, but who still feel not only that Israel’s response is disproportionate, but that what has happened is a result of 56 years of occupation, of 75 years of dispossession, and did not start on Oct. 7. I think that’s the way most of the world looks at this. I think that’s the way most American citizens are beginning to look at this.

RA: How do you think Palestinians are thinking about Hamas in this moment? They’ve clearly changed the equilibrium of the conflict as it stands. But at the same time, I imagine Palestinians must be blaming them for bringing this current round of violence on its own people.

RK: I’m sure there are many Palestinians, especially in Gaza, who feel that way, but I seriously doubt that any of them are going to say anything about it. Not only because they’re afraid, but because they’re so livid and furious at the atrocities and the barbarity that Israel has been committing daily in bombing civilians. They’re killing 100 civilians or 50 civilians for every alleged target.

RA: Israel would say in response that Hamas is using civilians as human shields, operating from areas where it’s more likely that civilian casualties could be much higher. How do the Palestinians react to that?

RK: Many people in Gaza probably resent that Palestinian civilians are being punished for the actions of Hamas. But on the other hand, most Palestinians are also seeing the destruction of any prospect for a peaceful two-state solution. The United States has demolished that possibility by its actions over decades. It’s not only the Israeli government. Everybody sees that.

Public opinion polls before Oct. 7 show that Hamas did not have majority support among Palestinians, but there is no alternative, not only because the Palestinian Authority is corrupt or because the Palestinian political arena is divided. There’s no alternative because the United States and Israel have basically stonewalled any possibility of negotiations towards a viable sovereign Palestinian state for decades.

RA: It’s fair to say that Israel’s response to Oct. 7 has been disproportionate, but it’s also fair to say that Israel needed to do something. What should Israel have done, bearing in mind that these attacks shattered the very sense of security that Israelis had in a homeland? What would an ideal response have been?

RK: You can’t answer that question by starting on Oct. 7. You have settlements on the borders of Gaza built on the ruins of Palestinian villages whose occupants were driven into Gaza in 1948 and never allowed to return. If you don’t start there, you end up saying everything Israel did from Oct. 7 is justified because of the attacks by Hamas and because the rockets and so forth.

RA: Okay, let me try something different here, then. I want to bring up the example of India after the Mumbai attacks in November 2008. This was called, at the time, India’s 9/11. I was there. There was pressure on New Delhi to attack Pakistan, which was identified as a source and training ground for the attackers. India resisted. And it ended up winning credit for not lashing out. India’s example has been cited as an alternative for Israel, instead of just following America’s example after 9/11. It’s a powerful example of restraint.

But since you say history doesn’t begin on the day of an attack, let me put to you another example from India. It doesn’t fit perfectly but I’ll try. There’s the example of Mahatma Gandhi, who managed to popularize a nonviolent national civil disobedience and got an entire country behind him. Is Palestine missing a Gandhi? Could a great leader make a difference for the Palestinians?

RK: The things that the British were doing in India or in other places were no different to what they did in Palestine or what they taught the Israelis to do. But the degree of the repression in Palestine is so extraordinary that you would require more than a Gandhi, frankly. You would require somebody who could unite a disunited people, which the Indians, you could argue perhaps were, and Gandhi succeeded. Frankly, I think this is a dead-end alley to go down. I would love to see a single Palestinian leader who could articulate a clear strategy. I’ve been arguing for that for years. We don’t have that right now, and it’s a Palestinian tragedy. I recognize that’s the problem the Palestinians have.

RA: Many pro-Israel voices would say that Palestinians never failed to miss an opportunity right from the 1947 partition plan to the Arafat and Clinton years to Abbas and Olmert. Are they wrong?

RK: The partition plan would have given most of the arable land the Palestinians saw as their own homeland, where they were the majority, to a one third minority. I’m not sure any people would accept an offer of that sort. They rejected it. Would they have been better off if they’d accepted it? I don’t think that the war would have been prevented. There would have been much the same result that you have now.

As far as the so-called generous offers, I was involved in negotiations in Madrid and Washington. We were not made a generous offer. We were told that in five years, nothing that you’ve said would be accepted, but we would discuss it and that discussion never really took place until Camp David. At Camp David in 2000, what Ehud Barak was offering was not a sovereign, viable, contiguous Palestinian state with control over its own borders. Nor was Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin said it explicitly in his last Knesset speech in 1995 before he was assassinated. He said it would be less than a state and we will control the borders. Well, that’s not a state. That’s a Bantustan. That’s an autonomous area under Israeli sovereignty and that’s essentially all that Olmert, Barak, and Rabin, offered, and they were the three prime ministers who went much farther than any other Israeli leader was willing to go.

Should the Palestinians have accepted those things and permanent subordination to Israel in their own homeland? You can ask that question to anybody and you’ll see what they say.

RA: But given where the status quo is right now, do you think there’s a sense of regret at not taking some of those offers on the table in the 1990s? Or a sense of regret at the leaders they’ve had over these last few decades, who have been feckless and corrupt?

RK: Criticism of leadership and its failures is widespread in Palestinian society. Nobody quibbles with that.

RA: I want to zoom out to the wider Middle East. Why do you think some Arab states seem to be abandoning the Palestinian cause, as the Saudis have with their normalization of ties with Israel, and as Egypt seems to be doing by refusing to let people cross the border? What’s your sense of the broader trend at play here?

RK: I would distinguish between what Saudi Arabia was trying to do in terms of normalization with Israel and what Egypt has done in refusing to allow Israel to expel Palestinians into Sinai.

Saudi Arabia’s attempt to normalize relations with Israel fits the pattern of Arab governments cozying up to Israel. This has been happening for decades, really since Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem in 1977. That’s a process which really implicates the Arab governments, but not Arab peoples. There have been solid public opinion polls by respectable polling institutions, which have shown that Arab public opinion is extremely supportive of the Palestinians and opposes normalization if the Palestinians don’t obtain their national rights.

These are the actions of the most undemocratic governments on the planet, by and large. We’re talking about absolute autocracies in the Gulf, military dictatorships in places like Algeria and Egypt and Syria, most of which are much more concerned with benefiting themselves as individuals or keeping the regimes in power or staying on the good side of the United States. That, as well as other aspects of self-interest by these regimes, or subversion of their populations by Iran and others, has driven them into the arms of the United States and into the arms of Israel.

Does this represent the Arabs? No. Read the polls and look at the biggest demonstrations in a decade in the Arab world. There is a dichotomy between governments that have been moving towards Israel, whether they’ve actually established relations with Israel—like Morocco and the Emirates and Bahrain—or whether they have clandestine relations with Israel like many others. It’s been interrupted by what’s happened since Oct. 7. The popular swell in support of the Palestinians is going to make governments like the Saudis and others rethink what they were planning to do.

RA: What about Qatar’s role? Doha has been at the forefront of mediating hostage releases. What kind of a player do you think Doha might be in potentially ending this conflict

RK: The Qataris obviously played an essential role together with the Egyptians in the exchange of hostages for prisoners. A lot depends on what the Israeli government decides as far as the next phase of this war is concerned, both in terms of how long it wants to fight and how much killing of civilians takes place. The United States is obviously trying to mitigate that because it’s a humongous embarrassment to America.

RA: Were you to step back and just assess the White House’s involvement since Oct. 7, how would you grade the Biden administration?

RK: I would give them an F-minus. The Biden administration’s support for what Israel has done has been so full-throated that we have had seven weeks of butchery in the Gaza Strip after the horrible killings that took place in Israel on Oct. 7. That was done with not just the assent of the United States, but with weapons and munitions that are being shipped as we speak in order to enable that killing.

At the outset of this war, the president sent Secretary Blinken to convey to the Egyptians and the Jordanians a request that they allow Palestinians to be expelled into their territory. That is disgraceful. That is direct American participation in the ethnic cleansing of part of historic Palestine. They immediately pulled back on that when the Egyptians and the Jordanians explained why they would under no circumstances allow that to happen.

It’s one of the most disgraceful chapters in American diplomacy that the United States, for the first time in its history, should be willing to participate in forcing Palestinians out of Palestine. Everybody knows that when Israel kicks Palestinians out of Palestine, they’re never allowed to return.

RA: I asked you earlier about what Israel should have done after Oct. 7. What about America? Biden, it’s often said, is today the most popular man in Israel. Assuming then that he has real leverage in Israel, is he going to use it? Can he use it? What should he be doing?

RK: He has enormous leverage in Israel. He could be taking positions that no American government has taken for a long time, which is to say occupation has to end. Just say this is an illegal occupation. The United States government hasn’t said that for decades now, and that’s part of the problem. Don’t just say we’re going to slap visa bans on some of the most extremist settlers who are attacking Palestinians. Cut off the funding to the settlements, which is coming from American 501(c)(3)s. There are many things that the president could do if he really were intent on reversing what has up till now been an irreversible process of reinforcement of occupation and expansion of settlements. And that’s the first step towards getting us to a different place. Those kinds of things obviously would be very difficult politically for the president.

But he’s in a different kind of political mess right now because there are a lot of people within the democratic party who are furious at the administration for its position—young people, minorities, Arabs, Muslims—they are shifting towards not voting for this man. Maybe this won’t last. Maybe this is ephemeral. Maybe he’ll change his position. But if the war goes on, and if the Biden administration continues to support a position where Israel won’t accept a cease fire until it’s ready, which may be in February or March, which is what the generals are saying, Biden is in two kinds of political trouble. On the one hand, if he tries to force Israel to do certain things, he’s in trouble with Republicans, the leadership of the Democratic Party, and people who are supportive of Israel. But if he continues on this course, even while trying to mitigate the number of Palestinians slaughtered in this war, he’s going to lose a lot of votes in 2024.

RA: You can imagine why for more than a decade now the White House has been trying to pivot away from the Middle East. Rashid, I want to try and move to the future. Can anything good come out of this? In other words, the wider world seems to have realized that the status quo before Oct. 7 was untenable and won’t keep Israelis or Palestinians safe. Do you have any hope this could lead to a serious diplomatic push for a two-state solution or for a Palestinian state?

RK: I’m going to give you two scenarios. The glass is half full in the sense that there’s been a shift globally in the Arab world and among Americans. Three-quarters of Democrats want a ceasefire. That’s a shift. There’s been a shift in the United States and in the Arab world towards seeing that the situation before Oct. 7 was unsustainable, and there has to be a change. That might be a positive factor. I can see a willingness to address issues that have never been addressed before: root causes, occupation, the settlements, and so on.

Traumatic events sometimes change people’s sense of what’s possible. You look at World War I in the Middle East: People just changed overnight. Israel changed after the 1973 war. Israel changed after the first intifada. Palestinians changed after the Madrid and Oslo negotiations. So that could be a positive.

There’s a glass half empty argument too. There’s paralysis in American politics. On the one hand, the president and the political leadership are almost blind to the Palestinians. They talk as if the Palestinians don’t exist and they can be thrown whatever scraps the Israelis might deign to give them. I don’t see that changing quickly, but it is changing at the base. There is a change ongoing in American public opinion. It may take many years before it manifests itself at the political level. It took years for the Vietnam War to become unpopular and further years for that change to reach the top. The same was true in the Iraq war. This may be true as far as Palestine is concerned. The Palestinians suffer from a divided leadership and a lack of a unified strategy. Where are they going? What do they want? That’s an enormous disability in terms of any progress towards any change.

On the Israeli side, the movement has further to the right, from being ashamed to talk about kicking Palestinians out, to having people who want to kick Palestinians out in senior ministries in Israeli government. That could change and so could the situation among the Palestinians. But right now, that’s not the direction things are going in Israel, partly as a result of the shock of Oct. 7.

The trauma, not just in Israel, but also in Jewish communities across the world, is something that is beyond the scale of this event. More Israeli civilians were killed in this war than in any Israeli Arab war, going right back to 1948. That’s going to have a psychological effect. Add that to previous traumas. I’m not talking about the military and the government. I’m talking about public opinion, ordinary people, that is going to lead to all kinds of possible changes in Israeli politics, which may turn out positively. The families of the hostages seem to be the only people in Israel who are speaking realistically. They are saying “let’s save these people and let’s cut a deal.”