Rashid Khalidi Speaks, You Listen

Rashid Khalidi is a professor at Columbia University who has announced his retirement, partly in disgust over the university’s shameful repression of its students’ legitimate protests against Israel’s ethnic cleansing and its outrageous efforts to prevent open debate about Palestine.

The joke used to be whether a university would be worthy of its football team. Now universities have become appendages to hedge funds, the playthings of billionaire donors, pipelines for public or tax-favored support for research the profits of which are privatized, and sources of endless Zionist propaganda.

The interview was done by my friend Doug Henwood. Transcript here. Not a softball exercise. I learned a few things that makes me a potential customer for Khalidi’s book. Anyway, a few things I didn’t know, besides the fact that Khalidi is well-versed in Jewish history.

The origin of the colonialist settler state thing was a well-established tenet of British imperial doctrine. Of course everybody knows it originated with the Balfour Declaration, and that the early Zionists were candid about leveraging British support for the seizure of Palestine, though actually it goes back further, and deeper. The early Zionists glommed onto an older Protestant-British interest. With the Cold War, Israel’s patronage shifted to the U.S. Now it is fortified by the U.S./Saudi interest in curbing if not annihilating Iran’s power in the region. The Russophobic element lives on in Russia’s backing for Iran.

The reality that Israel was the only available refuge for European Jews after the Holocaust sits uncomfortably alongside the Faustian, colonial bargain underlying the creation of the state.

It is in the U.K. that we first see elite, Christian support for the religious, philo-semitic Christian-Zionist notion of redeeming the Jews by returning us to our Biblical homeland (sic). This was alongside the famous elite English penchant for anti-Semitism. Pro- and anti-Semitism go hand in hand. We can see that in the Republican Party today, thanks to Trump himself and his evangelical Christo-freaks. Like the Back to Africa advocates in the KKK, they love us but want to send us away. Thanks a bunch.

What explains the failures of Palestinian leadership? The roots of that leadership were in pre-capitalistic economic formations, the power of “notables” who were beholden to patrons in the Ottoman Empire. There was no bourgeoisie. The old boys were not equipped to deal with the encroachment of the Western powerhouses of the U.K. and later the U.S. These days it is hard to see what remedies even a sophisticated Palestinian leadership has available.

One item I would take issue with, Khalidi’s claim that U.S. support for Israel is importantly rooted in evangelical Christian thinking. That is true today on a popular level and it did originate in the U.K. of the 19th Century, but the U.S. right-wing political surge of evangelicals is relatively recent. (Fun fact: in the 19th Century U.S., the most fervent Christians aligned with a now-extinct populist Left.)

Today I think U.S. support for Israel is mostly a question of U.S. geostrategy to retain global hegemony. There are no evangelical Christian elites. If anything, there is a neo-fascist Catholic elite that I’ve mentioned before. It’s amusing to note that the evangelical voters have elevated a competing strain of elite Christians who look upon them as cattle.