This is Duke University.
Hello, my name is Shai Ginsburg and our guest today is
Professor Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Saed Professor in
the Department of History at Columbia University.
I wanted first to ask you about your
thoughts about the role of the historians at this time
and place.
Well, I mean, I think historians can do several things.
One thing that they can do is to try
and increase the store of knowledge
generally and publish and speak to their colleagues
and to their graduate students and so forth.
I think that they have another role,
which is to also try and educate a broader public, which means undergraduates, but also the general public.
And so I try and do both things.
I've written a number of narrow monographs which are essential-- only a scholar could love a sort of thing--
books that focus very narrowly on something and that are
intended essentially for my grad colleagues and my graduate students
and other people who are very interested in Middle Eastern history.
But I also write books for more general audience, and I also try and speak to general audiences.
I give academic talks that are essentially meant for
academic audiences, but I also try and give general talks.
And I think that a historian should be able to do both and can play a role with both.
Does the Middle East present particular difficulties for the historian,
especially when he talks to a wider audience?
Middle East is full of mine fields, literal and figurative.
It's a dangerous place.
And it can be a dangerous place to talk about or write about.
And that's not just Arab-Israeli issues.
That can be Arminian-Turkish issues.
That can be Arab-Kurdish or Turkish-Kurdish issues.
That can be historical issues that would seem to be long dead
but which, in fact, are very alive for many people.
So the Middle East involves a great deal of sensitivities.
It's a little bit like the Balkans in that respect, and some other regions.
But it is sort of our responsibility to
try and illuminate as much as we can
some of these complicated issues, some of which are not quite as complicated
as they're made out to be and that's
a role that a good historian can make.
I always try and make comparisons to things that students or
an ordinary audience would understand,
so that they can see that this is not quite so exotic and
quite so impossible to understand as it's often made out to appear
What is your general approach as a historian?
to history in general and to the study of the Middle East in particular
Well, the first thing that I argue very very, very forcefully-- and I'm
building on the work of a lot of historiography-- is that
history entirely changes with the perspective from which it's seen.
Nobody would have written the history of the Middle East--
the role of religion, for example, in the Middle East--
in 1970 the way people write it today in 2015.
Religion was not important for a hundred years before
1970 it appeared that, say, no historian that I know of paid an enormous
amount of attention to the role of Islam, political Islam.
Up through the end of the 70's, in fact, it was understood and believed that there was an inextricable secular trend,
that modern state building had achieved certain things and so on and so forth.
People wrote from the perspective of the time they were living it.
Nobody would write the history of the past 200 years in that way today, in light of
changes in the last 20 or 30 or 40 years.
So that is the first thing I would argue.
Every generation has its own disease, every generation has its own history of previous period
because where we stand, in some measure, determines what we see.
The second thing
about the Middle East in particular is
that a lot of what people have said
has proven to be
not so solid as we once thought, and so you have to be pretty careful with rendering judgments.
I'm always very, very careful about trying to answer questions about "where is this going to go?".
I have no idea where it's going to go. I've been wrong so many times.
Sometimes I'm right. I mean I wrote a book in
2003 or 2004 called Resurrecting Empire
at the very beginning of the American occupation of Iraq
a couple of years after the Afghan war started,
in which I pretty much laid out what I thought was going to happen,
which proved to be unfortunately all too true.
It's not to say I was predicting anything.
It was to say that, having looked at two centuries of
imperial adventures in the Middle East, I could see
why what the United States was trying to do in Iraq was not
going to go well and, unfortunately, I was right.
Talking specifically about the Israel-Palestine
issue, are there any particular
difficulties with
teaching, writing, talking to the public about
this issue?
Talking to the public, yes.
Talking to a student audience less so perhaps.
As I said my talk last night
Most of what people think they know about Palestine is wrong.
So, with a general audience, you are talking to people who
think they know a lot about
Arabs and Israelis or about Palestine on the basis of the Bible, on the basis of
entirely worthless books like Joan Peters' book, "From Time Immemorial."
and it's the books that have no scholarly value whatsoever.
Almost everything in the book is wrong and
millions of people have read it
It's a huge bestseller.
Or, on the basis of the movie Exodus or the book.
In other words, sources that are thoroughly unreliable for understanding the 20th century and 21st century.
So you start off with a lot of misinformation, and
the second thing you start off with is a lot of very strong beliefs.
In fact, the less a person knows and the stronger their beliefs are,
the more of a problem you're going to have dealing with it, because people really,
really think they know things on the basis of their beliefs, which often are not very sound.
And that's a problem in talking to a general audience.
I think it's decreased a little bit because I think that
there is a better sense in much of the
published scholarly literature of the realities of the 20th and 21st
century in the Middle East and an educated public is getting
a better sense of things, no matter where they stand politically.
But, with a general audience, because of the general level of ignorance
of the world that you'll often find in this country,
it's often an uphill struggle.
You write two kinds of books on the Middle East: one that explores
history from within
Arab-Nationalism, Palestinian history, and one history from without, of
imperial interventions, imperial engagement with with the Middle East.
How are these two stories related?
They are not exactly the same story.
No, you're right. I think I'm following a little bit
the path light down by the person who was my supervisor at Oxford, Albert Hourani.
He was deeply interested in this interplay and
so much of what he wrote was really about the internal evolution of
Arab and Middle Eastern societies but much of what he wrote was about
the contact with and the interaction with the outside world.
In everything I teach, certainly most of my classes, this is a constant--
talking about that interaction.
But, you're right I do write two different kinds of books
Some of them are much more inwardly directed and some of them are much more focused on externals.
The last book, "Brokers of Deceit" is almost entirely focused on U.S. policy.
A previous book about the Cold War in the Middle East is almost entirely focused on Soviet and American
approaches to the Middle East over 45 years.
They interact in very complicated ways.
You have a war going on in Syria today, for example, which has to be understood in terms of two
interlinked but separate dynamics.
One is a civil war between Syrians with ethnic, sectarian, political causes and one is a proxy war between
regional powers that are fighting each other,
using the bodies of Syrians as their tools,
killing Syrians, in other words, to advance their interests whether it's
Turkey or Qatar or Iran or Russia or whoever.
That's not easy to explain.
I mean, read the good histories of the Spanish Civil war and you'll see how hard it is to explain a conflict
that is both a civil war in a proxy war.
And, that's what you've had three or four times now in the Middle East.
That's what you had in Lebanon for 15 years.
That's what you had in Iraq since 2003,
and that is what you have now in Syria.
So, that's a perfect example of how hard it is to do this.
Has your view of the
Middle east changed over the many decades that you've been writing about this
and, in particular, has your view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
changed over this period of time?
Yes, my view of many things in the Middle East has changed.
When I started, I had a much less jaundiced, much less critical view of Arab Nationalism, for example.
I now repudiate some of the things that I wrote in my first book which was published
35 years ago and was really written in the early 70's.
I just think I was wrong about many specific things about Arab Nationalism.
About Palestine, again I think I have a much more jaundiced view of Palestinian nationalism,
than when I did when I was,
what as I see it now, a kid when I first started working on these subjects.
And I think my understanding of the conflict has also evolved over time.
In some cases I've come back to views that I held when I was much younger and, in other cases,
I've discarded views that I don't really think makes sense anymore.
And, I mean I could go into specifics, but
Some things really
you learn over time
about it.
Can you talk in this contexts about your latest project
and the latest iteration of your understanding of the conflict?
Well this is a book which...
I mean, I'm now chair of the history department which is more than a full-time job.
It's actually a full-time job for maybe three people and
I'm doing that as well as teaching as well as coming to Duke
and giving talks and going elsewhere giving talks.
So, I'm not able to do much about this book.
I started working on it during a sabbatical and it's an attempt to frame
the conflict
which I think is completely misunderstood in terms of 100 years war on the Palestinians.
And I'm going to do that in a way
which is a little different from
many of the things that I've done before,
in that this is going to be a book that'll have what I hope is a sophisticated
framework and
analysis, but will be meant for a more general audience
and I hope to do that by talking about things either in my experience or
through documents or through personal experiences of other people as
shown in their biographies, or autobiographies
or documents that I have from them or about them,
over that century.
So it's not just going to be another boring narrative history, I hope, whenever I get to
really writing it.
It'll be something that'll be more easily approachable for a general audience
Inshallah, I mean, if I ever get to write it.
One thing I noticed about your use of the frame is that it actually challenges the
normal understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which usually traces its beginning to
Jewish immigration to Palestine really during the 1880's. Is there a reason why you
start with the British rather than with
changes in the Ottoman Empire
in the late 19th century?
I've done a lot of work on that early earlier period.
The book, "Palestinian Identity," goes back to that period and I think, to understand
developments there, you do have to go to a 19th century--
to understand zionism you have to go to the 19th century.
And, to understand
the evolution of Palestinian society and politics,
you have to go to the 19th century or at least the pre-World War One period.
And, there will be a prologue in the book that talks about the earlier period.
So, it's not like I will ignore it.
But I actually believe the proper frame for understanding this is
with the Balfour Declaration and with
this issue being taken up by the Great Powers.
I don't think we would have any of the outcomes that we have today, without
exception, but for the way in which the great powers have acted in Palestine.
The British, the Americans and the Soviets, the British
and the French, other external actors.
I'm not saying they've defined outcomes.
Palestinian resistance, the evolution of zionism and of the state of Israel, Arab actors-- they will played a huge role.
But the framing that I'm giving to this book reflects my belief that when Balfour issues this declaration and when this becomes
consecrated in the new International
post-World War One regime, that completely changes everything.
The Zionist movement is not just
some national movement or some colonial movement or both, which is what it is.
It becomes patronized by the entire global system.
The League of Nations is
supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home and is suppressing the existing
indigenous population of Palestine.
That's not just a zionist imperative.
It's not even just a British imperative.
It's an imperative of the League of Nations mandate system.
The same thing happens after World War Two
as the Americans and the Soviets move into the space
formerly filled by the European great powers.
So I think it's a legitimate way of framing this.
You can make an argument that, no
you have to put the Palestinians and the Israelis at the front of the stage
and, as you'll see whenever the book is finally finished,
they aren't honest on the front of the stage.
But the framing I think has to be
the framing that I'm giving it, but we'll see.
My thinking may evolve as I write this.
One of the things that this framing does is to emphasize even more--
such a thing that needs more emphasis--
the question of violence.
And of some kind of violence.
Conflict may not necessarily involve physical violence, but war does.
How do you see violence in this context of the new framing over there?
Well the rubric I'm going to use is a war.
This is a war on the Palestinians.
It's mainly seen in some quarters as a war on the Jewish people, or a war on
zionism, or war on Israel, or a war on Jews.
I'm framing it differently.
I'm arguing that if you look at it from the perspective I'm trying to put forward,
this has been a war on the Palestinians fought by
different parties.
The British did most of the dirty work up until World War Two.
Other actors, the zionist
Militias and then the army of the state of Israel, and then the Jordanian Army or the Syrian or the Lebanese
militias played different roles in this.
So violence is omnipresent and violence is present in any colonial situation.
It's there intrinsically. I mean, read Frantz Fanon.
Read any number of books, novels, [inaudible]...
Violence is always there in the colonial situation, and
it's not the kind of spectacular violence-- it's grinding, everyday
brutality and humiliation and
subjugation and control
That's violence. All of that is violence.
A checkpoint,
a cattle herding
barrier like the Kalandia Crossing is
violence incarnated.
It's not just the gun towers.
And it's not just the guns.
It's the way in which people are subjugated, controlled,
humiliated, forced through a set of
procedures, and this is often procedural violence.
Well,
you can't do this without a permit, you can't get the permit without this, you have to come in and
give us the names of all of your cousins or this,
or [else] you can't get medical treatment.
That's my life. That's violence
That's doing violence.
People having to have babies at checkpoints-- that's violence
So violence is threaded through the whole nature of the conflict.
But you're asking me, I think, a different question.
You're asking about the violence of the colonized, of the oppressed
And, I mean, I have a
nuanced view of that. I
mean I was living in Lebanon in the
1970's and early 80's
at a time when the Palestinian
National Movement was committed,
nominally at least committed, on struggle.
In fact, they were moving in another direction even though they maintained that verbal commitment.
And I know that there were important intellectuals who were very critical of that from different perspectives.
Either the Palestinians weren't doing it right or doing it enough
Or that whole approach was mistaken.
And, not just intellectuals, Palestinian leaders-- some of them were very
skeptical or wanted to be more loyal.
And I think it's a much more complicated question than it is sometimes
understood to be.
So I mean it'll be something that'll be maybe a part of this book.
But it's not an easy issue to address.
You know, how does the colonial power respond best?
Does it respond to violence?
Some people would argue that that's the only thing that makes it respond.
But you have to look at those things over very long duration,
and one of our problems with Palestine is everybody
thinks it's [inaudible] generous.
Everybody thinks it's unique, nothing ever has been like it--rubbish.
There are acres of Middle Eastern history to which it should be compared.
There are dozens of examples of
externally supported colonial center states-- dozens!
Literally dozens.
Each is different.
None of them will give you an automatic
comparison to Palestine-Israel, but I
think you have to understand that range of
alternatives to seriously consider a question like violence.
Thank you very much.
I'm so happy that you were able to be here today.
It's a pleasure. Thank you
