A Good Read: A Discussion Between an Arab Jew & an Arab-American

http://www.opentent.org/khalidi.html

The Crisis of Our Times: Nationalism, Identity, and the Future of
Israel/Palestine

An Interview with Rashid Khalidi

By Jordan Elgrably

Elgrably, an Arab Jew, is a writer and an activist who founded the
Sephardi/Mizrahi organization Ivri-NASAWI in 1996, and Open Tent
Middle East Coalition in 1998. He interviewed Khalidi from an
essentially empathetic position--that of a Middle Eastern Jew who
argues that Jews have an organic role to play in the region, and that
peace is possible between partners who not only evidence mutual
respect, but abide by international law and the principles of
democratic states.

Jordan Elgrably spoke to Rashid Khalidi in October during a visit to
Los Angeles, where he delivered his lecture, "The Emergence of a
Nationalism in the Modern Middle East." Khalidi asserted that most
conflicts in the region are no more than 100 years old, even though
Western rhetoric invariably uses the "age-old conflict scenario" to
justify Middle East policy. Rashid Khalidi is Professor of Middle
East History at the University of Chicago, where he directs the
Center for International Studies. He has taught there since 1987.
____________________________________________________


JORDAN ELGRABLY: How do you see this sort of third wave 
of resistance, a second intifada as it were, reshaping Palestinian 
identity?

RASHID KHALIDI: I don't think it's going to reshape Palestinian
identity, I think it's going to reshape the course of the so-called
peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. I think it's really
brought an end to the Oslo approach, the nine years that we've been
engaged in since Madrid. It has bypassed Arafat and his whole take on
things; sooner or later it will force, I think, the Israelis to come
to terms with an issue that they've refused to come to terms with,
which is removing settlements and ending occupation. I don't think
you can negotiate while settlement building continues and while
occupation continues.

I was watching Ephraim Sneh last night on Charlie Rose; clearly the
Israelis think they can bully the living bejesus out of the
Palestinians and at the same time dictate terms to them. This
intifada has signaled that that approach, ultimately, will not work.

JE: At times Israel reminds us of apartheid-era South Africa:
draconian special emergency laws, pass laws and codes against both
Palestinians and Israelis in the peace camp; in fact a great number
of Israeli activists have been tossed into jail merely for
cooperating with Palestinian activists. Why do you suppose American
Jewish supporters of Israel fail to recognize Israel for what it is?
Why do they support it so reverently?

RK: The mental framework in which they operate won't allow them to
see what's happening. They can't accept that this is basically an
apartheid system in creation. They've been brainwashed into
forgetting that there's been an occupation of 90-odd percent of the
West Bank, if you take Area B and Area C, i.e. the Israeli Army has
utter and absolute control over 90% of the West Bank: that's
occupation, and yet they don't see that, because they've been told
that through the Oslo peace process, Israel has withdrawn its forces,
and 97% of the Palestinian population is under the PA's
administrative control. These things are true, but the mindset that
they have leads them to believe a whole set of things, which in fact
are demonstrably false.

There is one other aspect that has to be put here, which is racism.
The kinds of things Israeli Jews would never accept for their own
children, i.e. shoot at them if they throw rocks, or beat them
senseless, are perfectly good for Arabs. You have a dual standard in
Israel, when religious Jews throw rocks at police, block roads, set
fires, in Jerusalem say, in Mea Sharim, over grave yards. They've
done it dozens of times in the past thirty or forty years, that I
know of. People don't shoot them. But when Arabs in the
Galilee--where the are no guns (and the pretext of firing by the
demonstrators doesn't operate)--13 people were killed, and dozens,
perhaps hundreds were wounded. These are double standards, and that
is basically racist. People hate to be told that, and it's a nasty,
loaded, weighty word, but there's no other way to explain that what
you would never accept for your own children, you not only accept,
you condone. You have advertisements in the papers, costing hundreds
of thousands of dollars, supporting the shooting of children, because
they're throwing rocks. I don't think somebody can find another word
for it, but I would certainly call it racism.

JE: The Palestinians have not been successful in either military or
political terms in achieving the aims of Palestinian national
identity. What force could help them to achieve their dreams of an
independent state with respected borders?last night you mentioned the
importance of third-party negotiators? (Canada for instance.)

RK: I think the main problem is internal, but there is a need for
fair negotiations between the sides. If anything, you should have the
United States at the negotiating table on the Israeli side, and then
it would be clear: you'd have the 900-pound gorilla and Israel
together at the table, so they're one party. Then have the
Palestinians and the European Union on the other side, and the United
Nations in the middle. That would be a fair way to negotiate. The
point is, end the farce which would have that the United States is in
the middle; the United States is not in the middle. The United States
is actually worse than Israel on some issues. Israelis are easier to
talk to about some issues than some American government officials are.

Palestinians have to have a completely different approach. They have
to understand what they want, they have to focus on it, they have to
put that message across to Israel, and they have to put that message
across in this country. I mean look at the way apartheid was ended;
apartheid was ended because what was happening in South Africa was
coordinated with a whole diplomatic campaign. The ANC was watching
abroad, it was one seamless message, one seamless campaign; everybody
was doing the same thing towards the same end. That's not the case
with the Palestinians. Specifically you have to decide: how are we
going to achieve independence, well, we have to end this occupation.
That should be the focus.

JE: Are you suggesting that they should use the power of the media
outside of the region?

RK: They should be speaking to the United States public and they
should be speaking to the Israeli public. Those are the target
audiences.

JE: How can they do this when the mainstream media is often closed to
alternative messages, platforms?

RK: If Israel has its deputy defense minister--at the "time of
greatest peril in Israel's history" if you believe the hysterical
outpourings in the synagogues and the newspapers--waltzing around the
media in the United States, obviously that's the most important thing
that Ephraim Sneh, who's the head of the whole Israeli security
establishment under Barak, could be doing. What's the most important
thing that some Palestinian leaders should be doing? There should be
people out here; you can get access, it's not true you can't get
access. The media is like a prostitute in the sense that the picture
will carry the day, even if the picture isn't favorable to the biases
of the editor. Take the picture of that guy with blood on his hands;
look at the way the Chicago Sun-Times, which is owned by Conrad Black
(the most extreme Zionist in public life, he also owns the Jerusalem
Post and the Sun-Times reflects his editorial policy), handled that
picture. The bias of the Sun-Times put it full front page, with
inflammatory headlines second and third page, tabloid format. The New
York Times and the Chicago Tribune came across as neutral on these
issues, but all three ran the picture of the guy with blood on his
hands.

JE: What I sense from Arab American leaders and activists, here in
L.A. and in Washington, is that they often feel a kind of
powerlessness?less access to the chambers of politics and media, and
they are less well organized, having been here less time than the
organized Jewish community for example.

RK: I think that that's a big part of it. I think the other part of
it is that we're not being supported from back home. I mean there is
no official Palestinian support for anything like this. And it can
only be done to a limited extent from here, in my view. The Edward
Saids of this world, and people like me are really very few and far
between; our energy is limited, and we have only a limited authority.
We're essentially outsiders. What you need is a reinforcement of that
from within, from the inside of core Palestinian national identity,
which is there, not here.

JE: Would a national tour by Hanan Ashrawi with an Israeli like Uri
Avnery have an effect?

RK: It can't be a one-shot affair; it has to be systematic and on
going. It has to understood that the battlefield is the streets of
Jerusalem, the hilltops of the West Bank, and the American and
Israeli media, and the publics of these two countries. Everyone else
is with us; literally, every other single place on the face of the
earth is in support of the Palestinians, yet all of them together
aren't a hill of beans compared to the United States and Israel,
because the United States and Israel can basically do anything they
please. They are the world superpower, they are the regional
superpower.

JE: Everywhere we look today--in the Third World as well as in
democracies such as the United States--the power of the people on the
street, the protesters, is challenged; in fact protesters everywhere
routinely get beaten, shot and thrown in jail. Haven't democratic
movements or expressions been severely curtailed by the power elites,
by capitalism or multinational corporations?

RK: I would not under any circumstances under-estimate the value of
people making sacrifices in the street, protesters, who are beaten up
in places like Seattle and L.A. and Prague, to take one movement, or
the West Bank. That sacrifice is not in vain, in the sense that it
forces an issue. You should listen to the way that people who are
supportive of the IMF and the World Bank talk about the way these
protests have forced them, fundamentally against their will, to
reorient themselves, to deal with issues, to face things, and how
these issues are put on the national, political and media agenda.
What you say about the power elites is entirely true; what you say
about the kids getting their heads beaten in is true. And yet you
would not have the discussion of the Palestine question, you would
not have the word "occupation" in public discourse, were it not for
[200] people killed. Now I'm not saying the sacrifice is a welcome
thing, I'm not saying that people in L.A. should have their heads
broken open. It shouldn't happen. But sometimes the only way to bring
an issue forward is to be willing to make that kind of a sacrifice.
And basically in the Palestinian case, this is not a rational
calculation. People have just had it; they're fed up. It's like "I
won't take it anymore," literally, to the point that tens of
thousands of people are willing to go out and risk death, to make
that point.

JE: Aren't there too few groups or people with financial means
offering support; don't they lack backing? I mean the $800 million
that's going to maybe come from the Arab League is not going to go to
finance this new Intifada, or a social movement, or the kind of civil
society that someone like Hanan Ashrawi is working hard at helping to
establish, is it?

RK: No. No, it won't. But I'm not worried about civil society in the
Palestinian case. I'm really not. Palestinian society is what comes
through during these uprisings; it's civil society that carried the
first uprising. The PLO really smothered it. And the PA represents
the antithesis of what is needed. Civil society pokes its way up
through the concrete. Our problem now, in this community, is to
figure out how we can reach "out" of the Arab community. The Arab
community has been energized by this month; the trouble is the focus
and the emphasis has been entirely inwardly directed. I mean you have
some people saying "haiba, haiba, ya yahoud, jaich Mohamed sai
yahoud," meaning the battle in which the prophet is supposed to have
defeated the Jewish tribe, the army of Mohammed will return. You have
people saying "Allahu Akbar." Now these are wonderful slogans if
you're in a mosque--"haiba haiba" is not a wonderful slogan, but
Allahu Akbar is. But if you're in the street, you've got to be saying
something to Americans that can bring together a coalition of people
who understand that what is being done in the name of the United
States is against the interests of the United States, is morally
wrong, and is something that we should be opposing. And that's a
pretty simple message. If you're not saying things which reach an
American audience, you may as well not be on the streets. Go and
demonstrate in your own community if you want to mobilize your own
community.

So you first of all have a problem of political enlightenment. You
have some very backward and reactionary elements in the Arab
community, you have some racist elements in the Arab community as
well (I have trouble with that); and you have people blind to
politics--they don't understand even if they're not backwards or
reactionary or racist or blind that you have to build a coalition or
you may as well not do it. The Arabs by themselves, Muslims by
themselves cannot be a force alone, they have to be a force by
linking up with other people. Look at apartheid. Apartheid was
defeated because the ANC understood how to make coalitions in Britain
and the United States and other countries; they did it and they won.
They won at home and abroad.

JE: Part of the problem which makes negotiating between Jews and
Arabs thorny is that Israel narrates itself as a country of the West,
rather than an organic part of the Middle East; Rabin said once that
Israel was part of Europe, and Ben-Gurion famously railed against
Levantine Jewry. This has produced an internal struggle among Arab or
Middle Eastern Jews who haven't, until recently, had very much power
in Israel. Today the president, Moshe Katsav, is Persian; Shaul
Mofaz, another Persian, is an army general; and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who
was born in Morocco, is acting foreign minister...The question is,
are these Middle Eastern Jews able to articulate their identities
from a truly Mizrahi position, or have they been coopted by an
Eastern European elite, which fundamentally asks them to reject their
cultural baggage as Middle Easterners?

RK: They've all been Ashkenazified if they are in leadership positions.

They may have to be to get there, but we're talking about the future,
not the present. If Israel can renarrate itself as an organic part of
the Middle East? in part because of Middle Eastern Jews?do you
suppose this will make any difference in dealing with the Palestinian
question?

RK: If it could, it would. But I wonder whether it could. Israel is
not a Jewish project? I said this last night?Israel is an Eastern
European Jewish project. Zionism did not come out of the needs of
Middle Eastern Jews; they were dragooned, drafted, dragged
unwillingly into being canon fodder for an Eastern European project.
It can be argued that the Eastern European project was justifiable,
given the Holocaust, even given what was happening before. I mean
Herzl came out of Vienna which had a mayor who was an anti-Semite;
there's still a statue of the son of a bitch, Carl Juger Platz, it's
right there, I was in Vienna the other day, I saw it. Herzl went to
France and was transfixed by the Dreyfus trial, by anti-Semitism,
which is still operative there. So it's not like we're talking about
an imaginary problem which Zionism was the answer to.

Now, neither in North and South America, nor in the Islamic world was
there or is there the same fundamental, historical problem. European
anti-Semitism is a thousand, eight hundred, nine hundred years old,
it goes back to the beginnings of Christianity and the Roman Empire,
it's not something new. My point here is that Zionism as a project is
very largely affected by those roots. I wonder to what extent the
North and South American Jewish community has been taken over by
Zionism in terms of their mindset. They now narrate their history as
Jews and as Jewish communities in terms of experiences which are not
theirs. We don't have the success of American Jews in museums in
Washington and New York; we have Holocaust museums in Washington and
New York. Now, that's understandable, everybody who's in those cities
and all over the United States had relatives who died in the
Holocaust, or many of them do. But the American Jewish experience is
an overwhelming success story about integration and assimilation, or
acculturation.

JE: Nor do we have museums that narrate the Middle Eastern Jewish
experience, and the Sephardic one in Spain, which were a formidable
segment of Jewish history.

RK: Precisely. It was Jewish history. The only positive aspect of
Jewish history for seventeen hundred years is the Sephardic and other
Mizrahi Jewish experience. That was Jewish history. The rest is
misery and oppression in Europe, that's it, those are the two
capstones of Jewish history.

JE: If you study the history of the past several hundred years, you
find that over ten million Jews have been killed in Europe, by
Europeans, whether as a result of the Spanish Inquisition, the
Russian pogroms or the Nazi Holocaust; while during that same period,
an estimated 5,000 Jews were killed in all the countries of the
Middle East and North Africa.

RK: And Jews probably faired better in the Middle East than other
minorities, or they were treated no worse than anybody else,
including majorities.

Yet you have American Jews, whose support dictates the course of
affairs, thinking that all the Arabs want to do is "destroy us and
throw us into the sea."

RK: That's the paranoia which has successfully massaged and fueled
and manipulated the Israel government's spinmeisters.

JE: There is, however, a small progressive wing, which includes some
Middle Eastern or Sephardic Jewish activists in the U.S., who want to
counteract that, and it's an enormous myth to fight.

RK: I understand that. Well what you have to do is analyze reality.
The reality is that you had a whole long period when the Arab world,
the Islamic world, were clearly willing to accept Israel. This
outburst, you can [either] see in terms of essentialism or primordial
hate, or you can see it as a response to what Israel does. There's a
three-page piece in the Economist that does a good job of analyzing
why people are angry with Israel. It has nothing to do with
primordial hate; it has to do with what Israel does. It's enough to
show what Israel does to show that for most people in the Arab
world--there are people who primordially hate, let's start with that,
but if you look at numbers, the number of people who support Hamas or
Islamic Jihad is 12%, 18%, 15%, 7%, 9%; okay, there's 10 or 20% of
Palestinians who irremediably hate Israel. And then there's 20 or
30%, who wouldn't be willing to compromise under any circumstances,
and then you have the floating middle, those are people who do not
advocate terrorism. I mean these are numbers that have been polled
and polled and polled, these are these solid, clear numbers, from the
West Bank and the Gaza strip. That is fact, that is truth, if you
understand it properly.

How people in the middle move is a function of how many Palestinians
Israelis kill, how many hundreds of Palestinians are humiliated on a
daily basis by Israeli border guards who slap them upside the face,
kick them, and tell them that they're "khleb," tell them that they're
"hallanet," tell them that their mothers are going to be screwed by
them, and that's what people are told daily, at road blocks, that's
what people are told daily when their kids are stopped on the way to
school. That happens every day; it's been going on since 1967. That
finally boils up--it has nothing to do with some essentialist Islamic
hatred, it has nothing to do with some primordial dislike of
minorities, it has nothing to do with anti-Zionism, it has nothing to
do with anything except finally the pot boils over. You can take just
so much. All you need to do is analyze what is actually happening on
the ground, humiliation and so on, and you see where the reaction
comes from. Now, it drives some of these people into irrational
hatred, yes, there's no question, but that is and has always been a
minority, that is a fact. That minority can sometimes lead, and could
be provoked into leading. I mean there's nothing to say that the Arab
world will continue to be basically accepting of Israel. Israel is
perfectly capable of provoking the Arab world further, but that's
Israel that'll be doing it, it's not some irrational, inevitable
basic hatred, that will dominate finally as these analysts suggest.

JE: Assuming Arafat passes away and there is not an autocratic
take-over but a referendum or democratic elections: could Hanan
Ashrawi ever win, and if so, what kind of Palestine would she govern
over?

RK: I don't think Hanan could win an election. I come from Chicago,
where political machines win elections-unless you have a popular
uprising of some sort, as in Serbia. And there are other reasons she
won't win. I think there will be a take-over by the security services
immediately after Arafat's death, the question is, what then will
happen. It won't necessarily be Hanan, but there are a lot of people
who could win, depending on how the Palestinians push their domestic
regime. I think that the street is strong than the state. We've seen
that: Arafat didn't want this uprising, Arafat didn't organize this.
Arafat followed this, and could not have stopped it had he wanted to.
That's why he didn't stop it. He couldn't stop a mass movement, and
[yet] he has credibility, he has enormous legitimacy. I mean the man
still has nearly 40% support among Palestinians, even though he seems
to be failing. There is no [other] Palestinian leader with that kind
of legitimacy or credibility. And naked force--as the Israelis have
learned over 33 years--doesn't work against the Palestinians. They
will not just lie down because somebody shoots at them. They showed
it in Beirut and they showed it the West Bank and Gaza strip
repeatedly, over years.

I think that ultimately, probably, you will have a democratic
transition of sorts, but who will come up? It depends on who has a
better political organization. Probably Fatah will put forward
somebody, because they have the best political machine.

JE: Edward Said, as you know, is now a proponent of a one-state
solution where Israelis and Palestinians would live and govern
together. Let's jump ahead 25-50 years: can you imagine it working?

RK: Oh god, that's a hard question. I think it will take a lot more
than 25 years, it will be very difficult to dismantle any state...In
the Arab world not one of the artificial state structures set up in
the wake of the mandates and the post-World War I settlement has
dissolved. States are very hard to dissolve. I think that dissolving
the state of Israel is not in the cards in one or two generations,
frankly. This is not an ordinary state; this is a very powerful
state, with enormous capability to indoctrinate, enormous capability
to mobilize. If you look at the money that they are able to bring in,
you look at the size of the economy, you look at what they are able
to sell, if you look at their naked power, I mean the Internet, IT,
avionics, Israel leads the world. This is not just some banana
republic. This is one of the most powerful states in the world. And
it is integrated into the American political system. It is not just
sitting out there in Bora Bora; it's in New York and it's in Palm
Beach and it's in L.A., in a profound, functional way. It's a state
of multi-millionaires and the multi-billion-dollar corporations are
here and there. Intel is here and there, and it's not just there
because it decided to make an investment; the people who decide to
make that investment are profoundly in tune with Israel, some of them
[are] Israelis. And this transnational Israeli community is an
enormous strength; and it's not just the Jewish community, there are
hundreds of thousands of Israelis in America, maybe a quarter of a
million, maybe half a million. Nobody knows those numbers. And
finally you have the infusions of capital they are able to mobilize,
so talking about the dissolution of any state, anywhere, under any
circumstances, historically speaking, is a profoundly complicated
business. This state ain't dissolving soon, folks.

JE: During your talk last night, you spoke of the inherent lack of
ethnic or cultural homogeneity in most parts of the Middle East. What
I wonder is, have nationalisms forever canceled out the possibility
of a more pluralistic Middle Eastern society, a quilt if you will, of
distinct yet inter-dependent entities, or can we hope to recreate a
sort of Levantine, live-and-let live multicultural environment?

RK: You can't eliminate nationalism; at least there's no historical
model in the modern world the last two hundred years for eliminating
nationalism. You have to transcend it. And there are ways it can be
transcended. Europe is an example; there are other parts of the world
that go beyond nationalism. And that's what will have to be done in
the Middle East. But for the moment we're stuck with it. There's no
other game in town. I don't like it, but that's the way it is. And
the ways to transcend it have to do with education, with economic
interests, with all kinds of things, some of which are not very nice.
People giving up aspirations--I mean there were once a lot of Germans
who really wanted Alsace-Lorraine back, and now they just don't care.
The Palestinians may want things, the Israelis may want things, but
if there's going to be peace between these two peoples, they're going
to have to give up on some of their aspirations. Open Tent

© Open Tent, 2000. All Rights Reserved. This interview is available
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