AMY GOODMAN:
The head of Hamas’s political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, has arrived in
Cairo, Egypt, for talks as hopes grow that a new deal could be reached
for a ceasefire and the release of more hostages. Israel’s bombardment
of Gaza began 75 days ago, on October 7th, just hours after Hamas’s
attack on Israel. Health authorities in Gaza say at least 19,600
Palestinians have been killed so far. Thousands are feared to be still
trapped under the rubble.
Just before this broadcast, Israel struck residential buildings in
the southern city of Rafah near the Kuwaiti Special Hospital. A reporter
from Al Jazeera, Hani Mahmoud, was on the air when the attack occurred.
HANI MAHMOUD: As we’re getting into — ooh! Oh my god! Did you hear that?
ANCHOR: Yes. Yes, we did, Hani.
HANI MAHMOUD: Oh my god! Oh, that’s the hospital! That’s the hospital! That’s the hospital! Oh my god! Are you guys hearing this?
ANCHOR: Yes, we are. We are hearing that, Hani. Are you — are you OK?
HANI MAHMOUD: Are you hearing that? All the debris.
ANCHOR: Are you — are you in a safe place to continue to talk to us?
HANI MAHMOUD: Why? Why? Why?
AMY GOODMAN:
“Why? Why?” Hani Mahmoud asks, the Al Jazeera reporter. Al Jazeera
reports the Israeli attack destroyed a large mosque in Rafah, as well as
two residential homes. Israeli drones had been seen in the sky just
before the strikes. Earlier, an Israeli attack on the Jabaliya refugee
camp killed at least 46 Palestinians and wounded dozens.
The United Nations Security Council is expected to vote on a new Gaza
resolution today. The vote was postponed Tuesday after the United
States voiced opposition to a draft of the resolution. On December 8th,
the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for
ceasefire.
This all comes as tension is growing in the Red Sea. U.S. Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin has announced the U.S. will lead a new military
task force to protect ships in the Red Sea following a number of attacks
by Houthi forces from Yemen.
We’re joined now by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of
modern Arab studies at Columbia University here in New York. He’s the
author of several books, including his latest, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. His recent opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times is headlined “How the U.S. has fueled Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinians.”
Professor Khalidi, I’m wondering if you can start off by just talking
about the situation overall in Gaza? Your family is from the West Bank.
You also have family in Gaza. And I want to just point out that I
particularly talked about, named the journalist with Al Jazeera, Hani
Mahmoud, because it has been so horrifying to only name journalists
after they have been killed, and so many scores of them have died. Hani
Mahmoud’s bravery is astounding as we watch him through the Gaza Strip
and today in the midst of this attack. Take it from there, Professor
Khalidi.
RASHID KHALIDI:
Well, he’s very fortunate that he’s still alive. Over 90 journalists
have been killed in Gaza since — we’re now in the 11th week of this war.
Two hundred and eighty-three healthcare workers have been killed. A
hundred and thirty-five United Nations workers have been killed. It’s
the highest death toll the United Nations has ever suffered in its
entire history. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You cited a
number of 20,000 people earlier, apparently having been killed. Probably
the number is much higher, because there are so many thousands of
people buried under the rubble or missing. And we will probably not know
the final death toll until many, many months from now, when operations
to remove the ruins of the buildings that have been destroyed are
completed.
The situation in Gaza is unspeakable. What we hear from my niece’s
family there is — I can’t describe it. It’s beyond belief. People are
scrambling for the basic necessities of life and are sometimes not
finding them — firewood to heat water and cook, enough water for
everybody to have sufficient water to drink, let alone wash. I could go
on. It is unspeakable. It is intolerable.
And the tragic thing about it is that this is clearly intended.
Neither our government nor the Israeli government recognize the fact
that what is happening there is causing this immiseration of over 2
million people. And this could easily be stopped, and should be stopped.
I can’t — I can’t — I can’t understand how this country can allow this
to continue. The idea that going after Hamas entails the destruction of
more than half of the housing in Gaza, the idea that going after Hamas
entails the wounding of 50,000 people and the killing of 20,000, is just
— it’s incomprehensible to me that our government can be so callous and
can be so determined not to separate itself from Israel, as far as this
basic — the basic nature of this war, which is really directed against
the people of Gaza. Over 2 million people have been forced to leave
their homes. This is the largest displacement in Palestinian history.
The killing of 20,000 people, almost half of whom are children, is
unprecedented in Palestinian history. So we are talking about traumatic
events that are going to scar generations to come. And this doesn’t seem
to be a matter of concern to our government, let alone the government
of Israel.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well,
Professor Khalidi, we’ve seen massive, unprecedented demonstrations in
support of the Palestinians throughout the world. A majority of
governments in the General Assembly, overwhelming majority, have called
for a ceasefire, yet the Security Council continues to be a roadblock,
especially the United States. Can you talk about what this is doing to
the legitimacy of the U.N. itself?
RASHID KHALIDI:
Well, I think it’s harming the United Nations, but I think it’s also
harming the legitimacy of the United States’ position. It’s not the
Security Council that’s blocking action. It’s the U.S. government that’s
blocking action. There was one abstention, 13 votes in favor last time
that a ceasefire resolution was before the Security Council. And they
spent three days trying to get a resolution which involves not a
ceasefire, but a humanitarian pause, and the United States has been
obstructing that, as I’ve said, for three days. So, I think this is
going to harm not just the United Nations, because it’s manifestly
helpless in the face of this catastrophe; it’s harming the United
States.
There is overwhelming support the world over for ending this. There
is overwhelming support, sympathy, the world over for the Palestinians.
There is — I think the polls show very strong support even in the United
States for ending this war, and at the very least for stopping what’s
going on so that humanitarian aid can get in. And the administration is
clearly impervious to all of this. And I think the mainstream media,
frankly, are complicit in this. Nobody knows that four major trade
unions have come out for a ceasefire: the United Auto Workers, the
nurses, the electricians and the postal workers. The New York Times,
for example, has not deigned to mentioned that. Well, that’s a large
chunk of labor. We’re talking about a great deal of anger and opposition
to the Biden administration’s policy among wide swaths of the American
people. And they just plow on as if none of this mattered. I find it
very hard to explain, frankly.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to
ask you about — there have been numerous media reports of attacks on
U.S. troops in Syria and Iraq, that are threatening to expand the
conflict beyond just the Occupied Territories and Gaza. But what the
heck are U.S. troops still doing in those two countries? Has Congress
authorized their presence there? Do the governments of those countries
even want them there?
RASHID KHALIDI:
Well, the government of Syria, the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad,
certainly doesn’t want them there. And the pretext for their being in
Syria [inaudible] against the Islamic State. I don’t think there is any
authorization for their being there. The troops that are in Iraq are
supposedly engaged in training the Iraqi army but there’s a great deal
of opposition in Iraq, even though the Iraqi government has accepted
their presence there. There’s a great deal of opposition in the Iraqi
parliament to the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq.
And I think what we’re seeing are attacks, whether from Yemen on
shipping or firing missiles at Israel or attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq
or in Syria, which are a response to what Israel is doing in Gaza. And
the same is true, obviously, of the fighting that’s going on between
Hezbollah and the Israeli army along Israel’s northern frontiers. The
fear is that this will — that this could possibly be expanded, that this
could become a regional war. So far, we are now in the 11th week of
this war, since the 7th of October. And so far, that fear has been — or,
that possibility has been contained. But it is always there. And it
would lead to, I think, possibly terrible consequences, were the war to
expand beyond its already quite horrific level in Gaza and were that to
spark a further increase of fighting on the Lebanese border, in Syria,
Iraq or out of Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN:
Can you talk about also what’s happening in the Red Sea? You have a
dozen corporations who say they won’t ship their goods through the Red
Sea. You have U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announcing a 10-nation
coalition to protect trading interests there, including Bahrain,
Canada, France, Italy, the U.K., the Seychelles; Houthi officials saying
that their drone and missile attacks will continue as long as Israel
bombards Gaza.
RASHID KHALIDI:
There is enormous anger in the Arab world about what is happening in
Gaza. Things that Americans don’t see, or don’t see enough of, the
scenes of what is actually happening in Gaza, are being watched all over
the Arab world, and across much of the world. And the anger that people
have and their frustration at the unwillingness of their governments to
do more to try and stop this is palpable. In Saudi Arabia, people can’t
demonstrate. In some countries, they can demonstrate. But you talk to
anybody in any of these countries, and public opinion is boiling. And
the passivity of Arab governments in the face of this, their
unwillingness to actually take action, I think, is — contrasts with
Hezbollah, militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen actually
engaging militarily in doing something.
And I think it is really time for countries that want to have to
ceasefire to begin to group together, whether Arab countries or European
countries or countries in the Global South, to group together and say
there will be X, Y, Z sanctions if this doesn’t stop. At the very least,
if sufficient humanitarian aid, if sufficient field hospitals, if
sufficient water and food and so forth are not allowed into Gaza, this
and this and this will be done to Israel, which is responsible. And I
think that there are countries that could do this, including Arab
countries. Jordan has recalled its ambassador. Well, that’s not going to
affect Israel very much. But stopping the transportation of food from
the Gulf to Israel — apparently the Emiratis are shipping food to Israel
— would actually affect Israel. Doing things that threaten diplomatic
relations would have an impact. Now, that, in and of itself, is not
enough, but I think a lot more has to be done.
The United Nations, as we can see, is paralyzed by the U.N. veto — by
the U.S., I should say, veto. The General Assembly has done what it
could, 153 to 10. You can’t have a more lopsided vote than that. I think
more has to be done to bring home to people in Washington, in
particular, that this is unacceptable and actually unsustainable, that
the possibility of this overflowing into regional conflagration, which
is always there, is only part of the damage that is being done. Whole
generations are being brought up angry at the United States, enraged at
Israel, all over the region. And Israel is going to have to deal with
this for decades to come. The United States is going to have to deal
with this for decades to come. We are seen as complicit. These are
American artillery shells, American bombs, American rockets, American
planes, American helicopters, American artillery that are being used in
this war. Twenty thousand people have been killed mainly with American
weapons, mostly civilians, in Gaza. And people are not going to forget
that, unfortunately. And I don’t see a sense of the impact of this in
Washington. I don’t — I really think they live in some kind of a bubble,
in some kind of a vacuum, in some kind of a fact-free space, where they
don’t seem to understand the impact of all of this. What they are
thinking and why they are thinking that is actually beyond me, as I’ve
said.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you, Rashid Khalidi, about the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Egypt to discuss a possible new truce, The Wall Street Journal
reporting Hamas is also in discussions with Palestinian rivals, like
Fatah, about a possible joint scenario for ruling the West Bank and Gaza
afterwards. Of course, Netanyahu is completely against this. If you can
talk about the discussion of the hostage negotiations, where we have
seen reports of possibly Marwan Barghouti — and if you can explain his
significance — being released for a number of Israeli soldiers released?
Talk about all of this that’s going on right now, so people can
understand what’s next.
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, that’s a big — that’s a big — that’s a big number — that’s a large number of questions.
I think the first thing, the hostage issue. There has been a huge
problem around the hostages, because what Hamas has been demanding up
until now is essentially an all-for-all exchange, all of the prisoners
and hostages. I mean, some of the hostages are military, and many of
them are civilians. And what they’ve been saying, apparently, from what
we can tell from press reports, is that if you want all of the hostages,
you’re going to have to release all of the prisoners. And that is one
possibility, I think unlikely. And one of the prisoners who could,
therefore, be released is Marwan Barghouti, who’s a senior Fatah leader
who was convicted of multiple murders, by an Israeli military court that
he never recognized, and who might well be a candidate for president
who could win a majority of Palestinian votes.
I think the other issue — and there are other possibilities as far as
hostages are concerned — for example, release of all the civilian
hostages in exchange for a certain number of prisoners. And I have no
idea where that negotiation is going. Some Israeli press reports
indicate that the Israeli government is talking about progress, when
there hasn’t actually been progress, in order to decrease the pressure
of hostage families, who are demanding the release of Palestinian
prisoners in order to get their loved ones home. I think the broader
question is —
AMY GOODMAN: Especially after Israel killed three of the hostages from Israel.
RASHID KHALIDI:
Accidentally, exactly, yes. And many others apparently have been killed
in the bombing. And released hostages have said, “We were terrified for
our lives because of the bombing that was going on.” I’ve read accounts
in the Israeli press from released hostages, who’ve talked about how —
the kind of danger that they were in, not so much from their captors as
from the possibility that they would be killed by the Israeli
bombardments.
The other aspect of this is the political aspect. Hamas has a
position in Palestinian politics that is not going to be eradicated, no
matter what Israel does in Gaza. If Israel entirely defeats Hamas’s
entire military network, infrastructure, if it kills every single
fighter — these are, of course, probably unrealistic, but even assuming
that they can do that, Hamas continues as a political movement. Hamas
continues to have support among Palestinians — not majority support,
according to almost every poll I’ve ever seen, but a certain amount of
support. If the — when and if the Palestinians manage to put together a
government — and, you know, everybody else is going to try and do it for
them. The United States is going to try and impose its intentions on
them. The Israeli government will undoubtedly try and do the same. And
the Europeans, in their colonial way, will probably try and do the same,
telling the Palestinians what’s good for them and telling them who they
can have and not have in their government. But when and if the
Palestinians can get their own act together and form some kind of, for
example, reformed PLO, there is no way to
exclude Hamas from that. This idea that Hamas, because of what it did on
October 7th, is completely excluded from Palestinian governance is a
fantasy, an Israeli, American, European fantasy.
You do not negotiate with the people who have already agreed to your
terms. You couldn’t do that in Ireland; you had to bring the IRA in. You couldn’t do that in South Africa; you had to bring the ANC in. You couldn’t do that in Algeria; you had to bring the FLN
in. These are groups that had carried out horrific attacks, in many
cases, on civilians. These are groups that were described by the
colonial power in South Africa, in Algeria, in Ireland as terrorists or
bandits, or they had different terms at different times. But the only
people you really need to negotiate with are the people with the guns,
after all. And until that fact gets through the thick skulls of people
in Washington and in Paris and London, we’re not going anywhere. They
can pick quislings. They can pick technocrats. They can select the
Palestinians who are acceptable to them, who meet whatever tests, who
get down on their knees and condemn Hamas, or whatever litmus test is
imposed, and those people will represent nobody, will have no
credibility, will have no legitimacy and will have no control over the
situation.
And so, you are looking — barring an acceptance that you have to
eventually deal with your real enemies, you are looking at a situation
of unending Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, direct or indirect.
You are looking at a situation which implies unending resistance to that
occupation. How many people can they kill? If Israel claims that there
are 25,000 or 30,000 militants, armed militants, in Hamas, how many of
them can they kill? Ten, 12, 11, 15? There will eventually be others,
people who are still there. And that means that an imposed solution,
with Israel continuing to operate in the Gaza Strip, which it has said
it intends to do, will provoke continued resistance. So, nothing will be
solved.
And the reconstruction and the end of the misery of the people of
Gaza can’t take place until those kinds of changes, from occupation to
some kind of Palestinian governance, takes place. And I don’t see — you
read The Washington Post, David Ignatius. The idea that Arab
countries are going to go in and do Israel and the United States’s dirty
work for them is a fantasy. The Emiratis and the Saudis and the
Egyptians and the Jordanians will not go in and govern on behalf of
Israel. It is not going to happen. There has to be Palestinian
governance of Palestinian territories.
And that is going to have to, one way or another, involve all the
groups within the Palestinian political spectrum. The Palestinians have
been divided by their own, you know, for reasons that have to do with
Palestinian dysfunction, but they’ve also been divided by the
divide-and-rule policies of the United States, Israel and the Europeans.
As long as that continues, this festering sore will continue, and there
will be violence. And it will not only be violence caused by hard men
in Hamas. It will be violence caused by the horrors visited on the
Palestinians by 56 years of occupation, by 75 years of colonialism, and
the fact that people, inevitably, necessarily, resist occupation. You
have to — they have to come to terms, sooner or later, with the fact —
in Washington and in Israel, with the fact that Palestinian governance
is a matter to be decided by Palestinians. And that is simply not in the
mindset, if you read what comes out of Washington or what comes out of
Israel, of our government or the Israeli government or many European
governments.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor,
we only have a couple of minutes left, but I wanted to ask you — you’ve
said that there’s an unquestionable connection of Judaism and the Jewish
people to the Holy Land, and yet that Israel — the Israeli state is a
settler colonial project. And in your L.A. Times piece recently, you called it, the assault on Gaza, “the last colonial war of the modern age.” Could you elaborate?
RASHID KHALIDI:
Right. Sure. I mean, this goes back to the nature of Zionism. Zionism
is a national project, which distinguishes it from every other settler
colonial movement, project. But at the same time, it was a
self-identified colonial project. I mean, the Jewish Colonization
Agency, the Palestinian Jewish Colonization Agency, is the term that
that organization, which existed until 1958, applied to itself. That was
something that was accepted by early Zionist leaders. They argued they
had a claim to the Holy Land, there’s a connection of the Jewish people
to the land of Israel. All of this is true, that there is such an
attachment and such a connection, but Zionism is a European colonial
project, backed by imperialism, British imperialism, and which intended
to replace an Indigenous population with a Jewish population. As Ze’ev
Jabotinsky said, “We want to transform Palestine into the land of
Israel.” And that meant a demographic transformation, and that meant
dispossession of the population and theft of their land, as happens in
every settler colonial scenario. So, Israel is both the result of a
national project, Zionism, and the result of a settler colonial project.
There’s no — you can walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s
actually no contradiction between it.
And it’s unique, in that it was not just an extension of a mother
country’s population and sovereignty. It had its own independent
ambitions: to establish a Jewish state, not a British state — came in
under the protection of Britain, but it had its own aims, separate,
independent aims. So, it’s a unique — it’s a unique phenomenon in the
modern world. And it learned everything it did from the British. The
Israeli army’s earliest leaders were trained by British colonial
counterinsurgency specialists, to blow up houses over the heads of their
residents, to shoot prisoners, to attack villages at night. This is
British counterinsurgency, which was transmitted to Israeli — members of
the Palmach and the Haganah in the 1930s in order for them to help the
British fight the Palestinians. And those are the founders of the
Israeli army. Moshe Dayan was trained by British counterinsurgency
specialists. Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Sadeh, many of the leading figures in
what became the Israeli army have that training. And Israel is using the
laws left over, the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations, under which
people are put in administrative detention, no indictment, no trial, no
conviction, nothing. They’re just put in jail and kept there. That’s a
British 1945 emergency regulation. That’s a typical colonial instrument.
So, this is a colonial war, fought in order to maintain the supremacy
of this group, which has taken the country over, at the expense of the
Indigenous Palestinian population. The connection of the Jewish people
to the land of Israel is, in my view, incontrovertible. But that, in and
of itself, doesn’t justify the colonial methods that have been used in
the establishment and the maintenance of Israel’s supremacy over now the
entirety of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
AMY GOODMAN: Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, author of a number of books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. We’ll link to your opinion piece for the L.A. Times, headlined “How the U.S. has fueled Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinians.”
Coming up, we look at how a group of Palestinian Christians are
trapped in the Holy Family Church in Gaza, where a mother and daughter
were shot dead this weekend by an Israeli sniper. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN:
“Keep On Keepin’ On” by Len Chandler. The song, by the folk singer who
passed away this year, was later quoted in a speech by Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.
