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On July 1, Israel and the United States signed an agreement to build a permanent U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on stolen Palestinian land. The site designated for the embassy compound is known as the Allenby Barracks, a 13-acre plot in West Jerusalem owned by several prominent Palestinian families who leased the land to British authorities during the Mandate era, before the new State of Israel confiscated the property under the discriminatory 1950 Absentees’ Property Law.
Among the descendants of those Palestinian owners is the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, who has been engaged in a decades-long struggle with various U.S. administrations to prevent the construction of an embassy on his family’s land.
Khalidi is one of the most preeminent scholars of Palestinian history and American foreign policy toward the Middle East. For over two decades, he held the Edward Said Chair in Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, before retiring in 2024, and also served as the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is a frequent commentator on U.S. and international media, and is the author of numerous published volumes, most recently “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”
On this episode of The +972 Podcast, Khalidi traces his family’s connection to this plot of land in Jerusalem — which stretches back to the middle of the 18th century — and how he first became involved in the legal battle against the embassy nearly 30 years ago. As Khalidi notes, the construction of a permanent compound on the Allenby Barracks would violate not only international law but also his rights as a citizen of the United States, which champions the sanctity of private property “except when it belongs to Palestinians.”
The signing of the embassy agreement comes just weeks after Israel was excluded from the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding to end the war, which Khalidi sees as an important turning point in the U.S.-Israel relationship. The fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped drag President Donald Trump into a failed and deeply unpopular war, Khalidi suggests, will only redound to the detriment of Israel’s standing in the United States.
Even as Israel has lost the battle of public opinion, Khalidi admits that translating this into political power will be a long slog: The pushback from the Israel lobby, weapons manufacturers, and the political establishment has already begun. But he takes heart in the fact, as he puts it, that “more has changed in three years than I ever could have imagined would happen in my lifetime” — and given generational shifts, Israel’s unpopularity will be difficult to reverse.
