PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Israel stole Rashid Khalidi’s land. The U.S. is building an embassy on it
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
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Jonathan Adler
Welcome to the +972 Podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Jonathan Adler, Senior Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
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Jonathan Adler
On July 1, Israel and the United States signed an agreement to build a permanent U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on stolen Palestinian land. This decision, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar proclaimed at the official ceremony, was “a recognition of history and a declaration of our shared future.” For U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, the agreement signalled Washington’s recognition of “Jerusalem as the eternal, indigenous, and forever capital of the Jewish people” — a decision he insisted “God made 3,800 years ago, and we finally got around to acknowledging.”
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 in Palestine, before the new state of Israel confiscated the property under the discriminatory 1950 Absentees’ Property Law.
According to the Haifa-based legal center Adalah, building a permanent embassy on the site would violate the special international legal status of Jerusalem, as recognized by UN General Assembly resolutions. On behalf of 12 descendants of the original Palestinian owners, Adalah filed an objection with Israel’s planning authorities against the proposed embassy back in 2023 — which, despite documented property claims, was rejected later that year.
One of those 12 descendants 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.
Dr. Khalidi is one of the 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.”
Rashid, thank you so much for joining me on the +972 Podcast — it’s really an honor.
Rashid Khalidi
It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Jonathan Adler
Can you explain the significance of this agreement to build a permanent embassy in Jerusalem? I mean, were you at all surprised that the U.S. signed it? And what recourse do you and the other Palestinian families who own the land have now?
Rashid Khalidi
Well, the decision to consider this site for the embassy goes back to the 1990s, since when the families of the owners, some of whom are owners of it as private property and some of whom are owners of it as waqf, and many of whom are U.S. citizens, have been fighting both in Israeli courts, as you mentioned, the case that Adalah brought, but also in the United States on several grounds. What we object to is, first of all, as do all Palestinians and anybody who has any respect for international law, the very fact of the United States moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was supposed to be a corpus separatum under a resolution the United States voted for in 1947. And Israel has absolutely no right under international law to proclaim it its capital, let alone its undivided and now we have indigenous added by Huckabee in the statement that you mentioned.
That was the first reason for our objection. The second reason for our objection is the United States has no business, in fact, it is probably illegal for the United States to lease from Israel property that was stolen from Palestinians, in particular from U.S. citizens. So here we have the U.S. government leasing land stolen from Americans in order to install its illegal embassy. So it’s on all of those grounds that we are objecting. The end of your question was what recourse do we have. Well, we’re examining our options. Obviously, we’re going to object to the U.S. government. Whether we will go further than that and take legal action is something that we and the various heirs who own this property are now considering. We are also obviously mounting a public relations campaign. I mean, here we have a government, the U.S. government, that proclaims, you know, America first and how much respect it has for Americans, agreeing to lease stolen land of U.S. citizens. That should be objectionable to Americans. The whole business should be objectionable to anybody who has any respect for international law or for private property. I mean, we go back and we look at the cases that the United States is pursuing. about the property of American citizens, whether in Cuba or whether elsewhere, or property that Israel has, or Israeli citizens have taken action about, which was stolen from them either before or during the Holocaust. Supposedly private property is sacred, except perhaps when it belongs to Palestinians? So those are some of the bases on which we’re hoping to proceed.
Jonathan Adler
So I’d actually like to go back to the beginning even further than when this case started. Could you describe your family’s history in Jerusalem and their connection to this specific plot of land? What do you know about how it was used both prior to and during the British mandate in Palestine and then what has happened to it since its confiscation by the Israeli state after 1948?
Rashid Khalidi
Yeah, the original plot was purchased in the mid-18th century by Shaykh Muhammad al-Khalili’s, who was probably one of the most respected religious figures in Jerusalem at the time. He purchased multiple properties all around Jerusalem with the objective of preserving them for the Muslims in perpetuity. Because he was concerned about foreign powers trying to take over Jerusalem. The property on which the Rockefeller Museum sits, which the Israeli government now controls, this property and two other very large properties in sites overlooking the Old City were purchased by him and were in most cases turned into waqf, which is an inalienable Islamic endowment. It cannot be sold. It cannot be in any way alienated. And most of the heirs, not all of them, that is to say most of the people who are the heirs of the original owners are descendants of Sheikh Mohammed Khalili. There are other families, because the British, when they established the Allenby Barracks, took over a large area, most of which was originally the Khalili Waqf. Some of it was other private property. And so you have families from all over Jerusalem whose property was stolen in this way and is about to be used for the U.S. Embassy. So this issue goes back to well before the mandate.
It was turned into a military installation by Britain during the mandate, during the Great Revolt of 1936-39, actually a little bit before that. The Israeli government after 1948, which claimed sovereignty over West Jerusalem, nobody else recognized that at the time, put it under the Absentee Property Law, put it under that administration, and eventually it was handed over to the Israel Lands Authority, which since then has leased it. For most of that period, the site was not used. The border guards, at one stage, established an installation there, but most of it is empty and has been for quite a while. Obviously the heirs, the legitimate heirs under Israel’s unjust, thieving laws have not had access to it. But it is now about to be, presumably, turned into a site for a very large compound, U.S. Embassy compound, if we don’t stop them.
Jonathan Adler
And do you have any sense of why this site in particular was ultimately chosen for a permanent U.S. Embassy compound?
Rashid Khalidi
There is an alternative site. It’s called the Arnona site, about which apparently there are no legal challenges. This is a piece of property that either the Israeli state has owned with clear title or, for some other reason, does not involve legal challenges. But apparently, and again, I’m reading the documents that the family has obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which conceals as much information as it reveals sometimes. But according to what we’ve been able to see through FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act requests, this site, the Allenby site, is both larger and apparently more secure, quote unquote, nd I think the Israeli government wants it there as well.
And the person whom we call the Israeli ambassador to Israel, Huckabee, he’s nominally the American ambassador to Israel, but he’s, I mean, he’s more Israeli than most Israelis, has been pushing very, very hard for this site, as did previous ambassadors under previous administrations, including the Biden administration. As far as we know, again, it’s hard through these opaque Freedom of Information documents that we’ve obtained to know for sure. But as far as we know, the Biden administration halted this process, which began in the 1990s, of consideration of this and one other site for a potential U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.
Jonathan Adler
So to pick up on that, I mean, could you talk a little bit about how you first became involved with this case in the 1990s? And as you mentioned, in your various dealings with different administrations on this issue? Have there been any meaningful differences, especially between the first Trump administration, which took the decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem and then the Biden administration?
Rashid Khalidi
I mean, the person who led this campaign for all the families was my late cousin, Walid Khaldi, Professor Walid Khaldi, who just passed away in March of this year. And he and our lawyers approached multiple U.S. administrations; the first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, and so on, right through the Biden and the Trump administrations. And so we have been dealing with different American officials representing different administrations over 30 odd years now.
There have been some differences. When this process started, it was initiated by Congress. or rather AIPAC’s chorus in Congress, which, you know, acting at the push of a button from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, jumped up and said the U.S. Embassy has to move to Jerusalem, and if it doesn’t, we will cut the Department of State budget. That was the law that was passed. And Congress then was somewhat different from Congress now. It was a Congress where on issues relating to Palestine, the only voice that was heard was an Israeli voice. There wasn’t an American voice. The idea of an American interest barely entered into the way in which Congress dealt with this issue. Whatever Israel wanted, Israel got, and that’s what Israel wanted, and that’s what Israel got: a law that demanded, insisted that the administration move the embassy to Jerusalem. So we’ve been fighting ever since, both in the court of public opinion and in dealings with the administration. We brought to the attention of the administration, which claimed that its legal eagles had checked and there were no claims to this property, we proved using British government, using original Ottoman and Mahkeme-i Şer’iyye religious court documents and Israeli documents, that in fact we had title to this right up to 1948, which is to say the various families involved in this affair.
And the U.S. government was taken aback by that because their legal work had been lousy. They hadn’t really checked or they’d listened to whatever the Israelis told them. And they discovered that we were going to challenge [this] legally and publicly. And so various administrations have basically taken different positions on this. But until the Trump administration, none of them was willing to push through with it.This Trump administration. The first Trump administration did not. And the Biden administration, as best we can tell from an ambiguous document, which we just received through Freedom of Information, apparently decided to back off on this. But Trump and the Israeli Ambassador to Israel, Huckabee, changed that decision, apparently. Well, certainly they’ve changed the decision if, in fact, the Biden administration had taken such a decision.
Jonathan Adler
But of course, the Biden administration didn’t reverse the first Trump administration’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem. So the idea was that they were just considering a different site?
Rashid Khalidi
The Biden administration endorsed, reinforced and pursued every anti-Palestinian action of the first Trump administration. Not just moving the embassy, closing the Palestinian office in Washington, recognizing the illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, making declarations about the legality of settlement in the occupied West Bank, and so on and so forth. And also pushed the Abraham Accords, which the first Trump administration had established. So every anti-Palestinian, and in the case of the Golan Heights, every anti-Syrian action, taken by the first Trump administration was maintained, reinforced, and continued by Biden. Biden was just as bad in every respect as Trump had been on the Palestine issue. Possibly even worse. Because the genocide started under Biden and the Biden administration funded it and supported it at the UN, issuing veto after veto of resolutions that would have imposed this ceasefire much, much earlier and would have stopped the slaughter and starvation, not that it has ever stopped, much earlier.
Jonathan Adler
So you have no sense that even if the Biden administration paused the project to build the embassy on this particular site, that they were ever going to reverse the decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem?
Rashid Khalidi
Well, they seem to have frozen it, if that’s true. Again, I’m not sure about this. They were at least considering that, as far as I can tell. Perhaps right up to the last moments. We’re going to investigate this. We’re just at the beginning of this process. You know, we worked on this for decades. We thought that under Biden it had been frozen because Trump didn’t push it in his first administration. And my cousin, as I say, who really led this process has since passed away. I mean, into his hundredth year, he was still engaged on this issue, as he was on a related issue, which is the Mamilla Cemetery issue where the heirs of people who are buried there, including many, many, many, many of my ancestors, in fact, some of my most illustrious ancestors, going back to the 14th and 15th centuries, are buried in the Mamilla Cemetery, which has been desecrated and stolen and chopped up and built on again and again and again over the decades.
We fought that, that was a different group of families, fought that in Israeli courts and were unable to reverse anything. The most egregious was the building of a so-called Museum of Tolerance. The idea of a Museum of Tolerance built over the bones of people whose descendants objected to that desecration Is the height of nauseating hypocrisy. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center is famous for that kind of thing. Those are the people who. established this monstrous building in the middle of one of the two most ancient Islamic graveyards in Jerusalem.
Jonathan Adler
I guess I want to move now to a broader discussion of U.S. policy, because the signing of the embassy agreement comes just weeks after Israel was excluded from the talks and the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran to end the war. Although, as of this week, it seems like that agreement too might be falling apart. So how do you interpret Israel’s absence from these negotiations and the clear rhetoric, especially from people like Vice President J.D. Vance, about potentially diverging U.S. and Israeli interests. As someone who’s written extensively on the history of the so-called U.S.-Israeli ‘special relationship’? Is this an unprecedented breakdown, as some have argued, or merely a temporary disagreement between Trump and Netanyahu?
Rashid Khalidi
No, I think it betokens an important turning point, actually. Benjamin Netanyahu has been famous for treating the United States as if it were a minor client of Israel, an ally, a second-rate ally, which could be pushed around and basically told what to do, led by the nose, deceived, whatever metaphor you want to use. And there’s no reason he shouldn’t have assumed that he could continue doing that, because he managed to do it with administration after administration after administration. He treated them like dirt. He went to Washington and insulted the President of the United States before the U.S. Congress at the invitation of the opposition party and got away with it and helped later on through his buddy, President Trump, torpedo the Obama JCPOA. I mean, he had managed basically to have the tail wag the dog so hard that the dog was senseless over a generation, since he’d entered politics back in the 90s, and even before. So he was to be forgiven, perhaps, for assuming that after having hoodwinked a gullible and ignorant president into launching a war at Israel’s behest, mainly for Israeli interests, The big dog suddenly said, wait, the big dog has interests and started treating Israel like a second -rate minor ally and ignoring Israeli concerns in the negotiations that the Trump administration undertook with the Iranians. The only thing the United States cared about at that point was Trump’s interest in the midterm elections, in the price of gas, in the economic situation that was a result of his imbecilic, badly thought-out decision to attack Iran, a country which is a quarter of the size of the United States and which controls the most important waterway for energy in world history. But having done that and having realized that maybe that wasn’t such a great idea, he immediately ignored Israeli interests.
Now, at the margins, he lets Israel do what it pleases. I don’t think Trump cares or knows very much about Gaza or Lebanon or Syria. And there, Israel has continued its unlimited expansion, taking over, now, about 70% of Gaza, continuing to take over more and more Syrian territory, and occupying a large chunk now of southern Lebanon, chasing out over a million Lebanese. He doesn’t really seem to care about that, but he does care about the price of oil. And he does care about the United States being drawn into a war which is deeply unpopular with the entire American population, including his own supporters on the right and everybody else on the left and the center. And so he did what was in his and the United States’ interest, which is try to stop the war with Iran.
Now, that’s not, as you mentioned, that doesn’t seem to be going so well, stopping the war, but it is a because of anything Israel has said or done, except perhaps at the margins. And so, you know, having acted as if Israel was the big dog, Israel was the major power, and the United States was a subsidiary client state of Israel, he suddenly finds himself, Israel suddenly finds itself, in the position of a minor client state of the United States, treated with contempt and derision. The things that Vance has said, even some of the things that the president himself have said, are things that American politicians have thought for decades about Israel. Presumptuous, arrogant, ignoring American interests, treating us like dirt, but they never dared to say it. These guys are saying it, Vance and the president, and a few of the people who are leaking from the Trump administration.
Jonathan Adler
And do you think that signals just then a sort of purely rhetorical shift or is the exclusion from the MOU and from ongoing talks with Iran, evidence of an actual shift in policy, or at least sort of a consideration of U.S. interests over Israeli interests, or some daylight between the two?
Rashid Khalidi
The problem is we are talking about an administration where the leadership is so unpredictable, so untutored, so ignorant, so volatile, that I mean, I’m a historian. I avoid predicting the future under any circumstances, but they could do anything, these folks. They literally could do anything. They could go back and actually wage a major war on Iran, which would warm the cockles of Bibi Netanyahu’s heart, because it would mean that he would be waging the next election campaign in October in the middle of a war in which he pretends to be Winston Churchill. Nothing could make him happier. But if the United States does that, it would be doing that for reasons that have only to do with Trump. Now, he’s been hoodwinked once by Netanyahu, and I think he probably resents that. In fact, I think his resentment may actually end up playing something of a role in the way in which things play out in the future. But you cannot predict anything with this man. And with this clutch of grifters and sycophants and yes women and yes men gathered around him. It’s worse than the court of the czar or the court of Henry VIII, I mean, the degree to which everything is dependent on the whims of the sovereign is really unprecedented, I think, in American foreign policy. Even in wartime, when presidents have infinite, the executive is infinitely reinforced, and the presidents have much more authority, I don’t think there’s ever been a period in history, and this man is completely fickle. You cannot predict what he’ll do from one second to the next. I mean, his fingers seem to have a mind of their own when he’s sending out these messages on Truth Social. So I can only say there clearly has been a turning point in the American relationship with Israel. Will Israel nevertheless manage, will the Bibi government, the Netanyahu government, manage to exploit the situation that they no longer control? I mean, they controlled things up to a point in the launching of this war, and they lost control once the war went south. The United States has lost this war.
The United States has lost control over the Straits of Hormuz. They’ll never get it back. You are not going to be able to defeat Iran. I’ve talked to military people again and again and again. They have war-gamed this forwards and backwards, up to and including the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The United States cannot defeat Iran, and it just tried to do so, and it has just failed, and it will fail if it tries again. So that is going to redound to the detriment of Israel’s standing in the United States, on top of everything else, on top of a live-stream genocide, on top of a younger generation that knows that they have been systematically lied to, and their parents and grandparents were systematically lied to, about everything in Palestine and Israel. Everything. They know that now. They’re not going to unknow that. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. So whatever happens with the MOU, with the ceasefire, with Iran, those are trends that I think we’re going to see continue, as well as a hysterical counter-offensive to tamp down this growing hostility to Israel on the part of the hard right, on the part of Israel’s partisans and patrons in the United States.
Jonathan Adler
Aside from Israel being sidelined from the negotiations, how do you understand the outcome of the Iran war? as you just mentioned, he fact of the U.S. losing to Iran and capitulating basically to every one of Tehran’s demands, given its leverage over the global economy and its control over the strait. Is this likely to reshape the geopolitics of the Middle East and the future, specifically of U.S. empire in the region?
Rashid Khalidi
The geopolitics of the Middle East have been totally scrambled by this war. Well, let’s start by October 7th, by the genocide that followed, by the war on Lebanon, by the fall of the Assad regime, by the wars on Iran, basically initiated by Israel with the United States joining it. The shape of the region has been changed permanently. How and in what direction, we don’t yet know.
I would mention one thing, which is that you correctly pointed out that the MOU with Iran was negotiated in the complete absence of input from Israel. The United States acted in what Trump perceived was his own and therefore the United States’ interest, paid no attention to what Israel wanted. However, Israel has been allowed to dictate its conditions insofar as agreements regarding both Gaza and Lebanon as well as Syria, are concerned. Israel does exactly as it pleases in all three of those arenas, and the United States does nothing. And this fits a pattern that I have identified long, long ago, going back to the Eisenhower administration, going back to Henry Kissinger, going back to Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush. When the United States has an interest, it treats Israel as if it’s irrelevant. It pushes it aside. or in some cases it forces it to do what the United States wanted. Israel didn’t want to withdraw from part of Sinai when Kissinger did the first and second disengagement agreements. They were forced to. In Arabic we would say, ghasban anhum — they were obliged to. Israel didn’t want to withdraw from Gaza under Eisenhower. I could go on and on and on. So when vital American interests are perceived as being at stake, the United States has acted with complete disregard for Israel. It’s only on issues like Palestine, which the United States doesn’t really care about, or Lebanon, which the United States doesn’t really care about, that Israel is allowed almost complete freedom of action. That may change, but that’s the broader pattern that we’re now facing. Israel helped drag the United States into a war with Iran, and that has changed everything.
The United States is worried about things far greater than Israel right now, like the price of energy. They’re going to have effects that we’re going to be thinking about for a very, very long time, having to do with renewables, having to do with changing routes for the movement of petrochemicals and so on and so forth, as well as shifts in the way in which countries in the region look at Israel, of which they’re now afraid, and which they know nobody will protect them which is why Saudi Arabia ran off to Pakistan for a nuclear deterrent, which is why Turkey and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are drawing closer together. That is going to have an impact regionally and globally for a very, very long time. And that changes the situation of Israel as well, which to some extent Israel has precipitated. I mean, by its aggressiveness, its attack on Qatar, for example. That changed the way the entire Gulf looked at Israel. Even their dear little friends in the Emirates are seeing Israel as different. They’re all connected, these Gulf monarchies. And when you hit one of them, you’re hitting all of them. Iran hitting them has disturbed all of them in much the same way. But Israel hitting Qatar, it just woke them up. Suddenly they realized the American umbrella is worth nothing. American weapons do nothing for us. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a bunch of weapon systems that do not protect us.
And we’ve invested tens of billions of dollars in the United States at the behest of the American president. And they didn’t do anything to protect us. Not a thing. They couldn’t protect their own bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Jordan, let alone the interests of the Gulf countries. This is going to change everything. Iran, well, Israel initiated this, but Iran, by its response, has changed a great deal strategically in the region. And it has put Israel in a very different position than it was on October 6th of 2023.
Jonathan Adler
To pick up on the point you made about the U.S. being willing to push back against Israel when it comes to its interests about the price of oil, but not essentially caring about Palestinians, about Lebanese, about Syrians, and the potential that that could change. So you’ve long been a vocal and public critic of the Israel lobby here in the U.S. and its impact on policymaking. So what do you make of the fact that if recent congressional primaries are any indication that AIPAC has now become a political liability for candidates and elected officials? Do you still believe that like you’ve argued previously, that the lobby is secondary to the deeper structural alignment, you know, enduring U.S. interests that tie Washington to Israel and the Gulf, given that those very interests may be shifting?
Rashid Khalidi
Well, two things. First of all, the Israel lobby is not what it once was. The Israel lobby is now an interconnected network of Christian evangelical and right-wing Jewish establishment interests. But they in turn are linked to the corporate interests which are by far the most important in determining foreign policy. The Israel lobby is almost an adjunct to the arms lobby, to the defense lobby, to whatever you want to call it, the military-industrial complex. Selling arms to Israel and selling arms to the Gulf is enormously profitable. Those people control a third of our budget. They own the senators and the congressmen who spend money on killing people, okay? Instead of the hospitals that don’t work, and the schools that are not very good, and the worst railway system in the world. That’s the lobby. It’s not Israel. It’s the war lobby. And Israel is a hand car of that, is the caboose of that, and has always been allied with those kinds of very powerful interests. And those folks, are going to fight for maintaining the status quo, whether in terms of the American connection to Israel or whether in terms of the American connection to the Gulf autocracies, who are a lifeline to their profit, their bottom line, their profit margin. As is war generally. Those are the real lobbies behind war in the Middle East. Those are the real lobbies in support of Israel. Because Israel is part and parcel of this, both intellectually, the idea that only war solves problems. Well, you know, force, and then if that doesn’t work, more force. That’s an Israeli motto, of course. But it’s the motto of the defense industry as well. They don’t want diplomacy. They don’t want AID. That’s why these things were cut. They want war.
Now, the problem there for Trump is that a lot of his base does not want war and does not want foreign adventures, and definitely does not want war in the Middle East, which is one of his problems. One of the reasons that he’s been going back and forth and back and forth on this deal with Iran is on the one hand, he has a bunch of people bought and sold to the arms industries. And on the other hand, he has a very large chunk of his base, Make America Great, America First folks, who really don’t want war, because it’s their kids who fight it, and because a lot of them are veterans and saw how incredibly stupid and pointless and harmful the Afghan war and the Iraq war were. And this will eventually be seen as equally stupid and pointless. Perhaps there will be fewer American lives lost if, inshallah, they don’t go to all-out war and don’t try the utter folly of invading Iran.
Jonathan Adler
In that case, what do you make of the real and historic popular shift on Israel-Palestine in the U.S. and the fact that the Israel lobby has become so toxic? Do you see then the war lobby sort of trying to distance itself from its connection to Israel? Are there other effects that you anticipate?
Rashid Khalidi
No, I think it’s not just AIPAC and the Israel lobby that’s become toxic. Israel has become toxic. Look at surveys, NORC-AP survey of American Jewish opinion. 60% of American Jews surveyed consider that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. A third consider Israel is committing genocide. It’s the American Jewish community. And if you take it on an age pyramid, if you go down to the people in their 40s, 30s, 20s, the numbers are much higher, much, much, much higher. And so I think that what is happening is that Israel is being viewed fundamentally differently. For people who believe that in force and only force, which is to say a large part of the right in the United States and the military industrial complex or whatever you want to call it, they will continue to support Israel. So there will be an Israel lobby. It’ll be a little different than in the past. It probably won’t include the majority of the American Jewish community anymore.
It’ll be more evangelical, more Southern, more Western, in terms of its popular base. And more based in, you know, big money. And that’s going to be the struggle. The struggle will be over big money versus people power or other kinds of financing of electoral politics. Again, the Supreme Court gave yet another victory to the Republicans in terms of campaign financing, which is because the big money people are terrified of the people. They’re not really Democrats. They’re not really liberals. They don’t really believe in a republic. They believe in some kind of capitalist oligarchy in which they decide, the Peter Thiels, the Elon Musks, the people who own and run the big corporations. So that’s going to become, in the future, the Israel lobby. The problem is they can be denuded, they can be stripped naked, they can be unveiled before the public as just powerful interests buying votes or buying politicians. And that’s what’s happened. I mean, you mentioned these primaries. That seems to be what has been happening. The well-financed establishment candidates are being whipped by much younger, much more liberal or progressive people funded by, you know, five and ten dollar donations and some bigger ones, obviously. But unlike your corporate establishment candidates, Goldman, Espaillat in New York and various others who’ve been whipped in the Democratic primaries. These folks are grassroots types. I mean, that’s what Mamdani represents. That’s to some extent what Barack Obama tried to represent, except he also catered to the big money people, of course.
Jonathan Adler
On that point, on sort of the pushback to Israel and the Israeli lobby becoming toxic in the U.S., in what ways do you see the Trump administration and Congress now seeking basically to insulate the U.S.-Israel relationship and the power of the war lobby from popular pressure? We’re seeing, for instance, the Netanyahu-endorsed proposal to end U.S. military aid to Israel after 2028 and instead shift to deepening military cooperation and weapons production and technology systems. Even going back to the embassy, is building a permanent U.S. embassy a kind of fact on the ground that will be difficult to reverse and immune to popular pressure?
Rashid Khalidi
I think that the powers that be, which is to say the bulk of the leadership of the corrupt Democratic Party and the leadership of the corrupt Republican Party and the big money interests behind them, as well as the Israel lobby, all see that their power in some respects diminishing. on campuses after October 7th. They were terrified by the shift in public opinion. They are terrified by these primary results and by some of the shifts that are going on at the base of the Republican Party. And so they’re doing everything they can to cement their control over everything they can for the longest possible period. Moving from having Israel’s armaments purchased from the United States, funded by American taxpayer dollars.
And in essence, embedding the Israeli defense industry inside the Pentagon budget is a brilliant attempt to say, we’re not having taxpayer dollars. No, you’re paying for the American defense budget, but you’re not actually. You’re paying for the Israeli defense budget under the guise of the Pentagon’s budget requests. It’s a brilliant move. And they’re doing the same kind of thing in terms of suppression of free speech, in terms of this IHRA definition of anti -Semitism, which is basically an attempt to stop people talking about Palestine by claiming that it’s anti -Semitic, and by the conflation of anything Jewish with anything Israeli. If you say something bad about Israel, you’re an anti -Semite and you’re attacking Jews.
Well, 60% of Jews consider Israel is committing war crimes. 30% of Jews consider Israel is genocidal. If I stand with those people, I’m an antisemite? But that’s what the law now says in many states, and that’s what they’re doing on our campuses. I mean, I stopped teaching at Columbia. I couldn’t teach under IHRA. It’s inconceivable that you could talk about anything about Palestine or Israel or many other things without violating these draconian, IHRA guidelines and by forcing all of those things while they still have power. In some cases they’re trying to do this before the midterms because they’re afraid they’re going to lose control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the midterms, which is to say they being not just the Republican Party, the elite of the Democratic Party. Even if Hakeem Jeffries is re-elected as Speaker, it’s going to make the right-wing Republicans under Newt Gingrich, who made Republican leadership’s lives miserable, it’s going to make them look like lucky, lucky men what’s coming, I think, in the Democratic Party. And I have a feeling something like that may start in the Republican Party, because that’s where the younger, that’s where younger Republicans are.
Jonathan Adler
I’d like to shift here, and maybe sort of get your thoughts on the Palestine movement right now. You went viral a few months ago for your comments on purity politics and the pro-Palestine movement and the need to engage people with whom you disagree to affect political change. So I’d like to end by picking up on that theme and asking how you think the massive shifts in public opinion on Israel-Palestine that we’ve seen during the genocide in Gaza over the past three years, especially among Americans, can be translated into political power?
Rashid Khalidi
Yeah, well, I said a few things in that interview, if you listen to it carefully. I criticized, obviously, purity politics, what I call purity politics. But I recognized something I think really quite important, which is that the student movement and young people generally, have actually succeeded in achieving an enormous amount in a very short amount of time. I was a participant in civil rights, pro-Black Panthers, anti-war activism in the ‘60s as a student. And it took years and years and years, and I don’t think civil rights have been achieved. I don’t think that the kind of police shootings of black militants and activists have ever stopped. The United States has not stopped going to war. And it took us years. It took years for the Vietnam War to be ended. I think that in a very short span of time, what mainly young people, university students by and large, have managed to do is an extraordinary achievement. And it’s world historical what they did.
I mean, I see it on the level of what students did in 1968, globally. Look at the Pew numbers for Europe. They’re the same as the United States. 72% of people in this European country disapprove of Israel. 68%, 75%. They’ve had the same effect. Now, it’s not just students. It’s live-streamed genocide. The exposure of the fact that everything every Israeli military spokesman has ever said is a lie. And so those are changes that cannot be reversed. Now, the problem here is, how do you translate that into meaningful long-term political change? Because demonstrations against the Vietnam War didn’t stop the war. It took real, hard, long, slogging labor on the part of the anti -war movement to finally translate that into the war machine, the military industrial complex Same thing happened over Iraq, and the same thing will have to happen over this, which means, it means we’re going to have to make alliances with those of us who are against the American-Israeli relationship as it exists today. We’re going to have to make alliances with people with whom we disagree on almost everything except one or two issues. Now, I don’t particularly enjoy doing such things. And there are certain lines you cannot cross. But I am prepared to argue that you have to make coalitions and alliances in order to stop this war on Palestine. And I think that there is a level of maturity, actually, to be fair, when I talk to students and when I talk to young people generally, which is much higher than a lot of people realize. I was a bit of an infantile leftist in my own youth, so I sympathize. And I remember how hard it was to listen to older people who said, well, we’re wiser, why don’t you try and do that? We didn’t pay much attention, and we did what we did. So I sympathize with those impulses. But when and if this transitions into something that will really change the status quo, as far as America and Palestine is concerned, it will have to involve a much broader coalition than people have been able to put together in a lot many more years to come. Unfortunately. Because this involves a lot of a connection to Israel which is completely different than the American connection to its clients in South Vietnam, or to its clients in Iraq, or to its clients in Afghanistan. Israel is an independent state. It’s a settler colonial project, but it’s also a national project, and it’s created a powerful country, powerful nation state.
And then you have the nexus of this war machine, the nexus of all of the interests, including the oil and gas industries in the Middle East. So this is going to be a long, long slog. It’s going to be very complex. I think more has changed in three years than I ever could have imagined would ever happen, frankly, in my lifetime. So the start that’s been made is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. I mean, a shift in public opinion in three years? Go back and look at the polls in 2022, and look at the polls in 2026. So building on that, understanding how to turn that into both movement politics and electoral politics, is the next stage and that’s going to take time and some more defeats and some more victories.
I mean, what happened in New York City, the biggest Jewish city in the world, where you’ve elected a Muslim mayor who’s pro-Palestine? I mean, I was born in New York City. The idea that an American, a New York mayor who would not walk in the Israel parade along with all the monsters from the Netanyahu government front bench, it would have been inconceivable in any previous mayoralty. So those changes can be built upon, I think. These primary victories are yet another unprecedented shift. It’ll take lots of hard work to prevent that eroding. But I think we’re on the right path. The problems are inside Palestine and inside Israel.
You have a totally corrupt political system. in Palestine, and you have two factions that will not see anything but their narrow partisan self-interest, and a large majority of people who I don’t think support either very strongly. They hate the Palestinian Authority. They’re agents of a foreign occupation. But there’s less support for Hamas, even though there is support for the idea of resistance, than a lot of people realize, because the people who have been governed by them don’t particularly like them. So you need something that can unify the Palestinian national movement, which is in a state of total disarray. And you need something that can wake Israelis up from this crazy illusion that they have that they can dominate the region. They can sacrifice their sons and daughters unto eternity, and they will not dominate the region. They’ve got to come to terms. And if they don’t figure that out, they will be the ones who will suffer. Palestinians will suffer more. Other people in the region will suffer, but they will also suffer, and they’re going to suffer much more than they’ve suffered already, simply because of their own stubbornness and refusal to get out of this bubble that they’re in they’re not going to be able to dictate terms, and it’s not just that. Their whole attitude towards their environment is going to have to change. This is still a colonial reality. Now, how that changes, I don’t know. I’m a great believer in the idea that Israel depends on an external metropole. That metropole is changing for good. And the tolerance for Israeli behavior is going to diminish. The politicians who don’t understand that will slowly or surely be eliminated. And the people in Britain and in France and in Germany and the United States who protect every atrocity, every war crime that Israel commits, those people are not long for this world in terms of the politics of those countries. And so sooner or later the metropole shifts, the settler colony is going to have to shift, whether they like it or not. Now those people who can’t adjust, they’re going to have a real tough time.
But Israelis who can adjust, there’s ways to live with this region. You can do deals with these folks, with the Turks, with the Iranians, if you treat people with respect, starting with the Palestinians, which Israel will not do, has never done, never, never. Israel has never deigned to treat the Palestinians as a people, an equal people, and that’s the minimum. I mean, we are the indigenous population. You can claim indigeneity, going back to King David. Yeah, well, you can claim whatever you want. I can claim Andalusia belongs to me, and that and five cents won’t buy you a cup of coffee. Now, it buys a lot of evangelical coffee in the United States, but sooner or later, that stuff is not going to fly.
And so you come to terms. As the South Africans have done, as people in Northern Ireland are beginning to do. Things are changing, and what was once a settler colony has turned into what will sooner or later be a knitted together polity. One hopes, one prays. Now, I don’t know when that’s going to come in Palestine and Israel, but if it doesn’t come, the future is much bleaker in the long run for the Israelis than the Palestinians. After a century of ethnic cleansing and a century of efforts to uproot the Palestinians, the majority between the river and the sea is still Palestinian. If you can’t do it in a century, you ain’t going to do it. Whatever Ben Gvir says, whatever Smotrich says, whatever they say to each other in Likud party meetings, you ain’t going to do it.
Wake up and smell the hummus.
Jonathan Adler
I think that’s a good place to end. Thank you so much. This has been a really great conversation.
Rashid Khalidi
You’re very welcome.
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Jonathan Adler
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