The 100 year war on Palestine w/Rashid Khalidi | The Chris Hedges Report

Gaza City is the largest urban area in the Gaza Strip. That is where the largest group of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip used to live. Where they will go and where they will live is simply impossible to foresee at this stage. I want to end by asking why, within both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, there is such blind support for Netanyahu's government. Where does it come from? I don't know if it is in our strategic interest to alienate the Muslim world at this level. It will take us

year

s to regain trust throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

But what is its engine? Why is it happening? It is a very difficult question to answer and has multiple answers. First, there is a difference between the Democratic party leadership and the base, and there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans are much, much more supportive of Israel. This may be due in part to Christian Zionism, to the zeal with which some evangelicals view the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. It may have to do with some Republicans' appreciation of Israel's muscular, colonial, racist aggression. However, at the top of both parties, it has to do with the fact that people of a certain generation were made to believe things that Israel wanted them to believe.

In a time of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, we're talking about a gerontocracy, look at the Senate leaders, look at the president, these are people whose opinions were formed in the '60s and '70s, when the only narrative available was a Israeli narrative. So they believe everything the Israelis tell them, whatever fairy tales they make them believe, they swallow it hook, line and sinker. The difference is a generational difference and the differences between the bases of the two political parties. The Democratic Party has a very broad and disparate base. And most elements of that base are much more skeptical of Israeli claims and much more critical of Israel than the leaders of the Democratic Party.

So the president, the people around him, the leaders of the House and the Senate are solidly pro-Israel in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. The difference is at the base. If we look at the components, unions and postal workers have come out to call for a ceasefire against the Biden administration's position. Black church pastors took a full-page ad in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago demanding a ceasefire. Black intellectuals, Native American intellectuals, and Hispanic intellectuals are all much more critical of Israel, especially the younger ones, than their elders, or than Republicans, as a general rule.

This not only applies to young black students, to young Latino students, to young Arab or Muslim students, but it also applies to many young Jewish students. If you look at university campuses, Jewish Voice for Peace is a central component of campaigns for the divestment of these universities' assets from companies that support the Israeli occupation and Palestinian rights in general. So there is a generational divide, even among Republicans, by the way, but especially among Democrats, which shows that although there is a high degree, in my opinion, of brainwashing among the older generation, people who believe that the movie Exodus is an accurate representation of reality, which is to say that many people in their 60s, 70s and 80s don't know any better, to be frank, while younger people have much better access to information than their elders.

They don't trust or pay attention to the mainstream corporate media, which, as far as they are concerned, is full of lies. And as far as I'm concerned. The image given by the mainstream American media is much, much less diverse than that given by the Israeli media. I read The New York Times in the morning and I read Haaretz, or The Times of Israel, or Ynet, Yedioth's English service, Yedioth Ahronoth. There is more disparity and more critical thinking in the Israeli press than in The Washington Post and The New York Times, or on CNN or MSNBC. And young people know this and have access through social networks and other forms to information that their elders generally do not even know exists.

Well, it's also money. AIPAC announced it will spend $100 million to defeat Rashida Tlaib and some others who have called for a ceasefire. They are great donors. And we've seen these billionaire hedge fund donors at Harvard, Columbia and UPenn use the power of money. The response from the presidents of Harvard and UPenn is that they have humbled themselves before these... Of course, they don't run the universities, the board of trustees run the universities. But it's also the weight of that money and the fact that we live in a political system of legalized bribery. Exactly. I would say this is true in all power centers of our society.

Politicians are bought and paid for. They can only exist with donations that finance their political campaigns, from the president to the city councilors. That's true for corporations, that's true for universities, that's true for the art world; They depend on the donors. And in the universities it has manifested itself in a quite terrible way. The concerns of Jewish students and their understandable concern about anti-Semitism have been combined with their concerns about Palestinian defense. And universities have been extremely helpful in this regard. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students, including Jewish students, minority students, and Arab students, have been treated in a relatively arrogant manner.

And if we look around the country, we find a Palestinian boy murdered in the suburbs of Chicago because he was Palestinian or Muslim. A couple of days ago three Palestinian students were attacked in Vermont because they were wearing keffiyehs. A man was shot outside a mosque in Rhode Island and a Jewish man was knocked to the ground and killed at a protest in Los Angeles. So there have been four or five incidents of violence, three or four of which are against Palestinians or against people who support the Palestinian cause or against Muslims. And yet the university's request, which is understandable and legitimate to the concerns of some Jewish students, does not extend to other students, including Jewish students who feel overwhelmed by the fact that the government not only blindly supports to Israel, not only If the media blindly supports Israel, not only is there a general atmosphere in corporations, we will not hire this person if he signs a petition in support of Palestine, but university administrations are hostile towards them.

And that is why students who support Palestine, who on many campuses are the majority of students, feel unprotected. At Columbia, Brown, and many other universities, resolutions supporting divestment from companies that support the Israeli occupation were passed by overwhelming majorities. That's a democratic indication of where much of the student sentiment was when those votes were held, sometimes several

year

s ago. But if you look at many universities, support for Palestinian rights is at least as great, if not greater, than support for Israel today, even after the impact of the October 6 attacks, when overall There was enormous sympathy in American society for the Israelis because of the enormous number of Israeli civilian casualties, initially up to 800 Israeli civilians died, perhaps more.

So there was enormous sympathy, but it hasn't lasted in light of the atrocities being committed in Gaza. People say 800 civilians, 15,000 civilians. Well, they're all civilians. Children are children. Unless you have a racist view that some children are more valued than others or some civilians are more valued than other civilians. Well, at Columbia, where you teach, didn't they ban Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace? They banned those groups, right? Yes. They banned them both. They took away their right to have events and university support. That's right. For the first semester. Isn't this closing because they can't win?

I'm talking about the Zionists. They really can't win the argument. There is an argument that anti-Semitism is the refuge of scoundrels and, unfortunately, that is what is happening now. There is real and virulent anti-Semitism in American society, most of it on the right, and there is some anti-Semitism, certainly in some of the sectors that support Palestinian rights. But in fact, since they can't really win the argument, how do they justify 56 years of occupation? What can you say to justify 56 years of occupation? What can you say to justify the lack of rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories?

What can you say to justify the relentless colonization, appropriation and dispossession taking place in the West Bank? There's nothing you can say. There are no arguments to justify that unless you say Jewish supremacy and absolute right, and God gave us this land. You say things like that that are not acceptable to most college students. So you close the debate by saying, well, they are anti-Semitic and their slogans are genocidal, which is actually what an administrator at Columbia University said, that the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is genocidal. It is part of the laws of the state of Israel.

It is the platform of the Likud party, that from the sea to the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty. That was the platform of the Likud party in 1977. So a group of students shout "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." And the Israeli government is actually instituting in the law, in its constitution, that from the river to the sea, the only sovereignty will be Jewish sovereignty. On the one hand, on the other. And these many are persecuted for their beliefs. And, on the other hand, we have an Israeli State supported by the people of the United States, which includes a provision to this effect in its constitutional laws.

We are obviously operating at Columbia and other college campuses in an unfavorable environment. But in a situation where there is enormous support for Palestinian rights throughout American society, especially among young people and minorities, but also among many right-thinking people who can see through the hype, the hypocrisy and the lies of the mainstream media and the framing of the mainstream media and our government. You listen to President Biden and he sounds like he's reading from an Israeli teleprompter; Line after line after line are lines you hear from Netanyahu or his ministers, or from Israeli propagandists. Line after line after line of things the president says from the beginning of this war until today, crafted in Tel Aviv, crafted in Jerusalem.

Tel Aviv is where the Ministry of Defense is. So we are operating in an unfavorable environment. But I would say that people who, for example, want a ceasefire and do not want Israel to continue with its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its massacre of part of its population, the support for that is overwhelming according to the polls. An overwhelming majority of Democrats and a large majority of Americans oppose Biden's Israeli war policy until, when the Israelis have decided the war is over, Hamas is destroyed, in their view. I mean that when those students sing "from the river to the sea" they are talking about equal rights for all;

When Netanyahu uses that term, he is referring to Jewish or Israeli supremacy. Good. That was Rashid Khalidi. Edward Said, professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years War Against Palestine, which is probably the best book to put the current conflict in context. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at

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