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Khalidi, the preeminent historian of the Palestinian people, has for more than two decades been the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia. Since the death of Said, in 2003, Khalidi has been the most prominent Palestinian intellectual in America, one of those rare scholars as at home in a green room as he is in a lecture hall. His most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, was published in 2020 and became a bestseller after October 7.
He is no stranger to controversy, especially over the past year. In January, Larry Summers expressed dismay that Khalidi — “who many see as antisemitic,” Summers added — had been invited twice to speak at Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies. (Summers later apologized.) In recent days, another outspoken Columbia professor, Shai Davidai, accused Khalidi of being a “spokesperson for Hamas.”
Khalidi, who is 76, retired from Columbia in June, a decision that he says had nothing to do with the events of the past year. He still teaches a survey course on modern Arab history. His office, once grand and palatial, is now small and shared with another adjunct. That’s where I caught him earlier this week. Above the din of an inordinately loud heating system, we discussed Palestine, protests, and his disillusionment with university leaders.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I last interviewed you in 2009 during a previous outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. At that time, you were dismayed that the public discourse around the war was unsympathetic to Palestinian suffering and underinformed about Palestinian history. We’re talking now amid another war, a much bigger and more destructive war, and the discourse seems much changed, especially on campuses. What happened?
The public discourse has changed profoundly and I hope permanently. But elite discourse, media discourse, political discourse is still in its troglodyte phase. Every idea, every fallacy, every piece of disinformation that you could have heard 15 years ago you can still hear from most institutions that own and run and control society. But that’s not where public opinion is.
Palestine has never before achieved this level of salience and sympathy. It’s a time of great tragedy, of course, but do you also feel vindication or validation?
I would feel relief if the degree of suffering wasn’t so much greater than it’s ever been before. Fifteen thousand Palestinians and 6,000 Israelis were killed in 1948, and that had been the highest death toll between Palestinians and Israelis. How can one feel relief when these atrocities are escalating?
What was the discussion about Palestine in the academy when you started out as an undergrad at Yale in the late 60s?
There was no discussion about Palestine. I did my graduate training in England, and there was more space for discourse in England at that time. That has changed. You now have a level of scholarship in every discipline that is extensive and critical and comprehensive and generally pretty good. And that just wasn’t the case. In the 70s, it wasn’t just that people didn’t talk about Palestine; there wasn’t much to read or talk about.
How has the way Israel-Palestine is taught changed over the arc of your career?
We’ve had revisionist Israeli historians who gave permission to people to see things that were there but they weren’t able to talk about before. The second element that changed is people went to see for themselves. They looked in archives. They realized that almost everything being said in the public discourse was false or largely false. And that changed the scholarship. And as a result the teaching has changed.
Let’s talk about the protest movement. Columbia has been a bellwether of student activism since October 7, and you’ve been a vigorous defender of the protesters. What historical and even moral role do you see them playing?
The comparison to 1968, or comparisons to protests against apartheid or the Iraq War, aren’t necessarily accurate. But in each of those cases, young people, for all the faults in what they may have said or done, represented the most enlightened segment of the American public. In part, that’s because they have no connection to the mainstream corporate media. They don’t know what’s in The New York Times, and they despise it. On campus they read something called “The New York War Crimes,” a satirical newspaper. They get their information straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. They watch babies burning in hospital wards in real time. Maybe they should or they shouldn’t trust this or that piece of information transmitted by social media, but it’s infinitely more correct, infinitely more true, than what you get from the American mainstream media. When the truth of all this comes out, we’ll look back and say the students saw it more correctly than the mainstream media. That was true of apartheid, that was true of civil rights, and Vietnam, and it will be true of this war.
One thing The New York Times, and others, have been covering recently is the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group — CUAD — and its recent retraction of an apology they had made for a student protester who’d said on video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” CUAD also endorsed what it called “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
This is a huge red herring. The things that are said on the other side are, in some cases, advocacy of genocide. They are students and they have the right to say whatever they please. I don’t like what they say, but that’s not my business. It’s free speech. They can call people “terrorists” or “Hamas” or “baby murderers” and no one will say anything about it. The New York Times won’t write a story about it. What’s happening in Lebanon and, most important, Palestine is the story. Whatever Columbia University Apartheid Divest says about it is secondary to the fact that they are driven by moral outrage at the complicity of our government and other institutions in society in what they see as genocide. And what almost any objective observer would agree is genocide. That’s the story. If the students say that any occupied people have a right to resistance, including armed resistance, they are right. In international law, this is legitimate, legal, and so on.
As a geopolitical matter, as a criticism of The New York Times, I hear you. But there’s also a campus discourse dimension. The statement from the student leader for which CUAD retracted its apology included comments like, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
I’m not going to say anything about it. They don’t talk to us, they don’t ask for our advice. All I would argue is that they have the right to speak as long as they don’t act violent. They have not. The allegations that there has been lots of violence on the Columbia campus are utterly false. It is the work of a bunch of Republican, right-wing, anti-education yahoos. Look at Virginia Foxx and Elise Stefanik’s agenda. It has nothing to do with antisemitism or Columbia’s encampment.
So you’re not concerned about a potential turn to violence among the protesters?
They have free speech. This is not kindergarten. When someone says I’m a terrorist or I’m a Hamas supporter, my feelings are not hurt. And if they are, it doesn’t matter.
Our students should be protected in the sense that their educational experience shouldn’t be affected. But when they’re in a public space, they’re subject to political rules, to free speech. To say “I’m in favor of America’s war,” which a professor at SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs] does — Secretary Clinton — she has a right to say that. And I have a right to call her a warmonger and a war criminal. Anybody who says, “you can’t advocate violence” — she didn’t advocate violence, she committed violence. She was secretary of state when the United States destroyed Libya on the pretext that the people of Benghazi were about to be slaughtered, which we now know was false. Just like the pretext of her vote for the Iraq War was false. She actually has blood on her hands. And people say, “These kids advocate violence.” We have faculty who advocate violence. I mean, really? The students can’t say this and we have faculty who did that? How about one standard: State violence is no more legitimate than other violence. Violence is violence. In fact, state violence is more harmful because it kills so many more people.
In December, a joint statement by Columbia’s deans warned that phrases like “by any means necessary” and “from the river to the sea” are experienced by some Jewish and Israeli students as “antisemitic and deeply hurtful.” You blasted that statement as antithetical to free speech and academic freedom, and cautioned against a new “politics of feeling” on campus.
I’m going to read you something, which comes from the statutes of the university. “The university is the place for received wisdom and firmly held views to be fully tested and then tested again so that members of the university community can listen, challenge each other, and be challenged in return.” This is about what happens in the classroom. The kind of ideas for which the thought police are tracking down faculty members and asking that they be brought before disciplinary proceedings — these are things that challenge received wisdom and strongly held views.
The classroom should be a space where anything can be said and challenged and tested, exactly as the university statutes say. I don’t think that has been violated. Professors have said things that I’m sure students have found challenging, but as I say at the beginning of my Modern Middle East course: “If you expect to leave here with exactly the same ideas and views and preconceptions that you came here with, let your parents save all that money and buy you a Maserati instead. You don’t need this if you don’t want to change a single idea or a single view or a single prejudice or a single preconception. The whole point is to be educated and have your mind broadened.” I honestly don’t believe — maybe there have been exceptions — that what’s happened in classrooms has in any way violated those kinds of limits.
What is said in public space is under a different dispensation. If people are offended by hearing this about Zionism or that about Palestinians, tough luck. You don’t want to hear it. You don’t like to hear it. But it’s public space. It’s not the classroom.
What the deans said is completely illegitimate. It’s none of their business if people talk about the “river to the sea.” The university has been egregious and extremely one-sided. Things said and done by people on the other side, a smaller group but vocal and present as they had every right to be, were as obnoxious as anything the antiwar protesters said. But one side was cracked down on and the other wasn’t. It’s a sad chapter in American academic history.
You’ve also expressed dismay at Columbia’s antisemitism task force.
Columbia has faculty members who’ve worked on antisemitism and who are very knowledgeable about it. They were rigorously excluded from this task force. Members were chosen for their political orientation. The three chairs are all known for their outspoken position on one side of this issue. And they are not known for their expertise on antisemitism, with all due respect to Professor Schizer, former dean of the law school, who is a tax lawyer. And Professors Fuchs, who does urban studies. And Professor Lemann, who is a journalism professor and former dean of the J School. Their expertise on this subject and my expertise on astronomy can fit in a thimble. Yet they were chosen as co-chairs.
It’s not a coincidence that there’s a political moment in which anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel really can’t be met with strong arguments. Much of what Israel is doing is hard to justify. If you don’t have arguments, you say we can’t argue. You’re not allowed to talk. In other words, shutting down a debate you can’t win because your position is so pitifully weak.
This is not to say there’s no antisemitism in the antiwar movement. Of course there is. There’s antisemitism throughout our society. But the dangerous core of antisemitism in the United States is not on the left. Rather on the right. It was not pro-Palestine demonstrators who marched through the University of Virginia campus with tiki torches saying “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” I haven’t seen any tiki torches or chants of “Jews Will Not Replace Us” at any encampment. Those are antisemites. These are antiwar people who sometimes are unwise in what they say. The fact that that is not even discussed is a disgrace to everybody who’s using the antisemitism cudgel to shut people up.
I feel very strongly about this, especially because the second report of the antisemitism task force basically came out and endorsed the idea that any critique of Zionism and a lot of critiques of Israel are antisemitic. So they’ve basically endorsed this weaponization of antisemitism approach, which NYU has now inscribed in its rules.
You recently gave an interview to The Guardian in which you sounded disillusioned about higher ed. Specifically, how the university’s pedagogical mission has been supplanted by an emphasis on making money.
My experience has been that budgeting and financial considerations have increasingly driven decision-making at the expense of pedagogical considerations. This is one of the reasons I wanted to retire. I felt that the possibility of delivering an excellent education to students was being narrowed by decisions made entirely for financial, rather than pedagogical, reasons.
Are the wrong people, or people with the wrong values, running universities?
That’s at the top. In the middle you have vice presidents and deans who are nominally academics but they’re responding to the wrong stimuli. They’re responding to cues from donors, trustees, money people in the administration, rather than the faculty and students. They should be standing up for us. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a bottom line, or that universities shouldn’t have budgets. I’m saying the educational process should be determined on educational bases. If you have administrators who won’t stand up for educational values and push back against the legislators, the donors, the trustees, then you have a sorry situation in higher education.
