The Works - S7E5

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This is OBS Radio, a service of OBS International, a division of Greater Works Business Services.

Salima Hamarani (0:32)

I'm Salima Hamarani, and on today's Making Contact...

Rashid Khalidi (0:35)

By the late 1930s, by the early 1940s, it was perfectly clear that to create a Jewish state in an Arab country would require the dispossession of a very large proportion of the Arab population. And that's what happened in 1948

Salima Hamarani (0:49)

We talked to Rashid Khalidi about his new book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance.

Rashid Khalidi (0:57)

Israel has created a situation where no one is going to be able to take control of Gaza, and where there is likely to be continued resistance in the West Bank for an indefinite period.

Salima Hamarani (1:07)

Stay tuned. All that and more, coming up.

Rami Almeghari (1:09)

Over the past week, mainly, over the week, and Israel has intensified its strikes, every strike on various parts of the territory, including the southern, the middle, the northern Gaza Strip, as well as Gaza City, which has been...

Salima Hamarani (1:29)

Welcome to Making Contact. I'm Salima Hamarani. You're listening to the voice of Rami Almigari.

Rami Almeghari (1:35)

Rami has reported from Gaza for decades for Pacific Radio, and for us here at Making Contact. As the Israeli army has stormed already, the Shefa Hospital, which is a major hospital in the Gaza Strip, where a few thousands of people have been stranded there, including patients.

Rashid Khalidi (1:54)

Rami was forced to flee his family home in northern Gaza when the Israeli bombing began, and for a while he was sending us audio reports of the situation around Palestine.

Rami Almeghari (2:04)

In fact, other developments in Gaza have been unfolding coincidentally as Israeli airstrikes have hit...

Salima Hamarani (2:13)

This one is from November of 2023...

Rami Almeghari (2:15)

.for the third time, the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza Strip, they hit nearby the hospital, around the hospital...

Salima Hamarani (2:24)

Rami, like many Palestinians, is effectively now a refugee on his own land. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops since October 7th, and Gaza is currently the most dangerous place on Earth to be a journalist.

Rami Almeghari (2:38)

That is the situation on the ground in the Gaza Strip for the time being. Rami Al-Milari, for making contact, Gaza Strip.

Salima Hamarani (2:51)

If you've listened to most of the Western press, the focus is on October 7th as the beginning of the war. But the war in Palestine started decades ago, before October 7th, before the Intifadas or the Camp David Accords, even before World War II.

And if we really want to understand what's happening in Gaza right now, we have to understand that very early history, which is when Zionists first set their sights on Palestine. And to be honest, it wasn't a history that I knew all that much about, so I sat down for an interview with Rashid Khalidi.

Rashid Khalidi (3:24)

I teach at Columbia University, where I'm the Edward Tsai Professor of Modern Arab Studies.

Salima Hamarani (3:30)

Because I just read his book, The 100 Years Worn Palestine, and Rashid said he had some specific reasons for writing this book. First, he wanted a more accessible account of Palestinian history, so not so academic, but he also wanted to combat some misconceptions.

Rashid Khalidi (3:47)

I had a very strong thesis that this is not a conflict that's been going on since time immemorial. It's a conflict caused by imperialism and the rise of modern nationalism.

That there was no hostility between Arabs and Jews before the rise of Zionism and modern Arab nationalism. And the intrusion of British imperialism into the Middle East after World War I. And finally, that Israel, while it represents a national project of Zionism, was established as a settler-colonial project. And those two things are actually not contradictory.

Salima Hamarani (4:20)

And for today, we're going to focus on a pivotal piece of Palestinian history, the very early Zionist movement and the subsequent settling of Palestine with the help of the British and later on, the United States. And we hope that today's interview will help us to understand how we got to where we are today.

Rashid, to start, let's talk about the idea of Zionism. Because for many of us in the modern world, we've come to perceive Zionism as a decolonial movement or even an indigenous one. But you argue in your book that actually, in the beginning, Zionism had no problems calling itself a colonial endeavor and that Zionists even aligned themselves with the big colonial powers of the time. So talk to me about Zionism as a colonial movement and then how it rebranded itself into a decolonial one.