Rashid Khalidi, America’s foremost scholar of Palestine, is retiring: ‘I don’t want to be a cog in the machine any more’

History has a striking capacity to intrude on the present day, as it does when I meet Rashid Khalidi. The Palestinian American professor’s retirement from his position as the Edward Said chair of modern Arab history at Columbia University was imminent, and that morning he has received alarming news: a gang of extremist Israeli settlers had stormed a house on Silsila Road in Jerusalem, a property that had been in his family’s possession since the time of his great-great-great grandfather in the 18th century.

The property had recently been briefly uninhabited after a cousin living there had died. The plan was to convert the house into an extension of the Khalidi library, just across the road, which houses more than 1,200 manuscripts, some dating back to the early 11th century.

Khalidi says he believes the settlers were being strategic, that they had been watching the property, or perhaps the obituaries, and were ready to act. While his family has the ownership documents relating to the property, Khalidi says he is full of doom: “We had a court decision in our favor, saying that we own the property, but these people trample all over legality, law and courts, and they are supported by the police and the government.”

Rashid Khalidi turns 76 this year; he is the same age as the state of Israel, and this incident was the latest example of what has been happening to Palestinians since the founding of Israel: in his words, “systematic, massive dispossession and theft”.

Khalidi cuts a friendly professorial figure when I speak to him in the south of France. He is in a contemplative mood and being away from the US is a welcome respite from what has been among the most tumultuous of semesters at Columbia University, in his more than two decades there.

The student protest movement against Israel’s actions in Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October attack began on Columbia’s campus, and brought together two strands that have dominated his life: the politics of Palestine and Israel, and being a scholar of the Middle East at an elite college.

The day after police were sent in to break up the Columbia encampment this spring, Khalidi appeared with a megaphone in hand to support the students. Ever the historian, he reminded his audience that, as with the Vietnam protests, history would judge the students to have been on the right side, that their valor would be vindicated.

In the year since 7 October, his voice and narrative authority on the subject of Palestine have been sought extensively, mainly because of his most recent book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance.

Khalidi has enjoyed a life dedicated to education, politics and family. But that life has also been laced with the agony of watching what has happened in and to Palestine. As he looks ahead to retirement and an emeritus position at Columbia, he does so as the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual of his generation in the west – a mantle inherited from Edward Said, and not just because he has for so long occupied the chair created in Said’s name.

It’s arguable, though, that Khalidi has been more influential than Said in recent months. The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine has been in the top five in the New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list for more than 30 weeks. It is a double-edged sword, says Khalidi, wanting your book to sell and also knowing that its success stems from a need to understand the history of the region in the wake of tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. He gives his royalties to charity.

The book presents a persuasive framing that what has happened to Palestine is the consequence of a settler-colonial project, and the resistance that that has prompted. It also doubles up as the story of his own prominent family’s history: his father being sent by his uncle to deliver a message to King Abdullah I of Jordan to speak on behalf of Palestinians underlines the absence of diplomatic channels for Palestinians. Their voices were silenced. The opening of the book describes a prescient letter written by his great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, to Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, in 1899. Yusuf Diya argues in the letter that the fulfillment of the Zionist project would entail the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

His ancestor’s prophecy is borne out in the book and on the ground.

Khalidi’s grandfather lost the family home in Jaffa in the Nakba, or catastrophe – the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. His family scattered. At the time, his parents were in New York, where his father was finishing his education. Unable to return to Palestine, they stayed in New York, where Rashid was born.

At Yale University, Khalidi was part of the class of 1970, the first that didn’t have quotas for Black or Jewish students. Those limits had crumbled after the civil rights movement. “We were the first class that was not made up of mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant prep school boys. And I almost dropped out after the first year,” Khalidi says. “It was hard to feel at ease around people like George W Bush, who was a senior.”

Khalidi did eventually find his people, who were involved in Palestinian activism, anti-Vietnam war organizing and the Black Panthers. He recalls a visit to Yale in the late 1960s by Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister. She said that there was no such thing as Palestinians, that they did not exist. Meir received a rapturous reception from about a 1,000 students, and only four people, including Khalidi, stood in opposition to her visit.

“Now,” he says, “the situation would be reversed. There would be thousands of students protesting and a few in favor.”

He attributes this change to a shift on several levels. In the academy and in serious scholarship, the way that the subject of Israel-Palestine is taught has changed. There is also what he describes as utter contempt on the part of the younger generation for traditional media. His son, a playwright, urges him constantly to rescind his subscription to the New York Times, telling him it’s a disgrace that he pays the paper.

“They are deeply skeptical of the shibboleths and myths and lies and distortions that the politicians and the media and the institutions that dominate western societies cherish and hold dear, and enforce by law on everybody else if you demonstrate in favor of something they don’t like,” says Khalidi.

And then there is what happened on 7 October.

“There were two things that were taking place at the same time. The horrors of that day shocked people for weeks, and then there were those who said chickens had come home to roost. They were, of course, punished, those who said an explosion was inevitable when you impose a brutal occupation or blockade on people for four or five generations. Alongside that, people started to see a genocide being played out, and were watching it in real time on their phones; that had a profound effect.”

What did he make of the shift that took place immediately after 7 October, when young people around the world rose up in support of Palestine? “Understanding the traumatic experience of Israelis is essential to understand what is going on now. And also what else it might do. And I also think people say a dead child is a dead child. On the one side you have a dozen or two dozen dead children, and on the other side you have thousands of dead children. And if you are angry about this, you have to be outraged about that. That it wasn’t the case with the media or politicians – well, that was noticed. Within a couple of weeks, there were as many Palestinians dead, but somehow the deaths of Israelis was more horrifying, more atrocious, and the rank, racist hypocrisy behind those attitudes is now stark for many people.”

The impact of the protests at universities is likely to be felt for some time. Three presidents of elite colleges lost their jobs, some students still have court cases hanging over them, and questions about the role that universities play in civil society will continue to be debated. But Khalidi, who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of learning, has had enough of the routine life of an academic.

“I didn’t want to be a cog in that machine any more. For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register – essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum,” Khalidi says. “Research that brings in money, they respect. But they don’t care about teaching, even though it is the students with their tuition who provide a huge proportion of private universities’ budgets.”

His personal disappointment aside, Khalidi is beloved by his students: more than 60 of those whose PhDs he supervised over his career turned up from all over the world to pay moving tributes to him in New York last summer. It was part of a two-day seminar looking at his academic legacy – and a new venue had to be found at short notice, as Columbia was under lockdown.

Khalidi resists questions that demand a crystal ball. He is a historian who prefers to focus on analyzing what past actions tell us. His next book will focus on Ireland, and how it was a laboratory for Palestine. It stems from a fellowship he had recently at Trinity College, Dublin. He says that to understand Palestine, you have to understand British colonialism more broadly. He is hoping to examine key figures in the British aristocracy whose Irish experience was central to everything they did afterwards – people such as Arthur James Balfour, Sir Charles Tegart and Gen Sir Frank Kitson. He is hoping to show how the Irish experience was exported to India, Egypt and Palestine, and then returned to Ireland again during the Troubles, having been magnified in the colonies. “It is astonishing how personnel and counter-insurgency techniques, like torture, assassination, find their roots with the British in Ireland,” Khalidi says.

His personal family history, his scholarship and the front row seat he had as part of the Palestinian advisory group during talks in Madrid in the early 1990s show him that until the US shifts its total, uncritical support for Israel, the Palestinians will not get anything close to sovereignty. “It’s never statehood, it’s never self-determination,” he says. “It is an extension into the future of the status quo with epaulets.”

When he looks back at the 1990s, he is reminded of what the Palestinians were up against, and why they didn’t stand a chance. And why the peace efforts of the time were destined for failure. Not only did Israel have its own lawyers, combing over every detail, it had the backing of the US too. Khalidi understands that it was a fundamental error on the part of Yasser Arafat and his team to think that the US could be an honest broker.

“That is what drives me: Israel cannot do any of this – killing this number of Palestinians [more than 40,000 at the time of writing] without the US and western European countries. The US gives Israel the green light. It is a party to the war on Palestine. That is what drives me as an American. I am not just at this because I am a Palestinian. It is because I am an American. Because we are responsible.”