America’s Past, Present, and Future Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

RASHID KHALIDI: Formally, rhetorically, the United States opposes settlements. Formally, rhetorically, the United States considers them illegal. Later on, that’s reduced to obstacle to peace, inconvenient, or not such a nice thing. But this is entirely rhetorical legalistic opposition. Nothing is done by the United States to force Israel not to continue cementing over the West Bank.

ZURI LINETSKY: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Zuri Linetsky. I'm filling in for Mark Hannah today.

Last week I spoke to journalist Neri Zilber and Muhammad Shehada about Benjamin Netanyahu's incoming government, which is expected to be the most right-wing in Israel's history. We discussed what role the United States should play, if any, in what could be a high-consequence and potentially volatile year for Israelis and Palestinians.

Interlude featuring archival audio

LINETSKY: The discussion left me wanting to explore America's historic role in the conflict. Has the United States always been an ardent supporter of Israel? And has it ever taken meaningful steps to de-escalate the conflict? I decided to speak with historian Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, to unpack the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and America's role in it.

KHALIDI: Woodrow Wilson was completely on board with the Balfour Declaration and with the British Mandate for Palestine, which really helped to create the embryo of what became Israel. Without those things, what happens in 1947 is incomprehensible. How do they win a war against Arab armies? How do they expel several hundred thousand Palestinians if they don't already have a state structure in place? That was created during the British mandate thanks to the British and was done initially when the United States was involved after World War I through Wilson's support for Zionism, for the Balfour Declaration, and for the British mandate. So, the United States has been supportive of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine since right after World War I.

LINETSKY: The Balfour Declaration was a statement issued by the British government in 1917 announcing its support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Palestine was then controlled by the Ottoman Empire and was home to a majority Palestinian-Arab population, as well as a small but significant Jewish population.

KHALIDI: Now, that was translated into on-the-ground facts through Resolution 181, as you say, through the partition resolution, whereby the United States with the Soviet Union—it's absolutely essential to understand it was both superpowers—voted for giving most of an Arab majority country to a Jewish minority. The thing they really wanted to do with the partition resolution, which supposedly was to create a Jewish and an Arab state, was to create a Jewish state. Each superpower, the Americans and the Soviets, for their own reason.

LINETSKY: And what were those reasons?

KHALIDI: Well, in the case of the United States, it had to do with American electoral considerations. Truman told a group of American diplomats who came to Washington to talk to him about Palestine, “Gentlemen, I have no voters who care about this on that side. The people who care about this care about the future of Zionism.” And he said that to American diplomats. That was one of Truman's major considerations. The other major consideration for the United States was the United States was trying to ease the British out of the Middle East. And the establishment of a Jewish state, from the American point of view, which they thought would be favorable to the United States, was one means of doing that. It was a lever to help get the Brits out. There were other considerations.

The Soviets had their own considerations. They thought this would be a socialist state. They wanted to get the Brits out as well. And if you remember, at the very end of the mandate, most Zionist groups were in a state of war with the British in Palestine. They blew up the King David Hotel. They killed a lot of the senior British officials. They murdered the British representative in Cairo in 1944. There was a state of war between the Zionist underground and between the British occupation of Palestine, and that's the very end of the mandate. Up until that point, Britain provided the strength without which the establishment of this pre-state formation wouldn't have been possible. But at the very end, they were in conflict. And so, the Soviets thought this was an opportunity to weaken British power in the Middle East as, ironically, did the United States. On this, they were together, and they bullied that resolution through the General Assembly, the Soviets twisting the arms of their satellites. They didn't have to twist. They told them what to do. And the United States forced countries which were dependent on the United States to vote for it. So, by a small majority, the resolution passed entirely due to American-Soviet pressure.

LINETSKY: You raise an interesting point about Truman talking about Zionism. It's interesting because you mentioned Zionism, and your book, Palestinian Identity, talks about Palestinian identity. And between 1936 and 1939, you have the Arab revolt. Where was the countervailing pressure? Zionism—and there is a historic movement of anti-Zionism—is kind of a Jewish idea, ranging from religious to non-religious, that Jews need a place of their own in the world. It starts in the late 19th century and gets magnified after the Holocaust. It has an impact in the United States and globally, and we get to Israel in 1948. But where is the countervailing Palestinian form of Zionism, or is there one we might not be familiar with?

KHALIDI: Well, there isn't really. There is a sense of Palestinian identity, which I'll talk about in a minute. But the force of Zionism resides in two things. The first is a sense among Jews, obviously, that they have a connection to the land of Israel. That's not manufactured. That's real, and that's preexisting. It wasn't nationalism. In other words, there wasn't the idea that all Jews must live in a nation state in the land of Israel. Nobody thought that way 200 years ago. Literally nobody. Modern political Zionism is a modern national movement that has nothing to do with the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, the historic religious and human connection. It's a new form of that.

The other thing is that this, in the minds of a lot of Christians, especially Protestants, is an important and real thing. The connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and the return of the Jews, in terms of the Messianic importance of it, is something that from the early 19th century, a lot of Christians came to believe in. So, you had somebody called Lord Shaftesbury in England, a major political figure, who's calling for Britain to support the return of the Jews—and the return is the term used—for people who at that time did not want to go there. It was a British lord who wanted them to be sent there with British support as a means of accelerating the end of days. So, it's related to a particular reading of the Bible on the part of Christians, Protestants in particular.

The other factor is that there is a certain amount of guilt about anti-Semitism in the Christian West—fully justified guilt—because what's pressing people to leave Russia and Poland and Eastern Europe is this virulent anti-semitism, which breaks out in the form of pogroms and so on and so forth, and was even more deadly earlier, over centuries and centuries in Christian Europe. And you had Jews expelled from entire countries for half a century. England expelled all the Jews. France expelled all the Jews, and so on and so forth, culminating, of course, in the Holocaust. And it's no coincidence that the establishment of Israel, takes place only three years after the end of the Second World War and the end of the Holocaust. And that is partly the result of a deep sense of guilt on the part of countries that could and should have helped to save some of the people who became victims of the Holocaust. The United States closes its doors. Britain closes its doors at a time when the Nazis would have let people go. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, could have been saved had anti-semitism not prevented Roosevelt or the British government or other governments from allowing in people who, at that time before World War II, the Nazis would have let go. And so, people felt guilty with good reason.

Truman is bullying the British after World War II. Let in these poor displaced persons who are the surviving remnant of the of the European Jewish communities who the Nazis were trying to exterminate who were living in displaced persons camps after World War II. Well, why don’t you let them into the United States? Had they had the opportunity, where most of their relatives who were surviving were, they would have obviously gone to the United States, not to Palestine, where there was a war going on. But the United States political system would not allow our racist immigration laws, which were set up in the 1920s, to change in order to allow those people in. And neither Roosevelt nor Truman was willing or able to change that. So, what do you do? You say, well, Palestine is the solution for these displaced persons and the sense of guilt also. You've got to do something given that you haven't done anything previously. So, all of these things combined.

Now, what's the Palestinian parallel? Well, the Palestinians are there. There's not an issue of bringing them to Palestine. There's not an issue of how to develop a modern language out of biblical Hebrew. Arabic is Arabic. It changes. It was changing organically into what we consider modern spoken Arabic today. And the Palestinians were developing a sense of national consciousness as early as the beginning of the 20th century, which ironically is pretty much the same time that Zionism was developing a sense of national consciousness. So, we have these two parallel but quite different phenomena developing, focusing on the same place.

LINETSKY: The first major expression of Palestinian identity was the 1936 to 39 Arab revolt. The Arab revolt was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs against the British. Palestinian Arabs demanded independence from Britain, as well as an end to open-ended Jewish immigration, which had more than doubled in the years leading up to the revolt, as well as land purchases by Zionist organizations. I asked Rashid why this display of Palestinian identity didn't have more of an effect in the decision to create a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948.

KHALIDI: Two things. Let me say two things about the ‘36/‘39 revolt. As much as 12 to 15 percent of the Arab male adult population of Palestine is either killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled during this revolt. So, it is a representation of the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians who don't want to be ruled by Britain and don't want to have their country turned into a Jewish state. So, there you have Palestinian consciousness expressed by 12 to 15 percent of the people killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.

Now, why does that not lead to a different outcome in 1948? For one thing, the British successfully crushed the Arab revolt, killing and wounding 12 to 15 percent—blah, blah, blah. Secondly, the leadership is decimated. All the military cadres are captured and executed by the British, and so on and so forth. Much of the leadership is exiled into the mid-forties. Some of them are never allowed to return. Others, like my uncle, are only able to come back six or seven years after their exile, or eight years or nine years after their exile. So, the Palestinian leadership is scattered. The military forces are broken. Arms are confiscated. Meanwhile, the Zionist movement is going from strength to strength. The British are arming and training them to help them put down the Arab revolt. The Arabs get weaker as a result of ‘36/‘39. The Zionist movement develops a powerful military during ‘36/‘39. The Jewish settlement police. The special night squads. The training by people like Orde Wingate. The development later on during World War II of a Jewish brigade in the British Army. All of this gives you the backbone of what becomes a really effective Israeli army once the state of Israel is established.

Meanwhile, the Arabs are going downhill—the Palestinians—having been broken, as I've said, by the British during the revolt. Are the Palestinians consulted? No. There's no Palestinian representation at the League of Nations during the mandate. They're not represented. They're not in the mandate. The word Arab or word Palestinian is never mentioned in the British mandate, whereas a Jewish agency with diplomatic status and representative assembly—all these things are created by the mandate. So, whereas the Zionist movement has diplomatic representation at the highest levels right up to World War II, the Palestinians have nothing like that. And so, when the partition resolution is passed, it entirely represents the American, the Soviet, and the Zionist position, which is a Jewish state in most of Palestine is to be created, and the backbone for that state is already there.

LINETSKY: And correct me if I'm wrong, but the leader to the extent of the Palestine movement that was remaining was Hajime al-Husseini, who has been and who was the head of the Arab Higher Committee. And there's some historiography to suggest, and I think this is incorrect—well, this is correct. He made enemies—linguistic overtures, the discursive overtures to the Nazis. They didn't go anywhere.

KHALIDI: He went to Germany. He was in Baghdad. The British chased him out of Baghdad. He went to Tehran. The British invade Iran. He went to Turkey. The Turks wouldn't let him stay. He ends up in Italy. And then he goes to Germany and spent much of the war in Germany, and he helped the Nazis. So, that's not that's not debatable. The mufti helped the Nazis during World War II, and he remained the head of the Arab higher committee. That was one of the problems the Palestinians faced. Half of their leadership supported the British during World War II. But the top guy was in cahoots with the Nazis, which is to say the mufti. He's discredited. As a result, he was able never to return to Palestine. But it is a real problem the Palestinians have, whereas the Zionist leadership is unified and is in Palestine. The Palestinian leadership is divided and is scattered. Much of it is in exile. And there are enormous differences between them.

You look at World War II. A lot of Palestinians, thousands of Palestinians, volunteered to serve with the British army, but they're not allowed to form a Palestine brigade, an Arab brigade, whereas thousands of Jews who joined the British army are put into a Jewish brigade and fight together as a brigade and develop all kinds of not only skills but a kind of solidarity as a unit. These are the backbone of the Israeli army. These guys are the ones who are trained by the British during the Arab revolt. The Palestinians don't have anything like that. Their leadership is divided, and their military doesn't have that kind of a background and training.

LINETSKY: The Palestinian leadership is divided. A lot of its male population in particular is decimated in ‘36/‘39. And we have a cohering of Jewish identity and military and political forces leading us to 1948 success in the war. From the Palestinian perspective, the Nakba—as Benny Morris, I think, elegantly lays out, the forcible displacement but not purposeful displacement.

KHALIDI: That's where Morris is completely wrong. You had 60 to 70 massacres. That was to force people to flee. That was intentional. That just didn't happen. If there was one massacre or two, that might have been a coincidence of war. But when it takes place in dozens, literally, of places, it is part of a plan to turn a majority Arab country into a majority Jewish country. The people who say it wasn't intentional sort of miss an important point. How would you create a Jewish state in a country with a 65 percent Arab majority without voting the Arabs out? It is physically impossible. If you take the partition borders—the borders the United Nations voted for in November 1947—you have an Arab-Jewish state and an Arab state. About 50 percent of the population of the so-called Jewish state would have been Arabs. If you don't kick them out, you don't have a Jewish majority, and you don't have a Jewish state. You can't have a Jewish state without moving the population. Herzl recognized that back in the day when he was writing in his diaries. “We have to spirit the population across the frontiers,” he says in his diaries. He's writing for himself, obviously, but he understood that. Jabotinsky understood that. They all understood that.

And now, is there in order to expel? No. And so, Benny Morris, who was the kind of historian who says if it's not in a document, it didn't happen. He doesn't even look at the larger picture. No expulsion, no Jewish state. You have an Arab-Jewish state. You have an Arab majority within ten years, even with all the immigration you could get. There are there are about six or seven million Jews in Israel today. There are 12 or so million Palestinians all over the world. You would have had an Arab majority if they hadn't been expelled. They had to be expelled. So, that argument of no intentionality flies in the face of logic.

And I just want to say one other thing. You said seven Arab armies?

LINETSKY: Yes.

KHALIDI: Actually, one Egyptian, two Jordanian, three Iraqi, and four Syrian armies actually fought in 1948. Lebanese army never crosses the frontier. There was no Saudi army. There was no Yemeni army. So, of all the Arab states that were independent and all of which were technically at war with Israel, there were four armies that actually fought. But anyway.

LINETSKY: I think these are important points.

KHALIDI: They’re minor points. But seven Arab armies, and you think of hordes of well-armed guys with beards. Well, there were four armies.

LINETSKY: The United States was pivotal in passing the United Nations resolution to partition Palestine and create the state of Israel. But the United States did not immediately establish close diplomatic ties with Israel. It mostly stayed out of the region in the early years of Israel's existence. So, when do we begin to see unconditional American support for Israel?

KHALIDI: Things change in the 1960s. Things change as a result of the Democratic administrations, especially the Johnson administration, which are much more favorable to Israel for Cold War reasons and domestic reasons—Cold War reasons because the Middle East comes to be seen through a Cold War lens. Israel is an American ally. Egypt and Syria and Iraq and other Arab countries are Soviet allies. And with the Vietnam War, finding a place where American arms defeat Russian arms becomes very important to people like Johnson and Rusk and the people around him. It's really in the sixties that the United States completely aligns itself with Israel. I think you're right. But in ‘56, the United States opposes the British, the French, and Israel, and American aid to Israel is not that significant. Israel fights the ‘56 war and the ‘67 war, essentially with British and French weapons. Significant American weapons supplies only start in the 1960s. They are initially defensive, and it's only much later under Johnson that you get top-of-the-line F-4 Phantoms being sent to Israel to fly against MiG 21 Js, top-of-the-line Soviet fighters. And that's the Cold War issue. Israel becomes an American proxy against Soviet proxies in the Cold War from the sixties, really until the Reagan administration, until the eighties.

LINETSKY: So, we have ‘67. The 1967 war is also known as the Six-Day War. This is really important because 1967 is when you start getting the idea of occupation, when the physical infrastructure of for occupation occurs. Does the United States take a position? We have now this norm in international law that in war you kind of want to give back land you take. We're seeing this Ukraine even. We want all our land back. Does the United States then say, “Well, you occupied this land. It's not part of 141.” What happened with UN Resolution 242, which ends the 1967 war?

KHALIDI: Well, 242 has to be looked at very carefully, because ostensibly it's a land for peace resolution. In other words, the Arab states are to get back their occupied lands in return for peace with Israel. And this is the resolution Egypt and Jordan accept a couple years after the 1967 war, and that Israel accepts soon after that and that Syria accepts in 1973. But the resolution is carefully drafted so it doesn't say Israel has to give back all the territories occupied in 1967. It talks about return of territories occupied, which is a loophole through which you can drive a Mack truck, and with which Israel, for the last 50-odd years, has driven a Mack truck, saying, “We gave back some of the territories. We gave back to Sinai Peninsula. We're not obliged to give back, necessarily, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip or occupied Arab East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights.” And unfortunately, the way in which the American ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, the British ambassador, Lord Carrington, and the Soviet ambassador drafted that resolution—it is essentially a British draft with American and Israeli input—was designed to allow that enormous loophole, such that Israel could claim it only had to give back some of the occupied territories in return for peace.

LINETSKY: After the 1967 October war, there was a fundamental shift in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel occupied parts of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. This was the beginning of the Israeli settlement project, which was initially articulated in 1967 by a left-wing government and then took off under the right-wing leadership of Menachem Begin in 1977.

KHALIDI: It's a Labor government claiming control of the occupied territories is necessary for Israel's security, though Israel managed perfectly well in three wars within its existing territories. But the claim was, “Oh, we can't possibly be secure unless we control the Gaza Strip, unless we control the West Bank, unless we control the Golan Heights.” And they begin to establish settlements immediately after the ‘67 war. So, Bagan then takes us to another level, arguing from 1977 onwards when he becomes prime minister, that this is not just a matter of security, this is a matter of Judea and Samaria or the heartland of Israel, and we can't give them all their hours to begin with. And so, you have a different a different take on why Israel has to keep these territories and why Israelis should be settling these territories with it with the Likud governments of 1977 onwards.

LINETSKY: We have, from 1967 forward, the discussion of settlements in occupied land. The United States doesn't seem to take a position on this, or a negative position on this. What's the reason for this? Why does the United States find it in its interest to do so?

KHALIDI: I have an explanation for that because formally, rhetorically, in terms of diplomatic position, the United States opposes settlements. Formally, rhetorically, the United States considers them illegal. Later on, that’s reduced to obstacle to peace, inconvenient, or not such a nice thing. But this is entirely rhetorical legalistic opposition. Nothing is done by the United States to force Israel not to continue cementing over the West Bank and essentially de facto annexing it to Israel, certainly the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Now, the question may be: why? Well, one false explanation is the United States does whatever Israel wants. But in fact, there are many, many, many cases where vital American national interests are seen as being engaged, where the United States forces Israel to do what it wants. You see this with the disengagement agreements of 1974 and ‘75 in the Golan Heights, in the Sinai. The United States makes these. You read Kissinger's memoirs, or you read the diplomatic documents that are available from Foreign Relations in the United States. And you can see the United States forces Israel to do something it doesn't want to do. This is because it's important for United States to win over Egypt as part of the Cold War struggle with the Russians—far more important than what the Israelis want.

The same thing happens at Camp David and later on with the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The Israelis didn't want to give up that territory or make all the concessions they had to make to Egypt. The United States wanted to do that so as to win the Cold War in the Middle East by removing Egypt from the Soviet camp and bringing it into the American camp and ending the possibility of any war between the Arab states and Israel by neutralizing Egypt. Egypt is at peace with Israel. Sinai is demilitarized. There's no possibility of a real Arab-Israeli war. So, from an American perspective, these are vital interests, and Israeli objections are irrelevant.

The same thing is true with major weapons sales to the absolute monarchies of the Gulf. Israelis object. The United States goes ahead with them and sometimes puts conditions on the sales. But where vital American interests are concerned, Israeli concerns are of little importance. Palestine is not a vital concern to the United States, especially things like settlement, Jerusalem. The United States doesn't care; it's not important. And there are people in the American political system for whom it is really important. They want to support whatever Israel does. And these are people who are motivated. They’re voters. They’re people who donate to political campaigns. They’re politicians who have come to believe these things.

So, you have a strong voice arguing for whatever Israel wants. You have no countervailing voice, and you have no major national interest. President Obama, when he decided it was in the American national interest to cut a deal with Iran and JCPOA, he went ahead and did it. That's a vital interest. The Israelis can scream and holler, and Netanyahu can come and speak before a joint session of Congress twice and undermine the policy of the president of United States. And it doesn't amount to a hill of beans, because it's seen by the president as being a vital interest of the United States not to have a war with Iran, which is the only other alternative to the JCPOA if you want them not to have nuclear weapons.

So, I would argue the reason these resolutions on settlements are never enforced by the United States as they should be or should have been, is because it's not a vital interest. Could the United States have done it? Of course. You can say you can't use American weapons to maintain an occupation. It could say you cannot use the dodge of 501(c)(3) charitable organizations to channel hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to illegal settlements. The Treasury Department could change that just like that. You're not a 501(c)(3) if you're building a settlement in the occupied territories. Any US government could stop the Israelis from using American weapons. Just say, “There's an American law which says these weapons have to be used for defensive purposes.” And oppressing the Palestinians in Nablus is not a defensive purpose.

LINETSKY: Jumping ahead, the PLO, or the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Israel, signed the Oslo Accords between 1993 and 1995. These accords were meant to set the stage for Palestinians to have the right to self-determination and ultimately self-rule in their own state. But the Oslo process did not achieve this, and many people think the accords were a horrible deal for Palestinians. So, why did Yasser Arafat, the then-leader of the PLO, sign off on them?

KHALIDI: Very briefly, first, the PLO had shot itself in the foot by supporting Saddam during the 1991 Iraq War. It was in a very weak position in the Arab world. Two, the PLO leadership was extremely eager to get back to the occupied territories. Three, the people they sent to Oslo had very poor English and had no legal expertize up against some of the smartest negotiators on the face of the earth. Four—and very, very importantly—the PLO leadership was out of touch with the situation on the ground in Palestine.

How do I know these things? I was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation that was engaged in negotiations from the Madrid conference at the end of 1991 until June of 1993. The ground rules which were imposed on the Palestinians—no discussion of Jerusalem, no discussion of refugees, no discussion of settlements, no discussion of water, no discussion of sovereignty, no discussion of borders. I could go on. Or the ground rules under which Arafat agreed to negotiate at Oslo as well. Those were American-Israeli imposed ground rules. And that meant, as you suggested in your question, everything important was deferred to never-never land, to so-called final status negotiations, which have never actually taken place. Oslo was supposed to be an interim agreement that was to have expired in 1999, which would now be 33 years ago. So, it is null and void, but it is the basis for the Palestinian Authority and for the existing situation. It was a terrible agreement.

LINETSKY: Even with the Oslo peace process, violence between Israelis and Palestinians has broken out episodically up until today. Both Palestinians and Israelis engage in horrific acts of violence. So, what is the American interest in providing disproportionate support to Israel, a country that in the context of this enduring conflict, violates Palestinian human rights and has been accused of using apartheid tactics in the occupied territories?

KHALIDI: First of all, most Americans, when they say, “What is the world?” or, “We are the world,” they're talking about an American, European, white settler colony echo chamber. The unwashed masses of the biggest countries in the world—India, China, Brazil—they don't count as the world. Those are countries that actually see Palestine entirely differently than does that little ecosystem of the United States, Europe, white settler colonies. Those guys see the world in one way. The rest of the world sees things quite, quite, quite differently. You see this over the war in Ukraine, but you also see it over Palestine. So, first of all, the United States doesn't really care about what anybody thinks outside that echo chamber.

The second thing is—there are powerful political interests in the United States which are devoted to supporting Israel. And by this, I mean a lot of voters for whom this is a big issue, a lot of political donors for whom this is a big issue. The leaderships of both the Democratic and the Republican Party, which are committed to an entirely pro-Israel point of view. So, if you're a president and you want to go up against this—say you're an Obama, or say you're a Jimmy Carter—that's a lot to take into account, given that so-called public opinion is really only a group of people within a very small part of the world who tend to see things from a pro-Israeli perspective. So, that's the first thing.

The second thing is, where is the counter pressure? The Arab countries care much more about what the United States and Israel think than they do about what their own people think. We know the Arab populations are supportive of Palestine, but we also know most Arabs live in dictatorships, absolute monarchies, and other forms of authoritarian regimes that don't give a damn what their people think and do not represent the views of their people. So, in the World Cup, we saw what Arabs think of Palestine. They really support Palestine. They carry Palestinian flags. And there are public opinion polls done by a half dozen reputable institutions in the United States and Palestine and elsewhere which show that's entirely true. Most Arabs are supportive of Palestine and do not want normalization with Israel until it deals properly with the Palestinians. Most Arab governments don't represent those views, and the United States is perfectly happy to deal with the Egyptian dictatorship, with the Emirati absolute monarchy, which are more interested in Israel and the United States than they are in the views of their own people.

So, where's the counterargument? You have powerful political forces in the United States that want you to support Israel, whatever it does. And you have governments like these corrupt, authoritarian, unrepresentative, illegitimate governments which dot the Arab world that'll go along with whatever the Americans say. In fact, several of them—the Emiratis are just doing new deals with Israel, even though Arab public opinion was inflamed over Palestine during the World Cup. They don't care. They have a powerful enough secret police apparatus that whatever their people care about can be kept under control. And from the sort of realpolitik point of view of the State Department, that's all that matters.

LINETSKY: You raise a really powerful question. Isn't the United States fundamentally undermining its own interests if it's propagating Israeli settler colonialism?

KHALIDI: Yes.

LINETSKY: And supporting these autocratic regimes? Okay. I'll turn it over to you. Why, yes?

KHALIDI: How many politicians care about the American national interest? They care about campaign contributions. They care about winning their primaries and then winning their elections. That's the answer for the politicians. And then let's talk about the “Blob. Where does anybody go against the fish all swimming in one direction or the lemmings all leaping off the cliff about Ukraine or about Palestine or about whatever it may be? There are a bunch of verities nobody in the foreign policy establishment dares to challenge. The two-state solution is physically impossible to implement. Does anybody say anything against it? No. What Israel does in the occupied territories is a violation of multiple American laws on the defensive use of American weapons. Does anybody raise that as a question? No.

LINETSKY: The United States, arguably, now, with the Bibi administration, has less leverage than it did ever before. Let me rephrase this as a question. What leverage does the United States have now with the Netanyahu government? This is a radical right-wing government.

KHALIDI: I actually think the United States has more leverage than it did with many previous Israeli governments. The reason for this is that this government is so repugnant to such a large segment of those who strongly support Israel that I think there's a lot of margin for maneuver in terms of putting pressure on them. And I'll give you an example of something which gives me an indication of that. Dan Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller are two veteran American diplomats. Miller once described what the United States does as, “We are the lawyers for Israel.” They're not honest brokers. They're not mediators. They're not in the middle. They're Israel's lawyers. He said it. I didn’t say it. And I saw that at work in the negotiations I was a part of.

These two guys are now calling for conditionality on the supply of American aid to Israel. That's something that was anathema to people who supported Israel since time immemorial. Nobody ever called for conditionality, saying, “You are violating this or that law by using these weapons for a non-defensive purpose,” or, “This is not a 501(c)(3). This is not a charitable endeavor to support settlements.” They can do that much more easily today with this government, not necessarily because Americans care that this government is an apartheid government or that it treats Palestinians with massive violations of human rights. It's because of what it's doing to the Israeli political system. It's what it's about to do, I should say, to the Israeli judiciary, what it's about to do in terms of allowing the Orthodox rabbinate to legislate about things which concern American conservative and reform Jews, what it's about to do in terms of LGBTQ+ rights in Israel. That's going to give this administration, in my view, a margin of maneuver it really did not have with previous Israeli governments, if they choose to use that maneuver. Now, there'll be a lot of resistance. But my sense is you push some things on Israel today—which the Israeli government kick and scream and fight. That's fine. I'm saying they have more of a margin to pick a fight with this government than they did with the previous government or several the previous Israeli governments.

LINETSKY: So far, they've exhibited absolutely zero will to do that. But I'm just going on what they say.

KHALIDI: He hasn't formed a government yet. Wait until he forms the government. They're going to restructure the Israeli system so that it's, as somebody very eloquently said—I think it was one of the most fervent defenders of Israel—“a democracy in name only.” When and if they recognize that in Washington, there's lots of space for them to do something. This is a government that's doing things which are repugnant to us. We're not going to support it. So, don't support them at the Security Council.

LINETSKY: In 30 or 40 years when they finally realize this is happening, I'm sure that might happen.

KHALIDI: I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm just saying if anybody in Washington has a shred of integrity and sense and some concern for the American national interest, that's what they would do.

LINETSKY: My conversation with Rashid Khalidi covered over a century of American involvement, to some degree or another, in what has come to be known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I'm struck by how much we were not able to cover, and I'm still curious about whether America's involvement in the conflict has served its national interest. I'm left with a set of complicated questions. When is the protection of minority rights for nonwhite peoples in the American national interest? How does the Biden administration claim to want to center human rights in its foreign policy but never questions Israel's treatment of Palestinians or the different sets of laws and practices it uses to administer the West Bank and Gaza compared to Israel proper? Does this administration even have the will to pressure Israel into changing, like Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer suggest it should?

I'm Zuri Linetsky, and this has been an episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Thanks so much to Rashid Khalidi for joining us. Thanks also go out to the None of the Above team. Thanks to our host Mark Hannah, producer Caroline Gray, and associate producer and editor Sarah Leeson. If you've enjoyed what you've heard, we would appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us.

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