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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Halima Shah: And I'm Halima Shah.
--:-- Noel King: When Israel went to war with Hamas, there immediately after erupted this conversation about what side everyone is on. It's maybe neither right nor useful, but it happened. What social media shows me, a once young person of color, and my co-host today, Halima Shah, a still young person of color, is that many young people of color are siding with Palestinians. But why?
--:-- Halima Shah: Two things you hear. Israelis are colonizers and Palestinians simply want their land decolonized. And also, Palestinians are on our side, like during our various American racial uprisings and reckonings and officer-involved shootings.
--:-- Noel King: I remember there were Palestinians in Ferguson who were sharing their street battles with the police, that there were tactics and ways to protect yourself from tear gas and things like that. And honestly, I just saw the struggle as one and the same.
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--:-- Noel King: On Today Explained, why so much of the world seems to think the Palestinian struggle is also their struggle.
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--:-- Halima Shah: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. And I'm Halima Shah.
--:-- Noel King: And right at the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, I saw something on Twitter that had me rabbit holing. It was this person talking about how they were seeing people at a bodega, not Palestinians, but Egyptians and Jamaicans, if I'm remembering right, talking about Palestine as a colonial issue or struggle.
--:-- Halima Shah: And I was like, are we about to talk about colonialism on this show? Yes, we are.
--:-- Noel King: And so you went into the field. And where'd you go?
--:-- Halima Shah: So I went to this meeting that was held in Chicago, where people were reading the works of Hassan Kanafani, a late Palestinian author who was a Marxist and a member of the Palestinian resistance.
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--:-- Halima Shah: Thank you all for turning out tonight. We know the importance of political education. We know that there are many struggles that people are fighting ardently for and that they're fighting against the things like Zionism, imperialism, racism.
--:-- Noel King: So this event was held by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a group that is very critical of Israel and has organized a number of pro-Palestinian protests around the country. But what was interesting was that this meeting was happening in Little Village, which is a mostly Mexican working class neighborhood in Chicago.
--:-- Halima Shah: Okay, so again, people are talking about Palestine, but they're not Palestinians. What did these people tell you about why they were there?
--:-- Noel King: Well, there were two big things. One was racism. The U.S. struggles with it. And one person I spoke to, her name was Eli Gallegos. She is actually the daughter of Mexican immigrants. They use very dehumanizing language towards Palestinians, like that they're human animals.
--:-- Halima Shah: And I think that the correlation to that is like how a lot of people use race here in Chicago and the United States to justify mistreatment of Mexicans.
--:-- Noel King: OK, so you heard about racism. Did you also hear about the C word colonization?
--:-- Halima Shah: Absolutely. I mean, colonization was a big theme in this room. A lot of people felt that the colonized people of the world are all, you know, in a common struggle.
--:-- Noel King: One person I spoke to, Nino Brown, his family is from Jamaica, which, like a lot of places in the world, was colonized by the British. They say that the sun never set on the English Empire because it was so large.
--:-- Halima Shah: And there's just deliberate creation of racial stratification systems and privileging one section of a population over another.
--:-- Noel King: Those are some of the main parallels I saw, all while describing the native population as savages, backwards.
--:-- Halima Shah: So the same way that they described African Jamaicans and the Rastafari and maroon societies as backwards, crazy, heathens. That's exactly how they described Palestinians.
--:-- Noel King: Okay, so the next step was to ask, what is the bigger framework for understanding this as a colonial scenario?
--:-- Halima Shah: We called Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi a distinguished Palestinian historian.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I've heard it from African Americans. I've heard it from people from the Caribbean. I've heard it from people from formerly colonized places like India, parts of Africa. I've heard it from Irish people. Anybody who lived under the boot of colonialism, whether British or French or otherwise, understands somehow that there is a similarity between what their people endured and what the Palestinians have gone through.
--:-- Noel King: Khalidi is a frequent guest on NPR and an op-ed writer for The New York Times. He wrote a book that both Halima and I read. It's called The 100 Years' War on Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Now, the word colonialism is really contested, and to put it in your book title seems significant. So I asked him, why is he so confident that that's what this is?
--:-- Noel King: And he began with what he identifies as the start of today's current conflict. It really starts with the arrival of the British in 1917 and the imposition of British colonial rule under the veil of something called a League of Nations mandate.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: But it was basically ruled by the British. and the British came to install what they called a Jewish national home. The Zionist movement aims to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.
--:-- Noel King: That in turn involved a settler colonial project. Zionism of course has a national aspect but as early Zionists all understood and accepted and were not ashamed of it was a colonial project
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: At the Second Congress Herzl establishes the Jewish Colonial Trust which was to be the financial instrument of the Zionist organization. They saw it that way, it was that. They saw that they were European settlers with a claim in their eyes to the land, but who understood they were coming to a non-European land to colonize it.
--:-- Noel King: And they talked about that openly. You had something called the Jewish Colonization Agency. That's not some anti-Semitic slur. That's what they called themselves. It was the Jewish Colonization Association, in fact.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: So in both of these respects, it was, and I would argue, still is a colonial struggle or an anti-colonial struggle. The main case of the Arabs is against the British government's policy in Palestine. A policy which, if continued, will surely have as a result the replacement of the Arabs by the Jews.
--:-- Noel King: Okay, so there was no hesitation about using the word colonialism at the time. It wasn't debated. No, no, it was not. I mean, you have to understand, before World War II, before the era of decolonization, colonialism was in good odor with Europeans, with the good and the great.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: As far as they were concerned, it was a good thing. They were civilizing the natives and so forth. If you read the way in which the League of Nations described giving European countries mandates, they were uplifting these people.
--:-- Noel King: So colonialism was seen as a good thing until World War II and everything is turned upside down. And at that point, the Zionist movement re-baptizes itself as an anti-colonial movement because at that point they were on bad terms with the British.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: So Israel comes into existence with the help of the British. What was the British plan for that region? What were the borders supposed to look like? And who was supposed to be able to live there?
--:-- Noel King: Well, the British, before they decided to take Zionism under their wing with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, for more than a decade had decided, for strategic reasons, that they must control Palestine.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: They needed it to defend the eastern frontiers of Egypt. They needed it because it constituted the Mediterranean terminus of the shortest land route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf.
--:-- Noel King: So the British wanted Palestine for strategic reasons. At some point, they had a plan for both Palestinians and Israelis to live there, right? Or for Arabs and Jews to live there, right?
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: The British put forward a plan in 1937, the Peel Partition Plan, which would have created a small Jewish state, which would have expelled a large number of Palestinians who lived there under the Orwellian rubric of transfer and would have kept part of Palestine for the British as a British possession.
--:-- Noel King: Later on, the United Nations in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 181 on November 29th of 1947, voted for partition of Palestine into a larger Jewish state and a smaller Arab state, even though Arabs owned most of the land, over 80% of it, actually over 90% of it.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: The Jewish state will include the ports of Haifa and Tel Aviv and the whole of the Negev Valley. The Arab will occupy the fertile eastern part. Jerusalem will come under United Nations trusteeship.
--:-- Noel King: And even though Arabs constituted a two-thirds majority of the country, more than 56% of it was to be given to a Jewish state, and the rest was to be given to an Arab state. And that was a UN plan, not a British plan.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: What do you say to people who insist that Jewish people have a historical tie to this land? Their origins are there, and thus they can't be considered colonists.
--:-- Noel King: Well, they're right that there's a connection between Judaism and the land of Israel. That's obvious. Everybody understands that. Muslims, Christians, and Jews understand that. It's in the Quran. It's in the Bible. Nobody can dispute that the Jewish religion is rooted in this part of the world, in Palestine.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: The question is, who are these people who are coming and on what basis are they coming? Well, they're coming as part of a national movement. And people who say, well, it can't be settler colonialism because it's a national movement. Well, it can be both.
--:-- Noel King: I mean, we live in a settler colonial reality in the United States, which is also a national reality. So is Canada. So is New Zealand. So is Australia. It's not so hard to understand.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: You can walk and chew gum at the same time. And the science movement was both. It was a settler colonial movement to bring persecuted Jews from Europe to Palestine, where they would establish a Jewish majority state.
--:-- Noel King: You remove the existing population to bring in a new population. That's settler colonialism. And the fact that there is an ancient connection between the Jewish religion and the land of Israel or Palestine, whatever you choose to call it. There's no contradiction between those three ideas.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Does that mean that the people who arrive from Eastern Europe are indigenous to the land? No, they're not indigenous to the land. Their religion comes from there. Maybe or maybe not, their ancestors came from there. But that's a question that doesn't give you a 20th century right. That's a biblical land deed that nobody believes, except people who are, you know, religious.
--:-- Noel King: And in modern international law, that just doesn't hold.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Professor Rashid Khalidi.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, the developing world enters the chat.
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--:-- Noel King: That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, Upwork.com. We're back with Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: So, Professor, when Israel became a country in 1948, how did the rest of the world react? And here I want us to think not just about the United States and Britain, but also about what we now call the global south or the third world, the developing world.
--:-- Noel King: In 1948, most of the developing world had not yet been decolonized. India had. Pakistan had. A few countries had been liberated from colonialism. but most of what we call now the global south was still subject either to direct colonial rule by European powers or was just in the process of liberating itself.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: You look at Indonesia, you look at China, you look at countries that were nominally independent or not really yet independent. And the global south didn't have the self-expression that it came to have by the 1960s when the process of decolonization had largely been completed.
--:-- Noel King: How did the world look at this? Well, the first thing is European countries and the United States looked at it almost entirely in terms of the Holocaust, for which they bore a great deal of guilt.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Since those countries had refused to take in people who could have been saved before World War II, when the Nazis would have let people go, had anyone opened the doors, which the United States refused to do, which Britain refused to do, which most countries in the world callously and consciously refused to do.
--:-- Noel King: So they bore an enormous share of guilt, just correctly. They should have been guilty. And I think that that's one of the elements that drove the desire to support the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in a majority Arab country and give most of it under the partition plan of 1947 to this Jewish minority.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: As Germany and other nations increase their persecution, treat them as parriers and outcasts, beat them down and trample on them, the Jews are turning more and more to their promised land. The land which they were told once would be flowing with milk and honey.
--:-- Noel King: All right. So the process of decolonization, we have India gaining independence from Britain 1947. And then from 1947 onward, the dominoes start to fall. The decolonialization movement gains steam and ends with what we have today.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Did the Palestinian people see themselves as part of a larger decolonial push? Were they thinking of themselves in those terms, like Algeria was like, get the French out?
--:-- Noel King: Absolutely. They did in the period before 1948. I mean, you see demands by Palestinian congresses, by Palestinian leaders, by Palestinian delegations to London saying, we are entitled to self-determination under the covenant of the League of Nations.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: We are a provisionally independent nation, and we should get our independence. We're the overwhelming majority in this country. It's our country. And the British and the League of Nations consistently refuse to do that.
--:-- Noel King: This policy is not only contrary to the pledge given by his Britannic Majesty's government to the late King Hussein in the year 1915 for the establishment of a completely independent state, but is also not in accordance with the fourth point of President Wilson's 14 points calling for the self-determination of all people.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: In the case of many of the countries in the developing world, Algeria, India, Kenya, the colonists largely left. In the United States, of course, that did not happen, right? We're all here.
--:-- Noel King: What do you think needs to happen for Palestinians and Israelis? Do Israelis need to...
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: No, absolutely not. Two things have to be said. The first is that Zionism is a national movement, and like at the same time as it was and is a colonial settler project, and as in many other colonial settler settings, it has created a nation state or a nation or a people, however you want to put it.
--:-- Noel King: And that is now a fact. Those are people who now are people that now has not just a presence, but certain rights. Now, that's not entirely unprecedented in the history of settler colonial projects.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: You look at South Africa, or you look at Ireland, or you look at Kenya, or you look at what is now Zimbabwe, and a very large proportion of the populations that were settled there by colonial powers, whether the Dutch and the British in South Africa or the British in Ireland, are part of those populations.
--:-- Noel King: They have rights there. They should live there. They have every right to live there. Now how the relationship between them is to be worked out that a question that you know, it's not going to be easy to solve necessarily.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: But certainly, the idea of pushing them out, which many Palestinians originally had, by the way, it's part of the original PLO charter, later amended. That idea is absolutely unacceptable and unfeasible.
--:-- Noel King: I really wanted to do this episode after I saw a tweet by a young person in which she was talking about Egyptians at a bodega telling Jamaicans about how Palestine was a colonial issue.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And I said, wow, that's really something right there. That kind of sums something up that I can't really put my finger on.
--:-- Noel King: You said you've been seeing this dynamic for a long time. You also work on a college campus. Do you feel like you're seeing it more since October 7th?
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: It's not new since October 7th. I mean, if you look back at things like the vote on divestment from companies that support the Israeli occupation at Columbia and Barnard four or five years ago, you already had that dynamic.
--:-- Noel King: I mean, the overwhelming vote in favor did not, I mean, the number of Arab or Palestinian or Muslim students is minuscule. The people who voted for that, that measure, were by and large members of minority or members of the white American majority, including a very, very large number of Jewish students.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: So I've seen, I mean, we've seen that over several years at least. But it is actually not new on this campus and I think on most other campuses.
--:-- Noel King: And I would argue in society as a whole. I mean, you look at black pastors put a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for a ceasefire. And I think they represent their congregations in that.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And I would argue that's true across not just many minorities, but a large part also of the majorities in this country. Polling certainly indicates that among Democrats, among regular voters.
--:-- Noel King: I have a lot of faith in those black pastors that they know what they're talking about. They know of which they speak.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: But there's part of this dynamic that's attracted some criticism. And it is that young people who seem to not really understand very much about the Israel-Palestine conflict are talking about it in terms that make sense to them as Americans.
--:-- Noel King: So Israelis are white and Palestinians are POC and therefore Israelis are racist colonizers. And I wonder if painting this in terms that make sense to Americans is perhaps less useful because it doesn't really get at what's happening.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I was on a platform with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had recently been to Palestine. And he said what I saw there reminded me of Jim Crow.
--:-- Noel King: I can remember walking down streets with a Palestinian guide. And we would get to certain streets and he would say, I can't walk down this street with you. You can walk. I cannot. Because I'm Palestinian.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And I thought, I know what that is. I don't think that what we have in Palestine is exactly Jim Crow. There are elements of segregation. I mean, housing inside Israel is completely segregated. Jews and Arabs don't live together except in a small number of communities.
--:-- Noel King: Education is segregated. So there are parallels to Jim Crow. But that's how he interpreted it. But, and I should say, students are students. And of course, they're still studying. They are still learning. They are young people.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And I think we should cut them a great deal of slack. Some of what they say may be, you know, not fully formed ideas or oversimplified ideas. But I actually think that there is a grain of truth in all of these comparisons.
--:-- Noel King: I mean, to segregation, to the disenfranchisement of black people. I mean, Palestinians, 5 million Palestinians have lived for 56 years under the jackboot of an Israeli military occupation with no rights and no vote in terms of all the decisions that really matter.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And that's not Jim Crow and it's not exactly segregation, but there's a parallel there. And if a black person sees it, I'm not going to tell him no. He or she is actually right in certain respects.
--:-- Noel King: Similarly, if a Jamaican says, well, the Brits did this to us, or an Irish person says the Brits did this to us, I'm not going to say no, because I actually know, as the Irish person does, that Balfour is known as Bloody Balfour in Ireland because of what he did, you know, in the 1880s, long before he became foreign secretary and issued the Balfour Declaration.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: So there are actually parallels there. You know, the United States likes to think of itself as the international community. and it likes to think of itself with its few European allies and a couple of other white settler estates like Canada and Australia as the world.
--:-- Noel King: Well, actually, the world is not the United States and Western Europe. The world is Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. The world is China. The world is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: That's the world. That's the world's population. And most of those people see this conflict in more or less the way that Palestinians do, with, obviously, with differences and, you know, with subtleties and so forth.
--:-- Noel King: So, in fact, I take a great deal of encouragement from that. Israel has the support, the undying support of the United States, Britain, and a couple of other countries. I don't see that changing in the short run, though I think peoples in those countries are changing. Their political leadership is not. But people, ordinary people, I think are beginning to change.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And I take a great deal of encouragement from that.
--:-- Noel King: Rashid Khalidi, he's a professor at Columbia University and author of The 100 Years' War on Palestine.
--:-- Halima Shah: Today's episode was produced and reported by Halima Shah and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Noel King: Laura Bullard and Serena Solon are our fact checkers, and Patrick Boyd is our engineer.
--:-- Halima Shah: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. Thank you.
