Khalidi, who recently retired from Columbia University after more than two decades, got an extra 15 minutes of fame this week aftter President Joe Biden was photographed buying a copy of his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. In fact, he’s been having something of an extended moment since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel — which he condemned — and throughout the ensuing, endless war in Gaza.
The subject of an October profile in The Guardian and a lengthy Haaretz interview just published in English, Khalidi has given scores, if not hundreds, of talks over the last 14 months of devastating violence. Yet Sperber’s salon was his first for a Jewish audience not just since Oct. 7 but in 15 or 20 years.
“I used to be invited to synagogues, I used to speak at the Hillel at University of Chicago when it was run by Rabbi Danny Leifer,” Khalidi recalled, a little wistfully. (He spent eight years at U. Chicago before moving to Columbia in 2003.)
“This is before Hillel became centralized and turned into a place where people who didn’t accept certain views weren’t welcome,” he added. “I can’t cross the threshold of a Hillel now.”
I know that quote is going to make some readers shut down. You support Hillel, your kids go to Hillel and you don’t think it’s closed-minded — or maybe you think it’s not a space where Palestinian perspectives belong. I thought about cutting the “certain views” line, to keep you reading this newsletter, to prevent you from dismissing Khalidi.
But this story, like Sperber’s makeshift group, is about breaking out of the bubbles too many of us live inside, particularly regarding Israel. It’s about the urgent need for all of us to wrestle with other people’s perspectives and narratives even about the things closest to our hearts, even when it’s upsetting. So go ahead and think Khalidi is wrong about Hillel — and The New York Times and maybe the whole conflict — but also, please, swallow hard and stick with me to hear him out.
“Israel is on a course that is, in my view, suicidal,” Khalidi told the 60-some folks crowded into the living room that night. “There are two peoples there. The Palestinians are not going to be eliminated.”
And: “Anybody who wants to talk about a two-state solution has to talk about dismantling the obstacles to it erected over the last 57 years.” He mentioned that 10% of Israeli voters live in settlements in the occupied West Bank. And the United States, despite condemning such settlements as obstacles to peace, nonetheless allows tax-deductible donations to groups that support them.
“Every single act of colonization has produced resistance.”
(I know: You may find the word “colonization” regarding Israel to be ahistorical and offensive, because Jews are also indigenous in the Holy Land, and because the pioneers who built the modern state were largely refugees from either the Holocaust or from Arab countries that expelled Jews after its founding. Let it go. Hear the rest.)
“You cannot have a system where one person’s property is sacred and another’s can be taken, based on nationality,” Khalidi said of Israel’s rules regarding land ownership.
“They are creating another generation that will fight them,” he continued, referring to the death, destruction and displacement in Gaza.
“It took years to stop the Vietnam War — years and years and years,” he cautioned. “This will be much harder.”
