When Hamas emerged, the Israeli occupation authorities were divided at first, because Hamas produced its notorious antisemitic charter and launched operations against Israeli soldiers and settlers in Gaza, after the start of the Intifada in December 1987. There was a debate within Israeli intelligence and the military: do we really want to continue supporting these people or not? But at different times, they were, if not supported, at least allowed to operate, for divide-and-rule reasons, by the Israeli intelligence services that controlled the Gaza Strip. I just saw a wonderful film called Gaza Ghetto made by Joan Mandell in 1984 which talks about what the Gaza Strip was like under Israeli occupation up to that point. She lived in Palestine at the time. The Israeli occupation controlled everything, as it controls everything in the West Bank today. There were attempts at resistance, obviously, some of which were successful, others not. But over time, Hamas turned into a resistance movement, and then the Israelis were not so happy with it. But they went back to supporting it in the last few years, under Netanyahu, because they thought they could use Hamas to pacify the Gaza Strip, with cash coming from the Gulf countries, Qatar in particular.

But that turned out not to be the case.

It didn’t work out so well for them.

We now have the irony that the so-called secular-democratic plo is 100 per cent or 99.9 per cent collaborationist with the Israelis, that there is no Palestinian ‘Authority’, that effectively, the idf issues the orders and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority carries them out. While the Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist organization, Hamas, has become the leadership of what we have to call, and what is in fact, today’s Palestinian resistance.

The terrible irony is that what Arafat and his colleagues did in accepting the Oslo Accords, and in moving almost the entire national movement into an Israeli-controlled prison in the occupied territories, was, first of all, to hollow out the plo itself. Today the plo doesn’t really exist, except as a shell. That leadership now operates through this puppet quisling Palestinian Authority, which is a subcontractor for the occupation. It doesn’t have an independent existence. It has no authority, no jurisdiction and no sovereignty. It’s simply an arm of occupation, one of several. The Arafat–Abbas leadership thereby hollowed out what used to be the core of the national movement, which was the plo. There is no plo to speak of now. There is a Palestinian Authority, a bureaucracy which has governing power over the civil lives of Palestinians in part of the West Bank, though only a small part. The majority of the West Bank, so-called Area C, is controlled directly by the Israeli military. At most, the Palestinian Authority has a presence in 20–30 per cent of the West Bank, in terms of responsibility for public education, health and so on. But Israel is the sovereign power over the entirety of the occupied West Bank and occupied Arab East Jerusalem. It is the occupying power. It is the security power. It controls the population registry, entry and exit, everything to do with funding. It controls the pa security services. They do what the Israelis want. The Palestinian people want to be protected from the occupation and settlers, but the pa’s people serve as agents of the occupation. They serve the enemy. So, yes: this is a tragedy for the secular-democratic, non-Muslim-Brotherhood elements of the Palestinian national movement.

After Oslo, nlr described Fatah’s trajectory as a lurch from fantasy maximalism to ignominious minimalism, with no attempt to define and fight for an equitable solution in between. footnote8 There are still some in the plo who are resisting. Hanan Ashrawi has been stronger than the others, and I’m sure there must be others waiting for some alternative.

There are many people, including people involved in the plo/Fatah, and even some involved with the Palestinian Authority, though not many, who still have an independent position and who oppose the pa’s collaborationist nature. You can see very clearly from a series of public opinion polls how broadly despised Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is, how hated the pa is. This in spite of the fact that it provides the salaries for a huge proportion of the population of the occupied territories. There are tens of thousands of security personnel, tens of thousands of government employees, teachers, people in the healthcare sector, who are on the Palestinian Authority payroll and are entirely dependent on it for their livelihoods. In spite of that, the pa is loathed by overwhelming majorities of the population. That’s perfectly clear.

The interesting thing is that Hamas’s popularity has not always been as great as some people think, whether in Gaza, where they were growing increasingly unpopular before October 7, or even in the West Bank, where they are more popular simply because people have not been governed by them. But many of those under their rule in the Gaza Strip took a dim view of Hamas. It depends on the poll, who’s asking and whom they ask. Public sentiment is not static; it goes up and down, over time. But the question of the degree of Hamas’s popular support really should be asked much more carefully than it is. People assume that, because a lot of young people were swept away by enthusiasm after October 7, that is still the view of most people today, eight months later. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Hamas is seen as deserving credit for inflicting a military defeat on Israel, the likes of which it has never suffered. Israel took a beating on some battlefields in 1948 and it suffered a severe military setback at the beginning of the 1973 war, before the Americans came to its rescue. But since 1948, Israel has never had to fight for days on its own territory. It took them four days to retake the military bases and the numerous communities that were overrun by Hamas and its allies on October 7. This has not happened before. The highest Israeli civilian death toll since 1948 was inflicted by the attack of October 7. (Israeli propaganda claims ‘the highest since the Holocaust’, but that’s not true; 2,000 Israeli civilians and 4,000 troops died in 1948.) But Israel has never suffered an intelligence failure of this magnitude, even in 1973. So many people give Hamas credit for this, even though they may have reservations about them on other counts.

The Israelis knew what was going on in 1973. The Americans were telling them.

They knew, or they found out somewhat belatedly, but they didn’t react fast enough, out of arrogance or hubris. They had spies in Egypt. They had spies everywhere. They had people telling them, ‘Wait, wait, they’re just doing exercises.’ Even if 1973 was as big a shock, with Syria taking the Golan Heights, there were no Israeli civilian casualties. This needs to be said again and again about October 7: in addition to the atrocities, which definitely took place, the highest civilian death toll that Israel has ever suffered since 1948 occurred on those four days at the beginning of this attack. This is something Palestinians have to take on board, if they want to understand why Israel is so savage in its collective punishment of Gaza. It’s not just the military defeat and intelligence failure. It’s not just about restoring the tarnished honour and shattered ‘deterrence’ of the Army. It’s a visceral desire for revenge, retribution for the traumatic suffering of a large number of Israeli civilians. Not just those killed or captured: entire communities were emptied and still haven’t been repopulated, eight months later. This is fundamental if we want to understand what motivates the ferocity of Israeli behaviour. There is an underlying logic to it that goes back to the launching of the Zionist project. Every settler-colonial project must behave ferociously, to establish itself at the expense of the indigenous population. But what we have witnessed for the past eight months is on a scale never seen before, even in 1948.

We are fully aware that since October 7, at least 25 times as many Palestinians have been killed as Israelis, with a huge proportion of them civilians, women, children, the elderly, medical and aid workers, journalists, academics. The world is now fully conscious of the trauma this is producing. But some have not yet fully integrated the degree to which Israeli society has been affected by the impact of those first four days that it took the Israeli military to relieve the besieged headquarters of the Gaza Division, to retake the Erez crossing point, the multiple military bases that had been captured and a dozen communities along the Gaza frontier. It took them till October 10. The shock to Israel is going to last for a very long time, just as the trauma of what is being done to Gaza now will affect Palestinians everywhere for many years to come. Not just Gazans, or people like me and my friends and students who have family in Gaza, or know people there. Every Palestinian is affected by this trauma, and many others besides.

As we’ve discussed, none of the previous tragedies of Palestinian history had this impact on public opinion globally, certainly not in the United States. And yet, watching the encampments being set up on over a hundred American campuses is quite astonishing to me. I heard your fine speech to the protesting students at Columbia the other day. It’s as if October 7 has brought about a generational shift, as far as Israel and Palestine are concerned. A significant layer of young people, including thousands of young Jews, like the ones who occupied Grand Central Station in New York, want nothing to do with this monster entity which kills at will. People see what Israel is doing, and are saying, it’s too much, it’s unacceptable, it’s genocide. And this is really rattling the mainstream media and the politicians. Do you think this will last? And, linked to that, how would you explain why Washington has become so utterly craven? In Brokers of Deceit, you provide a sober but very sharp analysis of the us role in the Middle East, particularly under Clinton and Obama, showing that while Washington claims to be an impartial mediator, seeking to advance an evenly balanced ‘peace process’, in fact it is highly partial, acting as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ and its main backer. Nevertheless, when American interests were at stake, earlier administrations were prepared to crack the whip. Truman maintained an arms embargo against all belligerents in 1948; after Suez, Eisenhower told Ben-Gurion to get out of Gaza and the Sinai within two weeks or face sanctions; in August 1982, Reagan yelled at Begin to stop bombing Beirut; Bush Senior threatened to withhold $50 billion to get Israel to the negotiating table. The current layer, Democrats and Republicans alike, show absolutely no willingness to put on any pressure at all. Biden—‘Genocide Joe’ as the students have dubbed him— is the worst of the lot. Trump will be no better. Secretary of State Blinken dances like a tame monkey to all Netanyahu’s tunes. Has the monkey become the organ-grinder? Why and how has it gone so far?

It’s actually a hard question to answer. We beat out our brains, trying to understand the degree to which they have become worse than complicit. They’ve become mouthpieces for every trashy piece of Zionist propaganda. The President and his appalling spokespeople, Admiral Kirby and the awful Matthew Miller, sound like Netanyahu’s press attachés—like the worst Israeli propagandists, nakedly espousing an Israeli narrative on point after point. Today they admitted that the us is helping the Israelis try to hunt down and kill the Hamas leadership, that it provided intelligence for the hostage rescue that killed nearly 300 Palestinians. The raf has flown almost daily surveillance missions over the Gaza Strip. America and Britain, its bloodshot adjutant, are participating directly in the slaughter, not just supplying weapons, money and un vetoes, but doing the intelligence and propaganda work for this genocide. You used the word ‘craven’. This is worse than that. There are words in Arabic for it that I can’t translate. The degree to which this Administration has inhabited an Israeli perspective, from Biden through Blinken to Sullivan on down, marks it out.

It’s true that in a couple of top leadership positions, there are people who will not and do not repeat that rhetoric. The Secretary of Defense, Austin, and Burns, the head of the cia, have not; nor have others, who know better. But they don’t have any purchase within the Administration on this question. I would guess that most career professionals who serve in the State Department, in the military, and in the so-called intelligence community—I love that term, intelligence ‘community’—know perfectly well that what Israel is doing is both futile and harmful to American interests; indeed, how harmful it is to any rational understanding of Israel’s interests. But they have no voice in Biden’s Administration.

Part of this has to do with the generational divide that you mentioned. The us is ruled today by an aged clique, a gerontocracy, that was indoctrinated in the 1960s and 70s with the myth of the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. Schumer, Pelosi, Biden, Trump; these are old people. Their consciousness was formed at the time of the 1967 war. And since then, they have never opened their minds, they have never had access to anything but a poisonous narrative that paints Israel in the most gleaming colours and the Palestinians in the darkest ones—the idea that Israel is always in existential danger, the Cossacks are always at the door; that the Holocaust could be repeated, that Israel represents a flower of Western civilization in a desert of Arab barbarism—a bunch of racist tropes that Israel, and the Zionist movement before it, successfully sowed throughout the West. Biden has not expressed the slightest sympathy for the 14,000 Palestinian children who have been killed by us bombs. He has no feeling of shame, no sense of the dimensions of the horrific genocide that he and his Administration are helping to perpetrate. And the people around him mirror that, obviously. They’re insulated.

How long can this continue? I don’t know. I see no sign of it stopping. They have now dimly begun to deduce that Israel is harming its and their interests, and they’re trying to slow them down. But they have no purchase with the Israelis so far. And if I were Netanyahu and my political survival depended on the continuation of the war, the Americans’ feebly bleating and threatening to delay an arms shipment or two would be no reason to stop it. He’ll go on for as long as he wants, correctly assessing that the Americans are more bark than bite, and that any bite would be a toothless nip. The us could say, we’ll stop all arms shipments, unless Israel accepts the ceasefire plan that the cia chief, Burns, has drafted for them. It could sponsor a Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire under specific provisions of the Charter, which would force Israel to stop tomorrow. They won’t do that. To go back to what you said: this was something that Reagan himself was willing to do, in August 1982. The Israelis only stopped bombing Beirut because Reagan yelled at Begin, and half an hour later they called it off. We were sitting there in Beirut, under Israeli bombardment, and suddenly it stopped, essentially because of a phone call from the us president to the Israeli prime minister. Biden hasn’t done that.

Mearsheimer and Walt were vilified for their book on the Israel lobby, called antisemites and so forth. footnote9 But the case they put for how American foreign policy is run on that level seems pretty strong today.

The amusing thing is that, in spite of all the vilification and the slanders, The Israel Lobby and us Foreign Policy fast became a bestseller, and it is still selling very well. I know the authors, they’re both friends of mine; I believe that with the latest war there has been a bump in sales, a decade and a half after it was published. I think it was a sound analysis. I don’t think it was comprehensive enough because it only talked about the lobby groups on Capitol Hill, as well as the Christian Zionists and the neocons, and the lobby’s vigilantes in the media and academia, whereas there’s a whole ecosystem that has extended to important elements of the American military, tech and biomedical sectors, which are closely integrated with their Israeli equivalents. Enormously important parts of the us economy are linked to these sectors in Israel and these are powerful forces in American society. They own Congress, in the sense that their contributions keep elected politicians in office—Silicon Valley, biotech, finance, the military sector in particular. The imbrication of the us security-military-industrial complex with that of Israel is seamless, as is the imbrication of Israel’s defence and intelligence networks with those in India, the Emirates and a few other places. I don’t think this is fully accounted for in The Israel Lobby, partly because some of this has emerged subsequent to publication of their book.

Let’s come to the subject of the present Arab elites, who are carrying on even more blatantly than they did after the Nakba. Prior to October 7, the Saudis were on the verge of recognizing Israel.

They still are.

They still are. And the Gulf States remain imperial petrol stations, with enormous amounts of money. Jordan has been a us -Israeli protectorate for a very long time. The Egyptian masses were brutally defeated by the army. I did think there might be more protests in the Arab world—and the only thing that could change the mood there would be mass uprisings. But apart from Yemen, not too much. There have been pro-Gaza demonstrations, but so far not on the scale of the anger displayed in Britain and the us .

I think there are at least two things to say here. The first thing is that there is, and has always been, a deep sympathy with Palestine among the Arab peoples, throughout the Arab world, from the Gulf to the Atlantic. This hasn’t changed. It’s gone up and down a little bit, but it hasn’t gone away. But these people are facing other critical issues. If you live in a state that’s been destroyed—like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon—by civil war or intervention by the imperial powers and their clients, you have other concerns. Iraq still doesn’t have 24-hour electricity, 21 years after the American occupation—one of the greatest oil producers in the world. Palestine is important, but electricity and not being killed by the regime—or by this or that army faction—is also important. This is the situation in half a dozen Arab countries: different stages of civil war-cum-proxy war, with all the great powers involved.

The second thing is that, almost without exception, from the Gulf to the Atlantic, you don’t have regimes that allow public opinion to express itself. There are jackboot dictatorships, a pouvoir in Algeria, the most absolutist monarchies since Louis XIV, which allow virtually no dissent beyond a tiny space, and if you go beyond it, you will be tasered and tortured, you will be arrested and your family will suffer. So, you’re right, no protests in the Arab world have risen to the level of what we’ve seen in London and New York, or in some parts of the Global South, Indonesia and Pakistan. That’s partly because the Arab masses have been cowed by the cattle prods and tortures inflicted on them since the so-called Arab Spring. They were brought back to order by America’s clients, in particular the Saudis and the Emiratis, with vast infusions of cash and support for the most hardline security measures. One can’t entirely blame the people for not being willing to raise their heads above a certain point over this issue.

In some places, however, the situation is critical—in Jordan, for example, and in a few other countries, under the surface. But I don’t see this leading to the democratic transitions which would be necessary for these countries to play an active, positive role. Their rulers are more concerned about what Washington and Tel Aviv may say than about their people. They don’t represent their people’s views in any shape or form. They’re tied to Israel by so many visible and invisible ties. The anti-missile defences of the Emirates were provided by the Israeli subsidiary of Raytheon, which means that Israel’s anti-missile surveillance against Iran is in Jabal Ali, in Abu Dhabi, not Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon), in the occupied Golan Heights. The uae depends entirely on Israel for its security against missile attack. There are variations of that arrangement in Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries. In Morocco, the royal bodyguards have been trained by Mossad for the past fifty or sixty years, since the time of King Hassan II. The Israeli defence connection is generations-old in the case of Jordan, Morocco and Egypt, and is well established in several of the Gulf countries and a couple of others, too.

There was some hope expressed early on that Hezbollah, with the backing, quietly or publicly, of the Iranian regime, might open up a second front and relieve the pressure on Hamas. But this didn’t happen.

I think Hamas was wrong to expect it. They probably expected far more sustained responses from other Palestinians in the occupied territories and hoped that Hezbollah, as well as other Iran-allied militias and perhaps Iran itself, would be much more vigorous in reacting to Israel’s counter-response to October 7. It’s a perfect example of how little they understand of the world. For all their acumen in other respects, the leaders who organized this assault have what I would call tunnel vision. I think they really believed that there would be an uprising throughout the Arab world. I don’t have a lot of evidence for that assertion, but they were certainly disappointed by the reaction. And Hezbollah’s response has been what I would call ‘performative’. It’s had a significant effect on Israel: it’s killed at least fifteen Israeli soldiers and eleven Israeli civilians, according to Israeli sources, and it’s led to the evacuation of the entire border region—tens of thousands have been forced to leave their homes.

But while it may still explode into a full-scale war, so far it’s been tit for tat, very measured and controlled. This is a function of what anybody with eyes to see could have told the boys in the tunnels, which is that Iran did not invest in building up Hezbollah’s capabilities for the sake of Hamas. It did so in order to create a deterrent to protect Iran against Israel; that’s the only reason. The idea that Hezbollah and the Iranians would shoot every arrow in their quivers to support Hamas, in a war it started without warning its allies—it beggars belief that anybody could think that that would be the case. Iran is a nation state that has national interests, which are restricted to regime preservation, self-defence and raison d’état. You can talk about Islam, ideology and the ‘axis of resistance’ until you’re blue in the face. I will tell you: raison d’état, regime protection—that’s what they care about, and that’s why they backed the build-up of Hezbollah’s capacity. And they’re not going to shoot that bolt. There was no possibility under any circumstances of their doing that to support Hamas. If, heaven forbid, a full-scale war erupts, it will be because of a miscalculation, or an accident, or an irrational move by Netanyahu, not a decision by Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese party. It has an Iranian patron, but it is acutely attuned to the fact that the Lebanese public will turn against it if its operations against Israel provoke a massive retaliation against Lebanon—which would not be directed just against Hezbollah but also, as in the 2006 war, against Lebanon’s infrastructure. The Israelis have always punished the host country in order to force it to force the resistance to stop doing whatever it was doing. They bombed Jordan, they bombed Syria, in order to force those regimes to stop the Palestinians. They weren’t trying to stop the Palestinians themselves, but to stop whichever Arab country it was from hosting and supporting the Palestinians. They would do that to Lebanon, to force it to stop Hezbollah. And Hezbollah knows that, and the Lebanese know it, too. I don’t understand how the leaders of Hamas didn’t understand that. It shows a detachment from reality and a flawed strategic sense which is really quite disturbing. Since October 7 they have dramatically upended the stagnant status quo in Palestine, and have shown themselves highly adept at waging guerrilla warfare—at an unspeakable price, let it be said. But ultimately, war is an extension of politics by other means, and they have not projected a clear, strategic, unified Palestinian political vision to the world. I don’t think people are saying these kinds of things, hard as they are to say. But they should be. They should be.

I agree with you entirely. Turning to the future, what is the Israeli plan for Gaza? Are they trying to create another Nakba, i.e., destroy the strip, sell it off to their own people and turn more Palestinians into refugees? That is what seems to be the case. Or will someone intervene to stop this from happening? The Americans certainly won’t, that’s become very clear.

Unlike at other critical moments in its history, Israel doesn’t have a unified elite and there is no clear-cut position on these issues today. In 1948, Ben-Gurion dominated Israeli politics; even in 1956, he prevailed over Sharett and he did what he wanted in launching the Suez war. Episode by episode, whether they did well or did badly, they at least knew what they wanted to do. There was a cohesive, unified sense of Israel’s interests, even after the 1967 war, when they couldn’t quite decide—should we keep it all?—they had a cohesive leadership. The military and political leaderships operated in sync throughout most of Israel’s history. That’s not the case today. I don’t think there is a clear Israeli vision of what to do. Netanyahu has very little idea of what he wants strategically. What he wants personally is a continuation of the war with no clear end strategy. That serves his narrow political interest: staying in power, not having an election and not going on trial.

Other factions within his government have different views. The military and intelligence establishment is not cohesive. Just recently a former Chief of Staff came out and said the war has to end. You’ve never had former Chiefs of Staff saying this in wartime; Aviv Kohavi just said it. Other former generals and intelligence chiefs have said similar things. The Israeli elite is divided, with good reason, over how to end the war, over what to do in Gaza on the day after, if it ever comes. At the beginning, it was clear that they hoped they could complete the Nakba and expel large numbers of people—into Egypt, and possibly also from the West Bank into Jordan. And they sent their errand boy, Blinken, to do their dirty work for them—going to the Egyptians, to the Jordanians and to the Saudis and begging them, please, could you allow this to happen? The participation of the American government in an Israeli plan to further ethnically cleanse Palestine is one of the most despicable episodes in American history. It will be a mark of shame on Blinken and Biden for the rest of time. In 1948, Washington didn’t want ethnic cleansing, though Truman allowed it to happen and did nothing to uphold the un Partition resolution he had twisted so many arms to get. This is different and much worse. This is Washington actively supporting Israel in genocide and actively trying to broker its ethnic cleansing of a part of Palestine.

But if the Israeli leadership had a clear view of what they wanted at the beginning—devastate Gaza and complete the Nakba—I don’t think they have a clear view now. What seems likely to ensue is some form of Israeli occupation, which is an outcome that nobody, including the Israelis themselves, should desire. I wouldn’t want to occupy Gaza if I were them. Their last occupation, up to 2005, wasn’t so successful. Think what they had to cope with then, from the Hamas of the early 2000s and other groups with capabilities a fraction of what they are today. I don’t think there are any good options, frankly, from an Israeli perspective. I don’t think there’s been a clear leadership decision on this. That may be wrong, but that’s my impression from the outside, reading the Israeli press. In spite of their overwhelming power, they have put themselves in a hopeless strategic situation.

A terrible historical irony. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher gave an interview to nlr.footnote10 He had broken with Israel decisively and sent a message to Ben-Gurion, whom he knew, warning of disaster if the occupation was not ended. He described Israelis as the Prussians of the Middle East—a succession of victories breeding blind reliance on their own force of arms, chauvinistic arrogance and contempt for other peoples—and recalled the lesson Germans drew from their experience: ‘Man kann sich totseigen!’ You can triumph yourself to death.

Well, Ben-Gurion learned that. He was worried after the 1967 War that Israel would wallow in triumphalism and fail to take the opportunity the war offered to obtain a settlement favourable to Israel and Zionism. He was, of course, right. The sad thing about so many of these leaders is they learn too late. So you have Ehud Olmert talking about things that he never talked about when he was Prime Minister, or Ben-Gurion saying things in his dotage that he never said before, or former Israeli generals or heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, full of wisdom after they’ve retired. I had a wonderful encounter with Yehoshafat Harkabi, chief of Israeli military intelligence in the 1950s, who wrote two seminal books that were blueprints for the demonization of the plo. He served not just as chief of military intelligence, he was the lead propagandist in the West for a negative vision of the plo. When I met him in his old age, the man had shifted completely and had written a series of books criticizing Israel. It often happens too late with these people. The same with Jimmy Carter. Why didn’t you say this when you were President?

Exactly.

The best ex-president the United States ever had. But I’d like to finish answering your first question, what has changed and what has not. I grew up in a world, as I said, in which the Zionist narrative was the only game in town and was believed blindly by almost everybody. That’s not the case today, as we’ve been discussing. There’s a vigorous contestation of the Zionist narrative, within the Jewish community in particular, with an interesting generational divide. That’s entirely new—and very important.

What has not changed, and what our grandchildren still have to contend with, is the unwavering support of the rulers of the imperial powers for the Zionist project. Especially the United States and Britain, from World War One onwards, and France and Germany after World War Two. That is in many ways the biggest problem, to my way of thinking. If you accept the settler-colonial framework of analysis, then the metropole is as important as the settler colony. Israel is not a typical settler colony, by any means; it’s also a national project, with a significant Biblical dimension, and a refuge from persecution. No other settler colony was a refuge from persecution to such a degree—the Puritans and other religious dissidents, like the Quakers, who came to North America, certainly experienced repression, but not on the same scale. Basically, this combination of characteristics is unique to the Israeli project. But the core of it, the settler-colonial core of it, relates to a metropole. And the elites in that metropole, unfortunately, have barely changed from the time when I was a child. The new generations are going to have to deal with this.

A number of Israeli scholars and archaeologists, including Israel Finkelstein, have shown that the heroic stories of the Old Testament account—the exodus, the royal lineage of the Book of Kings—were largely an ‘invented tradition’, borrowings that were constructed as a court ideology in a later period. The Hebrew editions of Shlomo Sand’s books, The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel, have been bestsellers in Israel. But this has had negligible impact on the hold of the national ideology over the majority of the population.

On nationalism, Gellner, Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson were right: it doesn’t matter what the historical realities were, it’s what people believe that counts. Finkelstein and other excellent Israeli archaeologists have blown to pieces much of the Biblical foundation of Zionism, to very little political effect. I think we have to look at the power of those Biblical myths, irrespective of their baselessness from a historical and archaeological perspective—their resonance over generations, over centuries, and not only among Jews. It’s equally important that they have resonated among Christians. British Protestants are ultimately responsible for the Balfour Declaration, rooted in their belief in these same myths. Lord Shaftesbury was a Zionist in the 1830s, before the first Jewish Zionists, for religious reasons.

But Israeli barbarism, as we’re seeing it, is beginning to dent some of these myths, is it not?

There may be a reckoning. This Christian Zionism is primarily a Protestant phenomenon; it’s much less prevalent among Catholic populations. That reading of the Bible—the ‘gathering of Israel’ as a precursor to the Second Coming and the Last Judgement, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine—is essentially a Protestant reading. And in many of the more liberal Protestant denominations in the us, there is a growing understanding of the danger of that reading and how false it is in terms of Christian values. You see a parallel shift among Jews, who say that this has nothing to do with the Jewish tradition we want to uphold. We don’t want to destroy people as the Israelites destroyed Amalek. We don’t believe in the version of Judaism that animates many of the settlers and the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum—which stretches from the far right to the centre left, by the way. They believe this stuff, about destroying the Amalekites as enemies of Israel. Netanyahu has cynically embraced that exterminationist logic, in a literalist reading of the Book of Saul—‘Remember what Amalek has done to you.’ A majority of the Knesset, 64 members, are backing a government headed by a man who has said this again and again. Yet that’s not what a large proportion of the Jewish community in the us believe.

Now, lastly, to your own university, Columbia.

It will cease to be my own university when I retire at the end of June.

But you will still be associated in some way.

I’ll just be a former faculty member, teaching some courses as a non-member of the faculty—or as ‘contingent’ faculty, as we have come to call them.

Might they do away with the ‘terrorist’ name altogether, the Edward Said professorship?

I have no idea what will happen with that. There are donors and descendants of donors who will, I assume, insist that there continue to be a chair and that someone qualified should hold it. I have no idea. The campaign in the United States against Middle East Studies in general, and studies on Palestine in particular, is virulent and spans the political spectrum. And we now have the New York City Police Department joining unprincipled politicians in the hue and cry shamefully echoed by university administrators, about outside agitators and incitement by faculty members, including myself. So I don’t know what will happen. When people ask me these kinds of questions, I say that the job description of a historian does not include predicting the future.

You dedicated your last book to your grandchildren, which we oldies tend to do.

[Laughter]

Let the record show both of us laughing heartily.

You expressed the hope that they would see a better world. What is the biggest difference between the world you grew up in and the world they’re growing up in?

I grew up in a world where there was no Palestinian voice—in the Arab world, in the public sphere in the West; none at all, it didn’t exist. Palestinians didn’t exist. My four grandchildren are growing up in a time when there are quite vigorous voices for Palestine, all over the world. So that’s an element of change for the better. I grew up in a world in which the Zionist narrative was completely hegemonic and Israel was fulsomely described as ‘a light unto the nations’. That is no longer the case. Today it is widely, and rightly, seen as a pariah state because of its own genocidal actions. These are among the few good things that have happened in these very bad times.
1 Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine: Background Details and Analysis, New York 2023 [1972].
2 Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, p. 60.
3 Nasser’s ‘Memoirs of the First Palestine War’, translated into English by Walid Khalidi for the Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1973, is a riveting account of the chaos and deliberate lack of plan by the corrupted High Command in Cairo.
4 Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables’ in William Polk and Richard Chambers, eds, Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, Chicago 1968, pp. 41–68.
5 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a revolutionary socialist organization formed by George Habash and others after the 1967 War.
6 Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, Princeton 2018.
7 Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence, New York 2000.
8 Perry Anderson, ‘The House of Zion’, nlr 96, Nov–Dec 2015.
9 John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and us Foreign Policy, New York 2007; the book expands on the arguments presented in ‘The Israel Lobby’, London Review of Books, 23 March 2006.
10 Isaac Deutscher, ‘On the Israeli–Arab War’, nlr i/44, Jul–Aug 1967, pp. 38–9.