Today, Explained - How Palestine went global

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

People with no direct connection to the Middle East have taken to seeing the Palestinian cause as an anti-colonial struggle connected to their own experience. Columbia historian Rashid Khalidi explains why “decolonization” is resonating worldwide. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Serena Solin and Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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? 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. 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. Untoday explained why so much of the world seems to think the Palestinian struggle is also their struggle. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement,

and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. And I'm Halima Shah. 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. And Halima, I told you about this and you said.

I was like, are we about to talk about colonialism on this show? Yes, we are. And so you went into the field and where'd you go? 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. 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. 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. Okay, so again, people are talking about Palestine, but they're not Palestinians. What did these people tell you about why they were there? 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. And I think that the correlation to that is like how a lot of people use race here in Chicago in the United States to justify mistreatment of Mexicans. Okay, so you heard about racism. Did you also hear about the C word, colonization?

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. 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. the English Empire because it was so large and there's just deliberate creation of racial stratification systems and privileging one section of a population over another. Those are some of the main parallels I saw while all while describing the native population as savages backwards. 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. Okay, so the next step was to ask, what is the bigger framework for understanding this as a colonial scenario?

We called Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished Palestinian historian. And first we learned that he's seen the same dynamic we've been observing. 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's a similarity between what their people endured and what the Palestinians have gone through.

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. 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? 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. 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. And that in turn involved a separate 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. 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. 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.

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. 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, you know, the good and the great, 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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? How did the British want to partition the land between these two groups? 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. You can walk and chew gum at the same time, and the Zionist 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.

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. 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. And in modern international law, that just doesn't hold. Professor Rashid Khalidi. Coming up, the developing world enters the chat. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your expenses in real time. You can say goodbye to manual expense reports. You will never have to chase down a receipt again.

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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. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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 refused to do that. 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. 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. What do you think needs to happen for Palestinians and Israelis? Do Israelis need to leave? 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 is created a nation state or a nation or people, however you want to put it. 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. 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. 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's a question that, you know, it's not going to be easy to solve necessarily. 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. 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.

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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I have a lot of faith in those Black pastors, that they know what they're talking about, they know of which they speak. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 in the 1880s, long before he became foreign secretary and issued the Balfour Declaration. 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 states like Canada and Australia as the world. 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. 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 obvious differences and subtleties and so forth. 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 people in those countries are changing. Their political leadership is not,

but people, ordinary people, I think are beginning to change. And I take a great deal of encouragement from that. Rashid Khalidi, he's a professor at Columbia University and author of The 100 Years War on Palestine. Today's episode was produced and reported by Halima Shah and edited by Matthew Collette. Laura Bullard and Serena Solon are our fact checkers and Patrick Boyd is our engineer. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you