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Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Rashid Khalidi: “Israel Is Acting With Full US Approval”

After 12 months, there’s no end in sight to Israel’s relentless onslaught against Gaza, now extended to Lebanon. Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how Israel and the US are working together to destroy all constraints on violence against civilians.
October 14, 2024
Source: Jacobin


Image by Edi Israel, Creative Commons 2.0

Israel’s onslaught against Gaza has now continued for more than a year; it shows no sign of ending, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has now expanded the war into Lebanon, resulting in more carnage. At time of writing, we are still waiting to see whether and in what way Israel will strike Iran, as it has promised to do.

Rashid Khalidi is one of the leading historians of modern Palestine. He spoke to Jacobin about the implications of the slaughter in Gaza for the world, and about his perspective on the US university system as he retires from his position teaching at Columbia. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

Daniel Finn

We spoke last October, during the opening weeks of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, and I think many people would have found it difficult to believe that twelve months later, we would be looking at this onslaught continuing at such a level of intensity, now also extending to the West Bank and Lebanon. Could you give us a sense, from a historian’s perspective, of how the death and destruction of the last year stands out, in particular when compared with the experience of the Nakba in the 1940s?

Rashid Khalidi

I couldn’t have imagined back in October of last year that we would be where we are a year later. It would have been inconceivable, I think, to most people. In terms of how it compares to the Nakba, in some ways it’s obviously not yet quite as extensive, while on another level, it’s infinitely more intensive.

What has been done to Gaza is far worse than what was done to any part of Palestine in 1948, and what is being done to Lebanon is far worse than what was done to Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. This is a war of extermination — it’s a genocide. I was reading a play by Marina Carr talking about the razing of Troy after the Trojan War. Quoting Hecuba, she says, “This is not war — in war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out.”

I think that’s what we’re seeing the United States and Israel do in Gaza and what has now been extended to Lebanon — the degree of suffering being inflicted; enormous civilian casualties purposely being caused. I think there is a threat to the entire international legal order if this is allowed to continue, as it has been by the United States.

If the United States continues doing this together with Israel, the barriers created since World War II against these kinds of atrocities will have been destroyed, and we will be in a situation where anyone can do anything. The targeting of civilians, the number of children going into hospitals with headshots from snipers, the destruction of water purification plants and sewage treatment plants — those kind of actions are designed to kill and to starve on a massive scale.

This is a new level insofar as what Israel has done to Palestine and to the region is concerned. Benjamin Netanyahu said this week, “We will do to Lebanon what we did to Gaza,” and they’re doing it. This is not just a threat — actions are being taken in Lebanon which will be expanded.

In some ways, obviously it is not yet as extensive as the Nakba. So far, it has only affected the Gaza Strip, where 2.2 million Palestinians live, and the West Bank to a lesser extent. But it’s expanding in its scope and now also reaching Lebanon, with over a million people made refugees.

Those numbers are actually far higher than the Nakba, when three-quarters of a million were driven from their homes. Between the two million people Israel has made homeless in Gaza and the one million people who have had to leave their homes in Lebanon, this is many times greater in sheer numbers than what was done during the Nakba.

Of course, that was permanent — most of those people never returned. We don’t yet know what’s going to happen here, obviously.

Daniel Finn

How does the record of the Biden administration over the last twelve months compare with previous US administrations, such as the Reagan administration and its response to the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, or George W. Bush and his response to the Second Intifada in the opening decade of this century? What do you think have been the main factors conditioning or determining Joe Biden’s support for Israel, from his own personal ideological worldview to questions of domestic political interests and blocs to the geopolitical interests of the United States?

Rashid Khalidi

The first thing we have to do is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the United States has any reservations about what Israel is doing. Israel is doing what it is doing in careful and close coordination with Washington, and with its full approval. The United States does not just arm and diplomatically protect what Israel does; it shares Israel’s goals and approves of Israel’s methods.

The tut-tutting, the pooh-poohing, and the crocodile tears about humanitarian issues and civilian casualties are pure hypocrisy. The United States has signed on to Israel’s approach to Lebanon — it wants Israel to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. It does not have any reservations about the basic approach of Israel, which is to attack the civilian population in order to force change in Lebanon and obviously in Gaza.

It is a category mistake to assume that there are any reservations on the part of American policymakers, whether we are talking about Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, or Samantha Power — all down the line. It is wrong to imagine that there are any reservations about the shared Israeli-American objectives.

We are living in a world of illusion if we believe anything that these people say. They have signed on to the slaughter of civilians in order to force changes, which include the elimination of Hamas from the Palestinian political map and the elimination of Hezbollah from the Lebanese political map. Those are shared objectives being carried out together in coordination.

The United States helps Israel in targeting Hezbollah and Hamas leaders — that is a fact. Anybody who ignores that and pretends that there’s any daylight between what Israel does and what the United States wants it to do is lying to themselves or is lying to us.

The second thing we have to recognize is that this is of a piece with previous American policies. In a book that I wrote a few years ago, I pointed out that the 1967 war was a joint endeavor. Washington agreed with what Israel was doing and gave its approval. The United States didn’t arm Israel on that occasion, but it did protect Israel at the United Nations Security Council and elsewhere during and after that war.

The same was true in 1982: the United States approved of what Israel was planning to do. Ariel Sharon came to Washington and met with Alexander Haig. Haig gave Sharon a green light as he told him, “We’re going to do this to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization); we’re going to do this to Syria; we’re going to do this to Lebanon.”

At a certain point, the United States reined in Israel because those objectives had been achieved. The Syrian army had been defeated in Lebanon, a puppet government was about to be installed, and the PLO had agreed to withdraw from Lebanon. Israel had achieved the objectives on which the two parties agreed — it was now simply bombarding Lebanon out of sheer sadism, and Ronald Reagan stopped it.

Those shared objectives of the two powers have not yet been achieved in Lebanon and Gaza, so the United States has not reined in (and in my view will not rein in) Israel. On the contrary, the United States is a party to this war. It is fighting in Lebanon, even if American troops are not directly engaged in combat. It’s an illusion to assume otherwise.

What is the motivation for Joe Biden’s blind loyalty to anything Israel says, does, and wants? Part of this has to do with the generation he comes from. Part of it has to do with the fact that he’s the largest recipient in US history of money from AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Part of it has to do with the fact that they have proselytized him ceaselessly since Golda Meir brainwashed him back in the 1970s.

Part of it has to do with a strategic calculation in relation to Iran and what are described as Iranian proxies. There is a vision of the Middle East — a skewed, distorted, perverted vision — that is shared by the United States and Israel, with an absolute devotion to force as the means to resolve issues. Every time a diplomatic solution has come up, Netanyahu has escalated to make that impossible. He has done so again and again and again, killing the people he was negotiating with in Lebanon or from Hamas, attacking the Iranian embassy in Damascus, and so forth.

The United States has been a party to this. It has approved of this approach and provided the weapons for it. There is a lengthy piece in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute about the American weapons that were used in the killing of Hassan Nasrallah. Those weapons could not have been used without American approval and without the lying American cover that this is an act of self-defense.

Biden is a particularly dedicated supporter of Israel, but he doesn’t differ from most of the US political elite. In that regard, he is quite isolated in terms of American public opinion. Most Americans don’t approve of US arms shipments to Israel, including large numbers of Republicans. Most Americans are in favor of the US stopping those arms shipments, and most Americans have an unfavorable view of Biden’s policies and of Netanyahu.

But all that and five cents won’t get you a cup of coffee in Washington. They do exactly as they please, whatever public opinion says — they don’t care. Biden is at the extreme end of a spectrum, all of which holds matters like public opinion, international humanitarian law, and the standing of the United States with the rest of the world in total contempt.

Daniel Finn

Even if the US political elite has shown itself not to be responsive to public opinion on questions regarding Israel, do you think there has been a significant shift over the last year in the way the American population as a whole perceives Israel and the US alliance with it? Are there likely to be consequences from that over the long run? What is the significance of the countermobilization that we’ve seen by pro-Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC — notably the effort that was put into taking out certain members of Congress who had been vocal in calling for a cease-fire?

Rashid Khalidi

There’s no question that public opinion has changed. Of the majorities that I have mentioned, possibly the only one that was in existence before the war started on October 7 might have been public disapproval of Netanyahu. There was no massive disapproval of Israel: indeed, at the beginning of the war, there was support for Israel’s war in public opinion.

But there has been an underlying shift in attitudes toward Israel driven by the entirely different view on the part of people under thirty or under thirty-five, in contrast with the view of their elders. That has been magnified by the barbaric atrocities that Israel is committing with American weapons and support. Those atrocities have further alienated people who might have had slightly critical views before but have now swung into much more vigorous opposition to US and Israeli policies.

I do think that there has been a major, consequential shift in public opinion; I don’t think there are likely to be consequences on the political level in the short term. Whoever’s elected in November and whatever government we have for the next several years in this country is likely to be as committed as previous ones were to unswerving support of Israel’s basic objectives, even if there are occasionally tactical differences.

That’s because the American elite hasn’t changed one bit. The people who own the politicians — the donor class, the people without whose millions and billions they would not be able to stay in office — haven’t changed. The same people own the big corporations, the media, the foundations, and the universities — who pays the piper, calls the tune. They tell the politicians what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

They own all of these things the way someone owns their home or a private business, and they haven’t changed one bit. There has been no shift among the political, media, corporate, and cultural elites, so I expect no change and no consequences in the short term. There is going to be a growing gap between elite opinion and grassroots opinion, but that has been the case in the past.

The Iraq War was fought by an elite that had lost the support of the public within a year of the war. The Vietnam War was fought for years and years after public opinion had shifted against it. It’s not unusual in American history for undemocratic leaders to act in opposition to the views of their constituents for years and years, and that will continue, I’m afraid.

As far as their counteroffensive is concerned and whether that will affect public opinion, I don’t think it will. I think it is actually going to exacerbate the gap between the people and their rulers. The repressive measures and the weaponization of antisemitism to shut down any discourse on Palestine, the attempt to use legal means to penalize universities if they don’t do the bidding of these two-bit politicians — all of that is going to escalate and it’s going to result in broader opposition and resistance among the general public to this approach on the part of the elites.

Daniel Finn

There’s another sense in which a yawning gap has opened up over the last year concerning the whole discourse of human rights, international law, and a world order based on principles that are something more than cynical, state-centered realpolitik. That discourse has been used by the US political class and its allies to legitimate their actions and their role in the world, particularly over the last twenty-five years. Over the last twelve months, we’ve seen important legal moves against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and we’ve seen the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. What do you think is the significance of those moves and the fact that the United States and its allies have so openly disregarded them?

Rashid Khalidi

The United States has taken a sledgehammer to any idea of a rules-based international order. It has taken a sledgehammer to international humanitarian law, and to the rules of war. If you can kill hundreds of civilians to take out one leader, then the whole idea of international humanitarian law and the laws of war based on proportionality and discrimination goes right out the window.

That happened eleven months ago in Gaza when entire apartment blocks were turned into a vast, steaming crater in order to kill one person. We don’t know the exact number of those killed because the victims were vaporized. In many cases, this has been done with American weapons. It could not continue without those weapons and without American approval.

The United States has supplied two-thousand-pound bombs with guidance systems to Israel in their thousands. They have used these weapons to completely demolish any idea of a rules-based international order. If there’s no proportionality and no discrimination in the use of force, you can slaughter any number of people and claim that they were human shields for some monstrous, evil person who we had to kill. There are no limits.

That is one of the tragic, lasting effects of this war. It has nothing to do with Palestine or Israel or Lebanon or the Middle East in terms of its future importance. This is the template that every state will now be able to use in waging war on its enemies. All limits have now been removed. We’ve gone back to where things stood before World War II.

During World War II, things were done that led to the creation of the Genocide Convention and various aspects of international law that one would have hoped would last. They have now been demolished. We’ve gone back to permission for genocide and for the slaughter of untold numbers of civilians, if you can use as a pretext the claim that the target was individual X or individual Y.

On the one hand, you’re going to have people who will try to maintain or restore an international legal order — what the Americans keep calling a rules-based international order — while on the other hand, you have the greatest power on Earth and its client state busy demolishing that order and establishing the actual parameters in which they and others will be allowed to operate.

Daniel Finn

As we’re speaking, twelve months from the beginning of the Israeli offensive against Gaza, the situation appears to be chaotic and unpredictable, with the potential to escalate to a full-blown regional war that could manifest itself in several different ways. What do you think is likely to happen as a result of what we’ve seen over the past few weeks alone?

Rashid Khalidi

I can’t predict the future, and I won’t attempt to do so. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can tell you what the trends are right now. If they’re not reversed, they will bring us more of what we’ve already seen.

What started in Gaza is now extending to the West Bank on a more limited but expanding scale. It is now being implemented in full force in Lebanon, and one fears it may be extended to Iran if the Netanyahu government and its many allies, friends, and shills in the American elite have their way.

What has evolved has been a willingness to engage in mass slaughter and extensive war crimes as collective punishment of an entire population in order to force certain changes. That’s what the United States and Israel are doing in Gaza. The latest episode involves trying to move half a million people out of the northern part of Gaza and slaughtering as many of them as necessary as incitement for them to move, while continuing to kill fifty to a hundred people a day.

This is directed at bringing about regime change. I’m not talking here about the military aspect — I’m talking about what kind of regime they’re trying to impose in Gaza. It looks like they may do the same thing in the West Bank, and the United States and Israel have both proclaimed that they are doing the same thing in Lebanon.

The State Department has said that the United States is no longer trying to achieve a cease-fire in Lebanon. It adheres to Israel’s objectives, and Netanyahu made those objectives clear — he wants a complete change of regime in Lebanon. One fears that this may well be extended to Iran.

I would remind people that regime change in Lebanon has a history. The 1982 war was intended, among other things, to establish a regime friendly to Israel in Lebanon. We can see how that ended up: it gave us further instability, and it gave us Hezbollah.

It also gave us the attacks on the US Marines and the US embassy, because many Lebanese felt that the United States had participated in Israel’s butchery of nineteen thousand Palestinians during the 1982 war. They believed that the United States had promised to protect civilians who were left behind when the PLO left Beirut in August 1982, yet those people were then slaughtered in Sabra and Chatila.

What Haig and Sharon attempted to do in Lebanon did not turn out well. The attempt to carry out regime change in Iraq did not turn out well, either. Iraq is closer to being an Iranian client than it is to being an American client. In 2024, there are rockets being fired at American troops in Iraq, and rockets being fired at Israel from Iraq.

I have no idea what’s going to happen, but those seem to be the trends underway, with a normalization of genocide and mass slaughter as a policy in order to achieve certain political objectives. I can tell you that, based on past experience, these things do not turn out well — obviously not for the population subjected to mass slaughter, and not for the people trying to implement these changes, either.

Daniel Finn

It’s clear that this is one of the most difficult moments, if not the most difficult moment, that the Palestinian people have faced in the whole period since the Nakba. Obviously, it’s very difficult to talk under these circumstances about the prospects facing the Palestinians and what the way forward might be from this point, but could I ask if you have any general reflections that you might want to make about that question?

Rashid Khalidi

The situation of the Palestinian people is extraordinarily grim. I don’t remember the Nakba — I was born in November 1948, by which time it was pretty much over, and I wasn’t conscious of any of this, obviously. I don’t know that I can even make the comparison historically, but I would say it’s certainly the darkest day for Palestine and the Palestinians since then — no question of that.

Whether it’s worse or not, only time will tell, because it’s not over. We’re not anywhere near the end — I wish that we were, but it doesn’t seem that we are. On the political level, the Palestinians are facing the same dilemma that they were on October 5 or 6 last year. They’re still divided, and they’re still, in my view, leaderless.

There is a powerful trend or faction that advocates an unrestricted form of violence. In my view, this trend does not have a strategic vision. It has achieved tactical victories and some catastrophic strategic defeats, and it has caused enormous suffering to Palestinians and also to Israelis. But there is no unified leadership or collective strategic vision. That was the situation before October 7, and it hasn’t really changed.

There’s no sense of how Palestinians want to live in the future and relate to the Israelis in Palestine in the future. Nor is there a sense of how they intend to get there. Those are strategic questions that are not being asked or answered by the people who currently claim to lead the Palestinian national movement, whether in Hamas or in what is laughably called the Palestinian Authority — an institution with no sovereignty, no authority, and no legitimacy among its own people.

I don’t think those leaderships have answers to the questions that I’ve just asked, so the Palestinians are rudderless as a people in terms of political leadership. On the other hand, it should be said that Israel and the United States have acted in ways that raise fundamental questions about the possibility of the continuation of Israel’s approach, and the approach of the Israeli people, since they now seem to approve in large measure of what their government is doing to their region.

I question how this can continue indefinitely into the future — how Israel can expect to continue dominating people in the way that it’s trying to do without the resistance becoming overwhelming. I think they’re sowing the wind in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. I know there are Cassandra voices in Israel who are saying, “This is suicide, this is insane — there’s no strategy here. How do you want this to end?”

There are no answers to those questions, because the people leading this enterprise have no answers, except to say that if force is insufficient, you should use more force. That’s the only thing they understand. That’s how they see politics, but that’s not politics — it’s as if Carl von Clausewitz never existed.

On the one hand, I see the future as being very grim for the Palestinians into the foreseeable future, until they develop a consensus around a strategy and a leadership. Hopefully that will come soon, but there’s no way of telling when it will come. But I think that there’s a message here in what Israel is doing. The policy of force, which would have worked in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, and even into the twentieth century, cannot possibly work in the twenty-first century.

It can’t work anywhere in the long run, but it can’t work in this case in particular because Israel as a project is entirely dependent on external support. It is now and always has been. This was never a totally independent project or an idea that was self-sustaining, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to Britain to get the Balfour Declaration or to the United Nations to get the partition resolution. The head of Mossad wouldn’t have gone to get Lyndon Johnson’s approval in 1967, and Sharon wouldn’t have gone to get Haig’s approval in 1982.

The project is dependent on the outside world and specifically on the West — that’s the metropole for this settler-colonial project. It’s also a national project — it has many other aspects — but it’s completely dependent on its metropole in the West. It has been alienating public opinion in the West, destroying its base of support in the countries upon which Israel depends, and without which it cannot do anything.

It still has the elites, the governments, and the military-industrial complex, which is perfectly happy to sell unlimited amounts of two-thousand-pound bombs, Apache helicopters, F-35 warplanes, and so forth. But it has lost the kind of wall-to-wall public support that the Zionist project and the state of Israel had in most of the Western world from the time of Balfour through to the 1990s or certainly through to the First Intifada of the late 1980s.

That trend could conceivably be halted or even reversed, but that would require changing this policy of force, more force, and nothing other than force. It would require stopping mass slaughter and collective punishment, and I don’t see that happening. I would say the future is quite grim for the Palestinians, but I don’t think it looks any better for Israel. In fact, in some respects, it may even be worse in the long term for Israel as it is currently configured.

Daniel Finn

You’re now retiring from Columbia. We’ve seen over the last year that US university campuses have become one of the most important, high-profile spaces of contestation. There was a backhanded tribute to the importance of the student encampments by the most right-wing elements in the US Congress, who held a series of hearings demanding action be taken against them. What do you think the experience of the last year has told us about the US university system, and where do you think it’s going?

Rashid Khalidi

What happened last year was a world-historical event. What started on American campuses spread worldwide and made it perfectly clear that overwhelming majorities of people in almost every country on the face of the Earth are opposed to what’s happening, in spite of the fact that their governments are perfectly happy allowing it to continue or are actually engaged in helping it to continue. The gap between the peoples and the governments was made perfectly clear. It’s also a generational gap — young people are completely committed, while older people are much more divided on this.

Remember that universities operate on a strange calendar, where things start in the fall and end in the spring. We’re now in a new year starting in September or October. This year has been quite different to last year on campus. The repressive measures mandated by Congress and implemented with extraordinary zeal by compliant, craven, and despicable university administrators have been very successful. There has been almost no disruptive activism of the level that we saw last year.

There has been activism on the Columbia campus. Students have been reading the names of people slaughtered by Israel. For days and days and days, they’ve been doing that, and that’s very effective, but it’s not having the effect — nor is it allowed to have the effect — of anything that was done last year up until the police crackdown.

Universities played an enormous role in 2023–24, but I don’t see the likelihood of that continuing, at least in the United States, in the places I can see. In Europe, more may be happening on campuses than is happening right now in the United States. But that contestation has spread to public opinion. Public opinion has shifted because people are seeing on their phone screens the reality that the mass media lies about, distorts, and prevents us from seeing.

I honestly don’t think you can look to the universities, given the success of this wave of repression, for the same kind of inspirational spark that they gave in 2023–24. From what I know, on the campuses where I hear what’s going on, that is simply not the case. This academic year, the police state that has been imposed at Columbia — the checkpoints, the surveillance, the extraordinary restrictions on movement and on political action — has been quite effective.

Those measures have been organized in concert with the state and the New York City Police Department, and in liaison with people from the Israeli intelligence services and the FBI, to make sure that what happened last year cannot happen again, so I wouldn’t look to the universities this academic year. That hasn’t stopped energetic demonstrations off campus — we’ve had many of those, in New York City at least. I may be wrong: we’re only in October, and heaven knows what will happen in the months to come.

Daniel Finn

Your next book, as I understand it, is looking at the connections and the feedback loops between British colonialism in Palestine and in other countries — in particular Ireland. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about that?

Rashid Khalidi

This is a book that I hope to write, not one I have yet written. It’s not a book for which the ideas have fully developed; it’s not a finished product, and I’m not sure how it will develop. What I do know is that I’ve been working on some extraordinary links and correspondences between the methods used in Ireland and those later used in Palestine.

There are also important similarities between Ireland and Palestine as settler colonies. Obviously, there are also enormous differences. English and later British attempts to subdue Ireland go back to the twelfth century and were incessant over the course of century after century after century. The settlement that is really significant in these terms only started with the Elizabethan era and the century that followed, hundreds of years before Zionism as a political project even existed.

Like most settler-colonial projects, what we saw in Ireland was an extension of the sovereignty and population of the mother country into a settler colony. You shipped English, Welsh, and Scottish subjects of the crown as an extension of its sovereignty in order to master the country that was being settled. That’s the classic paradigm of settler colonialism: it’s what happened in North America, Australia, Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, and other countries.

Obviously, Zionism was very different. It was an independent political project — a national project. The settlers who went to North America or Ireland were going as English settlers, subjects of the crown, and extensions of its sovereignty. They didn’t set up their own independent entities. They named Carolina after King Charles, Jamestown after King James, and so on.

Zionism had other aspects. It saw itself as a resolution of the Jewish question. For people persecuted in the Christian world, it was based on a connection between Judaism and the land of Israel, so it had distinct features. But its methodology and its behavior were those of a settler-colonial project.

The early Zionists saw themselves in this light. They saw themselves as European settlers, operating like other European settlers in barbaric, non-European lands whose inhabitants were to be disregarded. That is the approach of settler-colonial projects to indigenous populations.

Like other settler-colonial projects, it required a metropole. The metropole for most of them is the mother country. For North America, Australia, and Ireland, it was England or later the United Kingdom. Zionism was an independent project, and it started off searching for support from the German Kaiser, the Ottoman Sultan, or the French Republic, before ultimately finding Britain as an ally. But the Zionist project shifted seamlessly to relying on support from the United States and the Soviet Union when British support waned in 1939.

It later fought the wars of 1956 and 1967 with French and British weapons and developed its nuclear arsenal with French assistance. There’s an absolute requirement for any settler-colonial project to have a metropole, but Zionism is unique in being able to leap, as it were, from iceberg to iceberg, finding several different external patrons for the project. Today, the West as a whole — powerful Western countries like the United States, France, Britain, Germany, and a few others — serves as the metropole for this project.

The details are fascinating. The people who negotiated an end to the Irish War of Independence were the same people in the same cabinet that adopted the Balfour Declaration, helping to produce the Mandate for Palestine. That set up the regime that Britain created in Palestine to foster and favor the Zionist project. Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill — the personnel were the same.

You take an official from India and you bring them to Ireland to torture people. The next thing you know, a decade later, after more service in India, he’s back in Palestine setting up torture centers. You take the commander of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and you send them to Palestine to set up the Palestinian gendarmerie. Then you ship over the Black and Tans and the veterans of the RIC when Britain has to leave Ireland at the end of the War of Independence in 1921–22.

The connections are remarkable, and they go even further into the 1920s and ’30s. It was the general expertise of empire, but in particular it was the expertise developed in the specific settler colony of Ireland that was then bequeathed to the officers and officials who implemented British policy in Palestine. In turn, they bequeathed that expertise to the Israelis.

The officers who were engaged in putting down the great revolt in Palestine at the end of the 1930s were imparting the lessons of British counterinsurgency to the individuals who became the senior officers of the Israeli army. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were trained by these people. They learned how to shoot prisoners and how to destroy infrastructure.

They were taught by the British masters of these counterinsurgency approaches, many of whom were actually Anglo-Irish or had served in Ireland — Sir Charles Tegart, for example, or Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who commanded a brigade in Cork during the War of Independence and a division in Palestine in the 1930s. He was the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman. Their attitudes and their worldview — in particular the way in which they saw and treated the indigenous population and their favoring of the settlers — were of a piece between Ireland and Palestine.


Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of many books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) and Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013).

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

Thursday, September 19, 2024

AMERIKA BEGAN AS A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY

New research reveals that America's oldest tombstone came from Belgium and belonged to an English knight

New Research Reveals That America's Oldest Tombstone Came from Belgium and Belonged to an English Knight
Jamestown Knight's tombstone. Credit: Jamestown Rediscovery (Preservation Virginia) in 
International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s10761-024-00756-4

Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607 and was the first English permanent settlement in America. It has been the subject of many archaeological and historical analyses, including a recent study by Prof. Markus M. Key and Rebecca K. Rossi, which set out to determine the provenance of Jamestown's black "marble" knight's tombstone. What they determined was unexpected, says Prof. Key.

"For the past decade, I have been interested in determining the provenance of lithic artifacts using fossils contained within them. While working on the following project, determining the provenance of colonial black 'marble' tombstones from the Chesapeake Bay region, U.S.

"We found that the oldest tombstone was the knight's tombstone in Jamestown from 1627. The particular historical archaeological question we were trying to answer was: How extensive was the trade network in the Chesapeake Bay during colonial times?

"Little did we realize that colonists were ordering black marble tombstones from Belgium like we order items from Amazon, just a lot slower."

During the 17th century, affluent English colonists often memorialized themselves and their wealth with impressive tombstones. In the Chesapeake Bay region, these were often black "marble" tombstones. The Jamestown knight's tombstone was one such example.

Placed in the Jamestown Church in 1627, it remained in situ until it was relocated in the 1640s due to construction at the southern entrance. In 1907, the broken tombstone was rediscovered, repaired and placed in the present-day Memorial Church chancel.

Despite its name, the tombstone was not made of marble but rather of black limestone. In , any stone capable of being polished was often referred to as "marble."

The tombstone had carved depressions, indicating it had once held brass inlays. These were likely destroyed during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. The inlays included a shield, which may have depicted a family crest, an unfurled scroll, and an armored man standing upon a pedestal, which may have once featured inscriptions.

To the right and left of the man's body were protrusions that may have indicated a sword hilt and shield, respectively. This led to the interpretation that the tombstone belonged to a knight.

Only two knights died in Jamestown during the life of the second Jamestown church (1617–1637). One was Sir Thomas West, the first resident governor of the colony. He died in 1618 during a transatlantic voyage to Jamestown. No historical or  could link the tombstone to Sir Thomas West.

The second knight was Sir George Yeardley. His step-grandson, Adam Thorowgood II, made a request for his own black "marble" tombstone in the 1680s, asking that it be engraved with the crest of Sir George Yeardley and the same inscription as the one on the "broken tomb." This indicated that the knight's tombstone was already broken in the 17th century, prior to its discovery in 1901.

If the tombstone was indeed Yeardley's, as the familial evidence suggests, this would make it the oldest surviving tombstone in North America. Sadly, no DNA testing could be undertaken to confirm if the bones at the original tombstone site had belonged to Yeardley,

"The part of the Jamestown Church where the knight's tomb was found has already been completely excavated by archaeologists. Unfortunately, no bones with recoverable DNA were preserved to independently test for the connection to Sir George Yeardley."

George Yeardley was born in 1588 in Southwark, England. He first came to Jamestown in 1610 after initially being shipwrecked on Bermuda. He served as captain of Lt. Governor Sir Thomas Gates's guard and later as Lt. Governor of Virginia. He returned to England in 1617, a year after which he was appointed governor of Virginia and knighted by King James I.

He returned to Jamestown and remained in his position until 1621, until a few years later, he returned to England, only to be reappointed as Lord Governor in 1626. He returned to Jamestown once more and died the following year in 1627.

For his grave, a tombstone was commissioned, but where it had come from remained a mystery. According to Prof. Key, "A 'tombstone' is a dimension stone cut (and typically engraved) for use to mark a burial site.

"Native Americans undoubtedly had earlier grave markers (perhaps made of wood that did not survive), but they were not made of carved stone. Nor did the English settlers have the technology and skills to cut and engrave tombstones; that is why they imported them."

Furthermore, Prof. Key says, "The main cost of dimension stone is typically transportation costs as the stone itself is relatively low cost, and they weigh a lot. Therefore, most dimension stone is sourced locally. Thus, one would expect the source of the knight's tombstone to be local (our first hypothesis).

"Unfortunately, Jamestown is on the coastal plain physiographic province, which lacks rocks. Therefore, the stone had to be transported to Jamestown."

To determine the provenance of the tombstone, researchers studied and identified the enclosed fossils within it. Prof. Key elaborates on why this method was chosen, "Due to the evolutionary process, biological species are much more unique through time and space than chemical elements or isotopic ratios."

The results, based on the microfossils identified (Omphalotis minima and Paraarchaediscus angulatus, and P. concavus), indicated that the tombstone had to have come from either Ireland or Belgium, as none of these species were ever found in North America.

Historical evidence suggests Belgium is the likely source, as Belgium has been the most common source of the Lower Carboniferous "black" marble for centuries, from Roman times through to the present. It was particularly popular among the wealthy in England during Yeardley's life.

He and other Virginian colonists would have been very aware of the latest fashions in England and would likely try to replicate them in the colonies.

The research, published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, provides new insights into the extent of trade networks at Chesapeake Bay during  and into the lengths some colonists went to in order to obtain goods and materials not available to them in their new homes.

More information: M. M. Key et al, Sourcing the Early Colonial Knight's Black "Marble" Tombstone at Jamestown, Virginia, USA, International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s10761-024-00756-4

© 2024 Science X Network


Jamestown DNA helps solve a 400-year-old mystery and unexpectedly reveals a family secret

Wednesday, September 04, 2024

 prison jail man fence

Russian Duma Deputy Calls For Special Terrorist Prisons In Norway’s Svalbard Or In Russia’s Novaya Zemlya – OpEd

By 

Ivan Sukharyov, an LDPR Duma deputy, is calling for the construction of special prisons for those convicted of terrorism either in Svalbard or Novaya Zemlya because the isolation of these Arctic islands would not only prevent escapes but ensure that the terrorists did not influence other prisoners.


His proposals which echo those of others who have called for Guantanamo-like penal institutions to hold terrorists raise serious questions, however, first and foremost because of the Putin’s regime’s expansive definition of terrorism, one Moscow uses to convict many who are not in fact terrorists (ria.ru/20240903/tyurma-1970113222.html and  thebarentsobserver.com/ru/2024/09/v-rossii-poyavilas-ideya-sozdat-tyurmu-dlya-terroristov-na-svaldbarde).

But a bigger problem has to do with sovereignty. While Russia has complete sovereignty over Novaya Zemlya and could build such a prison there without any problems internationally, Svalbard belongs to Norway, although under the existing treaty regime other states, including Russia, have the right to act there as long as they respect the archipelago’s special status.

That status is of a demilitarized region despite Norway’s membership in NATO, and some analysts last spring suggested Moscow might use this confusion to launch an attack on NATO (jamestown.org/program/moscows-first-move-against-nato-could-take-place-in-norways-svalbard-archipelago/ and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/05/norwegian-security-expert-alarmed-by.html).

Such concerns prompted Norway to boost its military presence around the Svalbard archipelago (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/norway-to-boost-its-and-natos-strategic.html), and so fears about a Russian attack there appear to have faded. But the proposal for a prison for terrorists there could reopen them.

That is because the construction of such a facility would bring many Russians to the islands who might then be used to subvert Norwegian rule and because the prisoners might be identified as terrorists but could be released by Moscow if they agreed to fight for it, just as Russia has done with prisoners inside the Russian Federation who volunteer to fight in Ukraine. 


For these reasons, many in the West are likely to be skeptical about the idea. But at least for the moment, Russian commentators are too. Svobodnaya Pressa presents a sampling of their opinion and most are negative because of the costs involved in building and maintaining such a facility in the far north (svpressa.ru/society/article/428167/).

Nonetheless, what the Duma deputy has proposed bears watching because it has so many characteristics of other Putin moves, moves that many dismiss early one only to be caught out when they become the basis for broader aggression. 


 Moscow, Russia. Photo Credit: step-svetlana, Pixabay

Putinism And Russian Ideological Shifts – Analysis


By 

By Olena Snigyr


(FPRI) — Apparently, the collapse of the USSR did not mean the end of the Cold War. It took less than ten years for people trained within the KGB to take over the state management of Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies showed their skills and views on state management by conducting the second Chechen war, beginning in 1999. Around the same time, Putin asked former US president Bill Clinton his opinion on the possibility of Russia’s membership in NATO.

Against the background of Russia’s military actions in Chechnya, this idea sounded bizarre, but today Russian propagandists with imperturbable faces tell the story that Russian leadership had quite serious intentions regarding the rapprochement between Russia and NATO. Putin’s rhetoric about the democratization and liberalization of Russia sounded equally bizarre against the background of crimes in Chechnya, murders, and persecution of journalists. The rhetoric of the Russian authorities about rapprochement with the West was most likely a ploy to buy time and obscure the fact that the Cold War never ended in the minds of those who rule Russia. Russian leadership puts confrontation with the West, above all with the United States, at the core of its foreign policy.

Seeking to secure its superpower status and unable to compete with the West militarily and economically, Moscow competes for discourse power, offering international actors a set of opinions and beliefs that are assembled into a system of strategic narratives. Russia seeks to secure a wide range of supporters among the Multi-aligned Community[1] and to undermine the cognitive, value, and political resilience among Western countries and their allies. Russian Information Influence Operations are carried out mainly within the context of Russian strategic narratives and are guided by Russian ideological principles, which are hostile to the idea of liberal democracy.

Ideology is back as an instrument of creating international alliances in global rivalry, and Russia’s role in this process is pivotal. War, propaganda, and pushing the new ideology are tools for Russia to achieve foreign policy goals and create an anti-Western alliance. It can be suggested that today Russia’s renewed ideology combines the ideological heritage of the Russian Empire and the USSR and is adjusted to the needs and goals of the Russian leadership. In his recent book, PutinismPost-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology (2024), Mikhail Suslov mentions three main components of Russian ideology:

  • Anti-liberal, communitarian, or identitarian conservatism, which presumes that Russian identity was created at the moment of Christianization of Kyivan Rus more than a thousand years ago and has never changed since that time;
  • Right-wing communitarianism, which means denial of individual freedom to choose identity—to be born Russian means to be Russian forever.
  • Organic, geopolitical, identitarian populism, can be found such constructs as the theory of the “deep people,” the concept of “Russian world,” pan-Slavism, etc.

New Arguments, Old Foes

Contemporary Russian ideology complements Russian foreign policy, “explains” its goals and actions, and is revealed to internal and external audiences through strategic narratives. Thus, Russia’s foreign policy goal of preserving the status of a world power is interpreted ideologically through the idea of ​​the existence of Russia as a civilization that has a mission to save humanity, and therefore any Russian actions become legitimate and whitewashed in the eyes of supporters of this idea. The role of the global evil that Russia opposes is assigned today to liberal democratic values ​​and, accordingly, to the West, especially the United States, as the bearer of these values.


This grand narrative’s umbrella covers the stories that the system of international law and international institutions, especially financial ones, has been significantly influenced by the West and is unbalanced. Russian leadership declares that the West replaces international law with so-called rules and thus calls into question the binding nature of international legal norms, especially norms of international humanitarian law. According to Putin “the only rules that must be followed are public international law.” Russia promotes the concept of “democratization of international relations … primarily on the basis of the principles of the UN Charter … based on respect for the sovereign equality of states,” which in the Russian interpretation means promoting the inviolability of authoritarian regimes and impunity for their leaders.

The Concept of Foreign Policy of Russian Federation defines the “elimination of the vestiges of the United States and other unfriendly states’ dominance in world affairs” as a foreign policy goal and thus advocates establishment of the new multipolar world order. According to Russian strategic narratives, this assumes the division of the world into geographical zones of interest of major world powers. The geographical ambitions of the Russian sphere of influence include the entire European continent, which, according to the architects of Russian foreign policy, should be freed from US influence and presence and become part of the Greater Eurasia integration project. This narrative corresponds to the Kremlin’s very specific foreign policy demand voiced by Putin—“to return NATO’s military potential and infrastructure in Europe to the state it was in 1997, when the Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed.”

“Traditionalists of All Countries, Unite!” (A. Dugin)

Russian ambitions to oust the United States from Europe and establish influence find an ideological explanation in Russia’s self-declared mission and duty to save the Europe of traditional values ​​from the harmful influence of liberalism. The modern Russian ideology is based on the concept that liberal values ​​are the main evil for humanity, and therefore Russia has a mission to protect traditional values.

Russian antiliberal rhetoric specifically focuses on two topics:

  • The danger of LGBT+ rights.
  • The destructive nature of the concept of individual freedom for human communities, due to its opposition to the idea of birth given collective identity and loyalty to the authorities.

Russian (and not only Russian) propaganda insists that it is the idea of ​​individual freedom that leads to chaos, uprisings, revolutions, and the destruction of stable societies.

The list of traditional values which Russia seeks to protect, and which is given in Russian regulatory documents is made quite vague and casts a wide net in order to be appropriate for multiple audiences. The main focus of Russian propaganda is on “family values,” opposing them with individual freedom, gender equality, and the right to self-expression. An example of ​​ instrumentalization of the idea of ​​protecting “family values” ​​as opposed to human rights is the proposal of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, regarding international development and the adoption of a convention on the rights and protection of the family.

 While the idea of protection of Russian society from “malign liberal influence” became the reasoning for internal repressions and persecutions, in Russia’s foreign policy the idea of protection of traditional values became an integral element of all anti-Western rhetoric. Russia tries to popularize this idea globally and make it universal.

De-Libéralisation–Décolonisation–De-Westernisation

The idea of liberal values ​​as evil is present in all Russian narratives explaining the conflict between Russia and the West and is mixed, sometimes in a bizarre fashion, with historical and political myths. There are two examples of such a combination in Russian official rhetoric: In the first case, the Russian duty to liberate Europe from liberal ideas is presented as a continuation of the liberation of Europe from Nazism as the result of WWII. It should be remembered that the myth of Russian Victory in the Great Patriotic War is one of the cornerstones of all Russian propaganda. It organically fits into the narrative of the historical mission of the Russian people to protect the world from global evil and is an important element of Russian modern ideology. Despite the seeming impossibility of combining liberalism and Nazism into one concept, Russian propagandists and ideologues explain the proximity between the two by the fact that the liberal West allegedly limits traditional values ​​of illiberal societies, by demanding the observance and protection of human rights and denying the rights of authoritarian regimes to implement repressive domestic policies.

In the second case, liberalism is described as an instrument of Western neocolonialism towards their former colonial possessions, which are assumed to be only allegedly decolonized and independent, but de facto continue to be exploited by the West. Within the framework of this myth, the economic success of Western countries is explained not by the competitive advantages of liberal democratic systems, but by Western neocolonialism—the fact that the West, with the help of the policy of spreading Western governance models, created such a world order that allows it to continue exploiting its former colonies and other countries. This idea is a big part of intellectual discussions from the times of Jean-Paul Sartre and Kwame Nkrumah to contemporary statements of Walter Mignolo that Russia is just a “de-Westernizing” force and a “disobedient” state that is “not attacking, but defending itself from the harassment of Western designs.” Russia utilizes this argument of decolonial discourse with a great advantage, especially in the countries of the Multi-aligned Community.

 One may assume that Russian leaders don’t believe in their ideas themselves and use ideological arguments in Informational Influence Operations to enforce their policy and achieve their goals. However, the revamping of this ideology to use it in competition with foreign rivalries reveals genuine intentions and can indicate long-term tendencies in Russian politics.

  • About the author: Olena Snigyr is a 2024 Templeton Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. She is also a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.
  • Source: This article was published by FPRI

[1] The term Multi-aligned Community was proposed by Jonathan Morley-Davies, Jem Thomas, Grahem Baines and is defined as “States existing outside of the Western environment who have exhibited a preference for aligning or partnering with chosen states depending on specific spheres or issues.”




Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

Founded in 1955, FPRI (http://www.fpri.org/) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests and seeks to add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.