Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi Discusses ‘Colonial War’ in Gaza at CMES Event

Rashid I. Khalidi, a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, said the war in Israel and Gaza should be understood as a settler colonial conflict at a Tuesday event hosted by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Khalidi’s discussion was moderated by Harvard History professor Kirsten Weld and attracted a crowd of more than 300 people to the event, which was held in the Science Center.

Khalidi described the war in Gaza as “a colonial war and a settler colonial process.”

“I think there’s no better proof than the conference by Israeli finance ministers,” he said, referring to an event on Sunday where several ministers from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government called for the resettlement of the Gaza strip.

“Zionism, as a project, has many facets,” Khalidi said. “One is a settler colonial facet.”

When asked why the United States has continued to show support for Israel despite increasing global backlash, Khalidi cited a number of factors, including religious beliefs and geopolitical incentives.

“There’s Biblical resonances for Protestants,” Khalidi said, referring to some Christians’ belief in a Biblical argument for the creation of a Jewish state.” But Khalidi also said that U.S. support is “primarily about American longevity in the Middle East and the role Israel can play in that longevity.”

“This is a settler colonial project that produced a national project.”

Khalidi also discussed international criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, pointing to a recent legal case in the International Court of Justice in which South Africa accused Israel of genocide.

“I can’t think of another country that is better suited to do what South Africa did and I think it will have an enormous impact irrespective of what will happen months or years from now when it is finally issued,” he said.

In response to increasing discourse surrounding divisions on campus related to support for Israel and Palestine, Khalidi criticized elite American universities like Harvard and Columbia for forming a “plutocratic gerontocracy.”

“Older, richer, whiter people control the country and their institutions,” he said. “The younger, less wealthy, less white, less male you go the greater the support is for Palestine.”

Weld asked Khalidi if he saw campus politics as a distraction from the “real war” occurring in the Middle East or as a front for the war, shifting the discussion to the recent resignation of former Harvard President Claudine Gay.

“I actually see it more as a front than as a distraction,” Khalidi said, claiming that some criticisms of antisemitism on college campuses were actually veiled attacks on diversity in institutions of higher education.

“Many right-wing Republicans,” he added, “think the Ivies represent the elite, and they don’t want it to be diverse.”

—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.