Rashid Khalidi is an even-handed historian and analyst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From Seymour Hersh at seymourhersh.substack.com:
Rashid Khalidi’s chronicle of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Netanyahu’s latest desperate moves
Citizens bury the bodies of Palestinians killed during the war in a mass grave on Tuesday in Rafah, Gaza. / Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images.
I first came to Beirut more than a year after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, when it was clear that the men then in charge in the White House—George Bush and Dick Cheney—were going to respond to the fanatic Osama bin Laden by going to war against Saddam Hussein’s secular government in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. I conducted the first of what would be several long interviews with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah. His Shiite militia provoked anxiety and fear throughout the Middle East, as well as in official Washington. Nasrallah’s initial message to me was one I’d heard earlier from a prominent Middle Eastern oil man: America will not change Iraq, but Iraq would change America—forever.
That trip was the first of many to Beirut, and there were further meetings with Nasrallah over the next years, but what never failed to startle and then depress me were the leftover signs of the 15-year civil war that eventually involved Israel and Syria, as well as the various political parties and military factions inside Lebanon. The apartment buildings on both sides of the Green Line, a main thoroughfare that had divided the Christian and Muslim communities, were filled with bullet and rocket holes, some patched and some not. I had European friends who lived in one of the pockmarked buildings, and it was unsettling to visit there, as if I was in bombed-out Berlin in the aftermath of World War II. It turned out that the Israeli bombing that shattered Muslim society in 1982 had been justified by Israel’s phony allegation that the PLO had targeted an Israeli diplomat in London. Israel got what it wanted with its bombs: the forced exile that summer of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and more than 8,000 members of his battered army to Tunis.
All of that history was alive for me. I had written earlier about Henry Kissinger’s disregard —maybe contempt is a better word—for the PLO’s lack of understanding that the only Middle East issue of importance at the time for the White House was to hold off Russian influence there. Arafat, Kissinger dismissively noted in his 1979 memoir The White House Years, was demanding the creation of a “democratic secular state” in Palestine, “theoretically permitting Jews, Arabs [Muslims], and Christians to live together with equal rights.”
