A book tour discussion about the history of the Palestinian
people and their efforts to gain statehood drew the attention of
students, faculty and residents of Los Angeles in the Faculty
Center on Thursday.
At the center of the exchange was Professor Rashid Khalidi, the
Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and his
new book, “The Iron Cage: The Palestinian Struggle for
Statehood.”
Khalidi said he wrote the book because he has not found any
other historical narrative written in English which solely focuses
on the Palestinian people.
“That narrative is subsumed into other histories in this
country,” he said.
Khalidi said that this is because many other efforts to explain
Palestinian history are blended or even obscured by the more
well-known script of Jewish history, leaving the Palestinian
narrative largely unknown or misunderstood.
“(The United States) has a tendency to look at the broader
conflict … and view Palestine through a prism of
terrorism,” Khalidi said. “To see everything in those
terms does violence to every individual reality, whether it is
Israel’s, Lebanon’s or Palestine’s.”
Gabriel Piterburg, professor of history at UCLA, offered some
rebuttals to Khalidi’s philosophy, saying the historical
narrative of Israel and Palestine are inseparable.
“The process of colonization is what made them, and
that’s where I think the narrative is one,” Piterburg
said. “There is no Israel narrative without the failure of
Palestinians.”
Khalidi emphasized that though his book is about creating an
individual narrative for Palestine, it is not divided from the
histories of other countries, as he believes many of
Palestinians’ struggles are the result of outside
interventions.
But Khalidi said that while the histories obviously intersect,
the Palestinians’ struggle to establish statehood also lies
within the politics of their own leadership.
According to Khalidi, Palestinians’ political parties have
never been united enough to create a state, and international
forces have made the possibility even more distant.
Khalidi also said he wrote the book to answer the question of
whether statehood for any population is inevitable if the
population wants it.
He said he could not predict Palestine’s chances for
statehood in the future, but said the current political parties
leading Palestine are not promising mediums for progress.
Leeron Morad, president of Bruins for Israel, did not agree with
some of Khalidi’s assessments of Israel, particularly
Khalidi’s implications that minority groups face difficulties
in Israel.
“Israel is country where minorities enjoy full
citizenship,” Morad said.
Morad did agree, however, with Khalidi’s observation that
Palestinians would have had a much higher chance for statehood in
the past if they had been under more responsible leadership.
Khalidi started writing the book before the events of Sept. 11,
2001, but parted with the project temporarily to study the effects
of the terrorist attack.