"Disgraceful": Rashid Khalidi Slams Israeli Attacks on Journalists, Detention of Rep. Ro Khanna

Guests - Rashid KhalidiEdward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. Links Armed Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank have carried out a number of attacks in recent days targeting local Palestinians and foreign journalists, as well as detaining U.S. Congressmember Ro Khanna during a fact-finding trip. Khanna said that when Israeli forces arrived, they sided with the settlers. “The U.S. government just merrily goes along funding these atrocities against American citizens, not to speak of atrocities against Palestinians who don’t happen to be American citizens,” says Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. “All of this is being done with our tax dollars.” Transcript AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. We turn now to the occupied West Bank, where armed Israeli settlers have carried out a number of attacks in recent days targeting local Palestinians, as well as foreign journalists and even a U.S. congressman. On Wednesday, armed Israeli settlers carrying U.S.-made M4 assault rifles surrounded a van carrying Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna, who was visiting a Palestinian village that had been destroyed by settlers. Khanna said his delegation was blocked for about 90 minutes. REP. RO KHANNA: I’ve never really gotten to meet Palestinians and seen the occupation from the eyes of Palestinians, and it was important to me to have an uncurated, extensive look at the human toll of occupation. … I am certainly, probably, the first American politician who’s been detained by the IDF and Israeli settlers. I mean, we were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed. They had destroyed the school. They had destroyed that village. And we were just looking at it, and these hoodlums come in with machine guns, an M4, an American-made machine gun, and they detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF, and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans. … I saw the arrogance in the eyes of those settlers, 21- and 22-year-olds with guns, laughing that they had detained us, the arrogance of those young IDF soldiers that my tax dollars are funding, having no respect for the fact that they were detaining Americans. AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Ro Khanna will join us on Democracy Now! tomorrow, Tuesday. But in a separate incident Saturday, Israeli settlers armed with clubs, rocks and a knife attacked a group of journalists, including CNN’s Jeremy Diamond. Four settlers have been reportedly detained for their alleged involvement in the attack. One of the journalists posted video of the attack on Instagram. ADELE SHOKO: No, no, no! He’s going at our car. JASPER NATHANIEL: Go. Drive. Drive. ADELE SHOKO: No! No! No! JASPER NATHANIEL: Drive. Move! Move! GABRIELE MICALIZZI: Move. JASPER NATHANIEL: Get the [bleep] out of the way! Move! Move! Move! GABRIELE MICALIZZI: Move. Move. ANDREY X: Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. JASPER NATHANIEL: Move! ANDREY X: Go. Go. Go. JASPER NATHANIEL: Watch out! Watch out! AMY GOODMAN: The incident occurred at the same location where a mob of Israeli settlers beat the Palestinian American Saif Musallet to death a year earlier. To date, no one’s been arrested for Saif’s killing. He was 20 years old. He was born in Florida. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Israel has killed over a thousand Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since October 2023, including more than 200 children and teenagers. This all comes as the U.S. and Israel earlier this month signed a deal allocating land for a permanent U.S. Embassy in West Jerusalem, years after a temporary compound was established during Trump’s first term in office. For decades, a group of Palestinian families have pleaded with the U.S. government to reconsider the embassy’s location, saying the land where the embassy will stand, in an area known as Allenby compound, was unlawfully taken from them. For more on all of this, we go to France, where we’re joined by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, author of a number of books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Professor Khalidi, thanks so much for being with us. Start off by responding to these most recent attacks, that we know because this is a U.S. Congressmember, you’ve got CNN attacked, but, again, on the same site as a Palestinian American a year ago. RASHID KHALIDI: Well, this is one of many Israeli attacks on Americans. In the past, there have been repeated attacks on Palestinian Americans, who have been detained, who have been brutalized and, in the case you mentioned, murdered. It’s not at all surprising that this should extend to the detention for 90 minutes of a U.S. congressperson. The contempt with which Israel has treated the United States over many, many years, and the unwillingness of American administrations, one after another, to do anything about these infringements on Palestinian rights — I’m talking about human rights, I’m talking about property rights, I’m talking about the right to life — is truly disgraceful. The administration has, in fact, come out with a statement in which one of its flaks — I think a man named Gorka — has actually attacked Congressman Khanna, rather than saying something about the Israeli settler thugs and the Israeli army personnel who actually detained a U.S. congressman — but typical, frankly, of the way in which the U.S. government has related to these constant infringements on Palestinian rights, whether Palestinians under occupation or Palestinian Americans living in the occupied West Bank. AMY GOODMAN: And the whole story of Saif, the young American from Florida, Palestinian American, who was killed there a year ago to the day when the CNN crew was attacked? RASHID KHALIDI: I mean, Israel has been killing American citizens for many, many years. You can go back to the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. You can go back to the murder of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. You can go back to the killing of an old man in a village near Jerusalem — actually, near Ramallah, by the Israeli army. They tied him up. They left him in the cold. He died of exposure. This happens all the time, without any response from the Israeli government. They claim that they’re investigating. The investigations never lead to prosecution or conviction, if there even is an investigation. And the U.S. government just merrily goes along funding these atrocities against American citizens, not to speak of atrocities against Palestinians who don’t happen to be American citizens. All of this is being done with our tax dollars and with the protection of the U.S. government in international instances like the Security Council, where the U.N. issues — where the United States issues veto after veto after veto to protect Israel. AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting, Rashid. You talked about Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant to the president, senior director for counterterrorism, who advised Trump in his first term but was pushed out after The Forward, the newspaper, revealed he once had ties to a Hungarian far-right, Nazi-allied group and that he supported an antisemitic and racist paramilitary militia in Hungary while he served as a Hungarian politician, Professor Khalidi. RASHID KHALIDI: Right. I mean, I think the links of this administration to the far right are no surprise to anybody, from the Charlottesville demonstration, where the demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us,” about which Trump at the time said there were good people on both sides, to the appointment of a person like Gorka and many, many others. None of this should be a surprise. All of them happen to be, in addition to their right-wing and, in some cases, like Gorka, neofascist orientation, blindly supportive of Israel. And those two things are increasingly going together. The love of Bibi Netanyahu and his government for the now-defeated government of Orbán in Hungary is just one example of the way in which Israel is getting together with some of the — it has long been doing this, but has been getting together with some of the most noxious governments on Earth. Media Options