This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff.
The New York Times has exposed Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi as a purveyor of fiction when it comes to the Middle East conflict.
On January 7 Khalidi published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “What You Don’t Know About Gaza.” In it he claimed that: “Nearly everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong.” Khalidi’s article was filled with exaggerations, simplifications, and, it turns out, outright lies. I’ll just give one example of each.
One of Khalidi’s simplifications was his claim that Israel is still the “occupying power” in the Gaza strip, even after withdrawing its troops and settlers in 2005, and hence has a positive responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to, as he put it, “see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza strip.” Khalidi is not alone in making these claims. In its recent report on Gaza, Human Rights Watch argued that Israel is still an “occupying power” in Gaza and has a positive duty, under Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to “ensure the food and medical supplies of the population.” Both Khalidi and Human Rights Watch conclude that because Israel, allegedly an occupying power, maintains a blockade on Gaza which deprives the civilian population of food, fuel, and basic services, Israel’s actions constitute “collective punishment,” banned under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Both Khalidi and Human Rights Watch have grossly simplified the international law governing Israel’s duties to the civilian population in Gaza. The truth is that the legal status of Gaza after Israel’s military withdrawal is a hotly debated topic among international lawyers, as this posting at the International Law Observer explains. To my knowledge the only court to have ruled on the legal status of post-2005 Gaza is the Israeli Supreme Court, which, on January 30, 2008, ruled in the Gabber v. Prime Minister case that Israel no longer has “effective control” over events in the Gaza strip, according to Professor Yuval Shany’s paper on the decision. Logically, to claim that Israel is still an “occupying power” when it has removed its troops and settlers renders the concept of “occupation” fairly meaningless.
As Professor Shany argues, the relationship between Israel and Gaza is now more analogous to a siege during armed conflict, not an occupation. Of course, there are laws of war governing armed conflicts involving sieges, but these laws only require besieging states to allow the passage of humanitarian relief supplies and avoid targeting civilians. They do not require the besieging state to provide food, fuel, and services to the civilian population.
There are other simplifications in his article, but I want to highlight one of Khalidi’s gross exaggerations: his claim that “most” of the 700 Palestinians killed at the time of his writing were civilians. Khalidi’s implication was that Israel was perpetrating “war crimes” in Gaza. The truth - reported in the New York Times the day before Khalidi’s op-ed - was that according to the U.N. one-fourth out of the 640 Palestinians killed at that time were civilians.
Finally, Khalidi’s outright lie, which led the New York Times to publish a correction on January 30. In his conclusion, Khalidi dismissed Israel’s stated motives in Gaza and offered his own interpretation, namely that Israel is hell-bent on destroying the Palestinian people:
The war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defenses Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
When I read Yaalon’s alleged quote, I - and many others - raised an eyebrow. According to The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, Khalidi includes the same quote in his 2005 book Resurrecting Empire and he footnotes the source as a 2002 interview in Haaretz with Ari Shavit. When asked about Israel’s motives, here is what he really said:
I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us.
Yaalon is a sophisticated thinker and it is difficult to reduce him to simplistic sound bites, but in the interview he basically argues that many of the political movements which articulate the aspirations of the Palestinian people-including Fatah in 2002-have as their ultimate goal the liquidation of Israel as a Jewish state, and use terrorism as a means to weaken Israel’s resolve to fight and defend itself.
Nothing even close to Khalidi’s quotation appears in this interview. I, for one, am very concerned that the editors of the Times op-ed page published this incendiary quotation - relating to a war that has deeply fissured public opinion and sparked an intense spasm of antisemitic incidents - without fact-checking it.
But I am even more perplexed about the decision of the Times to pussyfoot its retraction, when the original interview is easily accessible. In its correction, it said that Khalidi’s quote was an “unverified quotation” and that it did not appear in the Israeli newspaper interview to which it is usually attributed. In one of the most bizarre lines I’ve ever read in the Times, it concluded: “Its original source has not been found and thus it should not have appeared in the article.” What original source? If the quote doesn’t appear in the article to which it is attributed, then it’s not true. There is no other “original source.”
All of this leaves me with many questions, chiefly: Why didn’t the New York Times publish a definitive retraction?
In the meantime, remember that nearly everything Khalidi led you to believe about Gaza is wrong.
Not much of a correction, really. There’s only the NYT’s acknowledgment of the misquote.
Not mentioned in the dissection above is that Gaza’s population is largely comprised of Palestinian Arabs sent into flight from southern Israeli towns like Ashkelon, circa 1948. On what evidence does he base this claim or is this just speculation on his part?
Michelle Seiff is right to point out what may be an inaccurate or mis-attributed quote, which would be shoddy scholarship on Khalidi’s part, but this is really beside the point. One need not look far to find examples of similar sentiments expressed by Israeli leaders toward the Palestinian people.
Seiff’s attempt to discredit the proportion of civilian Palestinian deaths is also completely irrelevant. For three reasons: (1) civilian deaths are notoriously discounted in the occupied territories; (2) the disproportion still shocks the conscience, and always has; and (3) it is now clear that a great majority of the Palestinians killed in the recent Gaza War were civilians, which only reinforces the moral weight of Khalidi’s point.
Furthermore, the notion that Israel is no longer an occupying power in the Gaza Strip, simply because troops and settlements on the ground have been removed, is simply fatuous. The Israeli military controls the air above the strip and all the borders that surround it. Even the Rafah crossing — which is supposed to be monitored by Egyptian military — is under the complete de facto, if not de jure, control of the IDF, which has acted directly to keep it closed. The Israeli Navy maintains a tight seal on Gaza from the sea. Israel has not followed its obligations under the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) — trade and traffic in humanitarian supplies into and out of Gaza are a pitiful trickle of what they used to be. The IDF tightly controls all movement of goods, all exports and imports, all immigration to and from the strip. Under international law, there is no question that this amounts to “effective control” and among practicing international lawyers the minority is very small indeed who would seriously state otherwise. Alvaro de Soto, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said this EXPLICITLY in his end of mission report in May 2007.
As to the above comment — there is no question that Gaza is largely composed of Palestinian Arabs forced to flee in 1948 from what are now southern Israeli towns. Anyone who has even a cursory background in the modern history of the region knows that some of the best sources to turn to for this information are eminent Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe who definitively closed the book on this question through nearly three decades of work. I would direct you first to two works by Benny Morris: “1948: A History of the First Arab Israeli War” or “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.” These are lauded works of history and the idea that this is mere speculation on Khalidi’s part is a ridiculous notion.