Profile: Rashid Khalidi, Scholar and Rare Voice for Palestinian History

Rashid Khalidi is a leading American public intellectual of Palestinian-Lebanese descent, a distinguished scholar of Middle East and Palestinian history and of American foreign policy in the region, and the director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. He was thrust into the 2008 American presidential campaign when right-wing bloggers and John McCain’s campaign implied, outrageously, that because Barack Obama knew Khalidi, Obama was anti-Israel and had “terrorist” connections. The slander (against both Obama and Khalidi) was designed to influence South Florida’s Jewish voters, who were favoring Obama.

Khalidi was born in New York City on Nov. 18, 1948, the son of a Palestinian diplomat at the Security Council of the United Nations and a Lebanese mother. He attended the United Nations International School. The family lived in a Morningside Heights apartment next to Columbia University — a proximity that marked Rashidi intellectually, though he got his undergraduate degree from Yale (1970) and his doctorate from Oxford University (1974).

Khalidi taught history at the Lebanese University in Beirut (1974-77) and the American University in Beirut (1976-85).

For 10 of those years, Lebanon was in civil war, and Rashidi occasionally spoke to western reporters looking for the quotable Palestinian perspective, especially when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Khalidi then taught at Columbia University (1985-87) before beginning a long tenure at the University of Chicago (1987-2002). In 2003, he was appointed Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. His wife, Mona, is an assistant dean at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. They have three grown children.

In 1991, Khalidi served as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid peace conference organized by then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. The Palestinian delegation had few individuals it could draw on who were conversant with American diplomacy, Middle Eastern issues and Palestinian ancestry—and who spoke the language of all three. Khalidi was one of the few.

Khalidi’s politics are no secret. He recognizes Israel’s right to exist but is a staunch critic of Israel’s repressive policies against Palestinians in the occupied territories. Khalidi’s position on that score isn’t original or even radical, by the standards of the Israeli press: his perspective is echoed by the left-leaning Israeli journalists and commentators. But because Khalidi is of Palestinian descent, he is frequently—if simplistically—branded “anti-Israel.”

The Khalidis and the Obamas crossed paths when both men taught at the University of Chicago, and both had young families. The two had long conversations that led Rashidi to believe that Obama was more sympathetic to (and familiar with) the Palestinian cause than the average American. But sympathy didn’t necessarily mean agreement. “you may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” Khalidi told The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama told the couple during a going-away party for them in 2002, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. … It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation—a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona’s and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

Those comments were quoted in an April 2008 article in the Los Angeles Times and quoted from a videotape of the going-away party given in Rashid’s honor when he left Chicago for Columbia University in 2003. The Times reported that at the party, a young poet “recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians”—an unoriginal comparison even Israeli writers in the conservative Jerusalem Post make on occasion.

The Times also noted that another speaker at the party likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden for being similarly “blinded by ideology.”

(Again, a more incendiary than unusual comparison given the frequency of settler violence and acts of terrorism on Palestinians in the territories—a frequency documented by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group.)

Obama, for his part, “adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground,” the Times reported.

Nevertheless, the right-wing blogosphere, slanderous innuendos about Rashid and his connection to Obama on Fox News, and finally, the McCain campaign’s involvement in the manufactured controversy led to a demand, by the campaign, that the Times release the videotape of the going-away party. As of October 28, 2008, the Times was refusing to do so.

“Critics,” Politico reported, “have suggested that the Times is witholding the video for political reasons, but there are other possibilities: competitive reasons, or simply out of tradition. In the mechanics of reporting, there’s another possibility as well. The video may have been given to the paper on the condition it not be released, or releasing it could compromise its source.”

Both Obama and Khalidi got a raw deal from a few news cycles trying to manufacture a controversy over their “association.” Khalidi is not only respected scholar frequently sought after by the mainstream media for his voice or his pen (All Things Considered, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, The New York Times, The Boston Globe), but a rare voice for the rarely heard Palestinian perspective in the Middle East peace process.

Obama’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause has, so far, extended no further than a listening ear—more than what most American politicians are willing to grant Palestinians, to be sure, but far less than what Obama has been willing to extend the Jewish lobby in the United States, as his reverential speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in June 2008 illustrated.