On Friday, Feb. 27, the War, Power, Culture installment of the Spring 2026 Cooper Series took place in LPAC Cinema. Amira Hass, a journalist at Haaretz, and Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, came together to discuss the history and continued conflict surrounding Palestine and Israel. Swarthmore Julian and Virginia Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professor Bashir Abu-Manneh introduced and moderated the event.
Abu-Manneh stressed the importance of the talk as a chance to discuss the “difficult topics” relating to current events. It was an “opportunity to learn” and a “fundamental job of universities” to participate in these discussions. Individual lectures by Khalidi and Hass followed this brief introduction. Khalidi was the first to speak.
Khalidi’s speech focused on the historical connection between the experiences of the Irish and those of Palestinians, which he discovered in Ireland during his book tour.
“Looking at the things that my Irish friends were telling me regarding the Irish War of Independence from 1918 until 1921, the Irish beat the British,” Khalidi said. “They defeated the British army, and in trying to suppress this revolt, the British used all of the tactics — all of the strategies that are laid out in these manuals of counterinsurgency.”
Khalidi said that these military counterinsurgency strategies were originally developed between the late-19th and early-20th centuries. They were written in manuals and practiced by the military individuals that shaped a nation’s wartime strategy and tactics for maintaining colonial control.
Khalidi used the Second Boer War (1899-1902) as one of the examples. During that conflict, the British had switched to a plan of “population-centric counterinsurgency.” Instead of only targeting the people causing the uprising, they also attacked non-participants. Villages were burned, farms were destroyed, and separations into internment camps occurred. These tactics were seen again by the British Empire during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921).
“[The British] burned down creameries. They killed civilians. They tried to destroy these economic bases of the towns and villages that they thought were the centers of rebellion,” Khalidi said. “They burned the city of Cork, destroyed the public record office, destroyed the city hall, and burned a large part of the city to the ground — and they did the same in a number of villages all across Ireland.”
Connecting back to Palestine, Khalidi referred the audience to the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt. During the conflict, the British, who controlled Palestine at the time, reacted with the same strategies they had used to suppress previous revolutionary movements. Khalidi also talked about the Haganah and the Palmach, which were active in the mid-20th century. Haganah was a combatant group composed of Jewish refugees and immigrants that defended settlements from Arab or potential Nazi attacks. Palmach was the more specialized, militant attack force. Both were trained by the British army.
“What the British did was arm them, train them, mobilize them, put them under British command, even though they were under the actual control of the Jewish Agency [of Israel],” Khalidi said.
He highlighted how the British armed these groups with the same military strategies used in previous colonial disputes. More notably, he described how these same groups ended up forming the Israeli army later on, after their independence from Britain in 1948.
Khalidi also devoted much of the end of his speech to highlighting the role the U.S. media and government played. He called to attention the “tens of billions” of dollars which the U.S has used to finance the Israeli army and the way parts of the media have worked to frame this conflict as a continuation of a much longer history. However, he also shared a noticeable change in understanding between generations.
“A much larger proportion of younger people are sympathetic to the Palestinians and less sympathetic to Israel than is the case with older people,” Khalidi said. “Young people do not consume mainstream corporate lying media. They have their own means of access. Some of it good, some of it bad.”
While Khalidi focused on the historical significance of the current situation in the Middle East, Hass shared her experience as a journalist in the area. Hass started living in Gaza around 1993 when she was reporting for Haaretz and writing a book. She lived there for four years before moving to El Bireh, a city in the West Bank. She has been living there until now. In Gaza, she’d stay in people’s homes, refugee camps, or with more affluent people, such as members of the leadership. Through these experiences, she made many acquaintances who have shared their stories with her.
Hass talked about her impression of Ihab Al-Ashkar, a person “from a refugee camp, a shanty refugee camp in Gaza. He was one of those who really mobilized the first intifada when the people started going to the streets and demonstrating.”
Hass described several others, including one woman who survived the 2008 Gaza War. The woman, whose name is Amal Samuni, told Hass about her trauma during the conflict.
“The army collected all the tenants of the neighborhood and put them in one building, and then on one of their screens that they have on these science fiction weapons that they have today, they saw some people carrying something long and they were sure that this something long was an RPG. So he ordered to bomb the house.”
With her anecdotes, Hass revisited the title of the event: “The Palestine Question.” Hass disagreed with this framing and said, “There is no ‘Palestine Question.’” She argued that the phrase implies that only Palestine is subject to change.
“Everywhere I go in Palestine, I see Palestine through the people that I meet,” Hass said. “So the question is not Palestine. The question is actually the Israeli Jewish society, not even Israel, but the Israeli Jewish society.”
By emphasizing the word “society,” Hass implored the audience to consider how the Israeli sociopolitical structure should change. The war itself is fought and contributed to by multiple actors around the world. However, she emphasized, it is the people living in the area who are caught in the middle of it all, both those experiencing the tragedies and those letting it happen. Similarly to Khalidi, she stressed the terrible conditions the Palestinians have been experiencing.
“They are being tortured, they are being beaten, they are being humiliated, they are not allowed to see their families, they do not see the Red Cross for two years already,” Hass said. “About a hundred prisoners have died during the last two years, not of old age, but some of them were tortured to death — most of them were tortured to death or starved to death. This is Israeli society.”
Khalidi and Hass agreed on the notion that the taking up of arms against the Israeli government is currently a problematic strategy for the Palestinians. Khalidi asserted that this strategy only allows the Israeli government to further its violent agenda. Both noted that Palestinians need to look for other avenues to sway the world to act on the need for change.
Other questions during the Q&A section concerned the potential utility of a global anti-war movement and the need for divestment by academic institutions like Swarthmore. One student criticized the speakers’ use of the labels “cult” and “myth” to describe Palestinian militant groups and not Israeli ones. She argued that “oppression and weakness must not be conflated.”
In closing, Khalidi encouraged students to take advantage of the current shift in the global political climate and the growing appreciation for intersectionality in activism. He highlighted the general public’s power to influence through the example of the protest movement that helped end the Vietnam War in the 1970s.
“It’s going to be very hard. We’re going through a darker time than usual in this country,” Khalidi said. “But I think on this issue, a breakthrough has already taken place.”
