‘Palestinians be damned’ — Khalidi explains the American role in the peace process
April 26, 2013
‘Palestinians be damned’ — Khalidi explains the American role in the peace process
By Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss.net Published on April 26, 2013
Rashid Khalidi's latest book on the conflict may be his most important in terms of policy. Brokers of Deceit documents as no work has before the record of American double-dealing during the peace process. For 40 years, the United States government managed the negotiations closely but always as Israel's lawyer; and Khalidi, a professor at Columbia, has laid bare the dismal official record of this imposture, including many papers never before published, some from Khalidi's own work as an adviser to the PLO during the early 90s.
The book is unstinting about the role of domestic politics in this record -- the lobby-- and it builds to a savage conclusion about the power of racism in shaping the denial of one people's story and the affirmation of another. "Denial and affirmation have been diligently and patiently rooted for many generations in the Bible, in cinema, in popular culture, in racist stereotypes of Arabs, in putatively shared values... They have moreover been internalized by most of the American political class, by much of the American media, and by many ordinary Americans."
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