On Saturday 24 September 2022, the ACRPS and the Institute for Palestine Studies, hosted the historian Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, to present a public lecture titled ‘Settler Colonialism in Ireland and Palestine’, introduced by Arab Center Researcher Ayat Hamdan.

Khalidi’s lecture came as a continuation of his research efforts, a significant portion of which he has devoted to studying the history of the Palestinian issue. He has published many works in the field, including British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 (1980); Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making during the 1982 War (1986); The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991); Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997); and Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004).

During his lecture, Khalidi presented several points of convergence between the Palestinian and Irish experiences. He indicated that Ireland was Britain’s first settler colonial experiment whilst Palestine was its last, and that the former was, moreover, the earliest laboratory of British settler colonialism. Britain implemented many colonial tactics in Palestine long after first testing them in Ireland from the 12th century onward. He suggested that there is no standard model for settler colonialism: each case is unique. In the same context, Khalidi mentioned several British political and military figures such as Arthur James Balfour, Major General Orde Wingate, and Sir Charles Tegart, whose experiences in Ireland are considered pivotal to the shift to Palestine. He addressed the counter-insurgency methods that security forces and the British army employed in Ireland, then transposed to the other colonies, such as India and later to Palestine by training Zionist gangs, before bringing them back to Ireland once again.

In his comparison of colonisation in Ireland and Palestine, Khalidi arrived at several research findings, most prominent of which was that what differentiated settler colonialism in Palestine was the fact that Britain did not bring its citizens to establish settlements in Palestine, nor did it seek to incorporate Palestine into the United Kingdom. Rather, it paved the way for another community — Jews — to build settlements there, whilst the settler population of Ireland was made up of English who had arrived from the metropole. In Palestine, Britain supported the Zionist colonial movement, which was composed of European Jews from across the continent, but the Zionist colonial project depended on Britain and the United States as metropoles from which to derive its strength and ensure its survival. Further, Britain’s colonisation of both Ireland and Palestine was based on several strategic objectives which Khalidi explicated in his lecture, drawing a comparison between the strategic dimensions of both cases.