Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in chief of current affairs magazine.

My guest today is Professor Rashid Holliday. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

He's also the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is the author of many books, including The Iron Cage,

a story of the Palestinian struggle for statehood and most recently the Hundred Years' War on

Palestine, a history of settler colonialism and resistance 1917 to 2017. Professor Holliday,

thank you so much for joining us on current affairs. Well, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

We've just witnessed this month a new airstrikes on Gaza, justified on the grounds of preemption,

killed a number of children. Every year, it seems we see new horrific violence erupting,

especially in Gaza. I think that at this point, so many people watch events unfold

without any sense whatsoever of the context. And one of the things that comes across well in your

book is that in order to really understand what is going on in Palestine, we really have to go back

a hundred years. We have no idea what we are seeing unless we grasp how the situation came about over the course of a century.

And so I wondered if we could start with Palestine at the turn of the 20th century, as you do in the book,

perhaps, because I think hardly any of our American audience really understands what Palestine was

like at that period. So perhaps you could paint us a little picture of what Palestine was like

at the beginning. Right. And I think you're right to suggest we start with the history because

we're often told, oh, let's forget the history. Well, they want us to forget the history because

without it, you can't understand what's going on now. And they can put all kinds of silly ideas into our heads, making deserts

bloom and only democracy in the Middle East and that sort of nonsense. So the history is simple,

actually. People always say, oh, it's very complex. It's not complex at all. This was a society, part of a number of societies, Arabic speaking in the Middle East, made up of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, who identified in different ways, but whose lingua Franco was Arabic and whose governmental language was under the Ottomans Turkish.

It was a society in rapid development.

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