College and University Monitor

In an interview last week, Columbia University's Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Rashid Khalidi, told fellow Columbia professor Bruce Robbins, "I am a great believer in the artificiality, in the constructed nature, in the entirely modern nature, of nationalism and nations. I don't think they have the ancient roots they all claim."
This would seem to undermine a key tenet of Khalidi's worldview: his insistence that the Palestinian people have a long history.

In a New York Times review of Khalidi's recent The Hundred Years' War On Palestine, Scott Anderson summarized the professor's thesis: "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is best understood as a war of colonial conquest, one that closely hews to the pattern and mind-set of other national-colonial movements of the 19th century."

So, on the one hand, Khalidi claims all nationalisms are artificial constructs, while on the other — the central thesis of his book and much of his previous scholarship, in fact — he argues that Palestinian nationalism is an inviolable concept threatened by phony Zionist colonialism....