A HISTORY OF NEGATION

Rashid Khalidi’s chronicle of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Netanyahu's latest desperate moves

Citizens bury the bodies of Palestinians killed during the war in a mass grave on Tuesday in Rafah, Gaza. / Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images.

I first came to Beirut more than a year after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, when it was clear that the men then in charge in the White House—George Bush and Dick Cheney—were going to respond to the fanatic Osama bin Laden by going to war against Saddam Hussein’s secular government in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. I conducted the first of what would be several long interviews with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah. His Shiite militia provoked anxiety and fear throughout the Middle East, as well as in official Washington. Nasrallah’s initial message to me was one I’d heard earlier from a prominent Middle Eastern oil man: America will not change Iraq, but Iraq would change America—forever.