Pro-Israel figures will “infest” President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, a Palestinian-American Columbia University professor and notorious critic of the Jewish state declared on Tuesday.
“There are a group of people, a lot of them in Israel and some of them in the United States, who live in a world of their own,” Rashid Khalidi — the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia — stated during an interview aired by Chicago’s WBEZ 91.5 public radio station. “That is to say, they think that whatever they want and whatever cockamamie schemes they can cook up can be substituted for reality.”
“So they have a vision whereby the occupied territories aren’t occupied,” Khalidi continued. “They have a vision whereby there is no such thing as the Palestinians. They have a vision whereby international law doesn’t exist. They have a vision whereby the United States can unilaterally cancel a decision of the United Nations. And unfortunately these people infest the Trump transition team, these people are going to infest our government as of January 20th. And they are hand in glove with a similar group of people in the Israeli government and in Israeli political life who think that whatever they think can be imposed on reality.”
“Well they will live in that little bubble for as long as the Trump administration is here, but there’s going to be a rude shock awaiting them, because most Americans don’t feel that way,” Khalidi claimed.
