In his article, “The Palestine Issue & the Role of Religious Leadership,”¹Ishraq US English Edition (January 2025) Url <https://www.ghamidi.org/ishraqus/> published in the journal Ishraq, Hassan Ilyas cites the works of three prominent scholars—Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Rashid Khalidi—to bolster his claims about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the purported failures of religious leadership in guiding the Palestinian cause. In this review, I have nothing to say on the role of the religious leadership of Palestine (who are they? Ilyas names no names) or of Pakistan (why must we care what they say in the context of discussing Palestinian struggle?).

My review is about the three scholars Hassan Ilyas has chosen to cite in his article. These are important intellectuals whose works have collectively illuminated our understanding of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and the plight of Palestinians; Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Rashid Khalidi have each produced seminal scholarship on Palestine that offers depth, nuance, and ample historical context. Indeed, one would expect that engagement with these texts would lead to a historically rich and carefully balanced argument.

Yet, upon examining Ilyas’s article more closely, it becomes apparent that these references function less as reasoned engagements with the authors’ core arguments and more as rhetorical flourishes—a form of “appeal to authority”, (notably without citing particular page numbers or chapters) intended to legitimate the author’s own reductive theses, forcing the reader to question if Ilyas has even read the books he is invoking. This critical review will examine how each of these works is invoked and contrast that invocation with the actual content of the cited references, while also highlighting where misrepresentations, oversimplifications, and ahistorical assertions emerge.

1. Misrepresenting Noam Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle

Ilyas’s Claim

Ilyas suggests that Noam Chomsky criticized the Palestinian leadership for its “reactionary and belligerent” approach, allegedly insisting that Palestinians needed to cultivate trust with global powers instead of leveling accusations of injustice. (p. 70) In Ilyas’s narrative, Chomsky’s main criticism is that Palestinian leadership confined themselves to moral protests rather than forging pragmatic diplomatic alliances.

What Chomsky Actually Says

In his book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Chomsky delivers a detailed historical account of how Israel and the United States consistently opposed the “international consensus” that emerged in the post-1967 era, which moved toward recognizing the national rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. Far from framing the Palestinians as solely or chiefly at fault, Chomsky details how the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and several Arab states made repeated offers for a negotiated settlement—offers largely dismissed by the U.S. and successive Israeli governments.

Chomsky demonstrates that after the 1970s, mainstream PLO factions increasingly echoed international calls for a two-state solution. The main rejectionists, according to Chomsky, were the United States and Israel, not the Palestinian leadership. He concedes that the PLO’s diplomatic strategy was imperfect and sometimes reactive, but his overarching thesis is that U.S.-Israeli intransigence, fortified by massive military and economic aid from Washington, was and remains the single largest obstacle to a just resolution.

In the official U.S. narrative, Washington and Israel have supposedly pursued a peaceful settlement, while the Arab states (excluding post-1977 Egypt) and the “terroristic” PLO have been rejectionist. Chomsky overturns this account by examining the historical record since 1967. Beginning with President Nasser’s acceptance of the Rogers Plan in 1970, he demonstrates how the confrontation states and the PLO gradually joined an international consensus favoring a negotiated settlement—evidenced by repeated peace offers from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and others, culminating in Prince Fahd’s 1981 plan and the 1982 Fez summit resolutions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Israel—ironically in step with minority Arab factions—have consistently opposed this consensus. Chomsky details an internal U.S. policy debate following the June War: Secretary of State Rogers advocated aligning with UN Resolutions 242 and 338, but Henry Kissinger’s more hawkish stance prevailed. Since then, American policy has effectively supported “Greater Israel,” backing Israel’s retention of the occupied territories in service of U.S. strategic interests.

Israeli policy under both its major parties similarly rejects the international consensus. Likud favored extending sovereignty over all occupied territories; Labor, via the Allon Plan, sought to keep most of the West Bank while offloading its heavily populated areas to Jordan. Both categorically oppose an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan. Faced with Arab and PLO initiatives, Israel routinely reacts with alarm (Chomsky christens it ‘panic’) or aggression—expanding settlements, ignoring peace overtures (as with Sadat’s 1971 offer), or threatening military action, such as its overflights during Fahd’s 1981 plan. To quote Chomsky: “In fact it was not only the Saudi Arabian peace plan and other conciliatory gestures of the Arab states that were causing the familiar “panic” by 1981-82. A still more serious problem was the increasing difficulty in portraying the PLO as merely a gang of terrorists, particularly in light of its observance of the U.S.-arranged cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border despite much Israeli provocation. There is good reason to believe that this threat was one prime factor impelling Israel to invade Lebanon.”²Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and Palestinians. South End Press. p. 79

By selectively focusing on a supposed “failure” of the Palestinians to build alliances with global powers, Ilyas diminishes the significant asymmetry in power that Chomsky goes out of his way to highlight. Ilyas’s claim that Chomsky indicts the Palestinians for remaining “confined to accusations of injustice” turns the historical context on its head: Chomsky thoroughly documents Palestinian proposals for peace and autonomy, as well as the systematic refusal of the U.S. and Israel to engage in serious negotiations. This selective reading thus transforms Chomsky’s nuanced discussion of power relations into a one-sided indictment of the Palestinian leadership.

2. Misusing Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine

Ilyas’s Claim

Ilyas references Edward Said to suggest that “due to its religious framing, the [Palestinian] conflict became irrelevant to a large segment of the international community,”³Ishraq US English Edition (January 2025) p. 69. Url <https://www.ghamidi.org/ishraqus/> implying that Said criticized Palestinians for failing to cast their cause in universal, humanistic terms. Ilyas’s paraphrase implies that had Palestinians framed their struggle purely in human-rights language, they could have bridged cultural gaps worldwide.

What Said Actually Argues

Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979) is a foundational text that examines how Zionist settler colonialism and Western imperial ideologies treated Palestine as “a land without people.” Said meticulously documents how Zionist leaders, reflecting European colonial attitudes, came to view Palestinians as either invisible or inherently inferior. He critiques the West’s racial and cultural biases, which Israel exploited to delegitimize Palestinian claims to their land.

While Said does encourage the internationalization of the Palestinian issue—urging Palestinians to articulate their struggle in ways that resonate with global audiences—he never reduces the conflict merely to a failure of “religious” versus “humanist” framing. Said’s deeper argument is that Western racism and Orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims contributed to the dehumanization of Palestinians in global discourse.⁴ Said, The Question of Palestine. Vintage Books.1979 pp. 26, 33, 81-82, 88-90. The problem was not that Palestinians used an exclusively religious narrative; the problem, Said shows, was a prevailing global power structure that ignored or disparaged Palestinian voices, no matter how they were framed. Also, note the dates. Said’s book came out in 1979. It is a truly bizarre claim that Palestinians have failed to internationalize the issue and seek support from allies from erstwhile colonized nations. The world’s most famous, and arguably most successful, ‘boycott’ movement is BDS. Palestinian solidarity ranges from Latin America to Vietnam, to South Africa. Does Ilyas need to be reminded who took the case against Israel to the ICJ?

Ilyas’s distilled claim that “Edward Said argued for a purely secular, universal approach” thus ignored Said’s broader thesis about Orientalism and racial hierarchies in the West. Said does argue that connecting with worldwide human-rights movements could help garner support, and were Said alive today, it is not likely he would hold his previous view (For Ilyas, benefit, let us mention here that Said died in 2003). But it must be reiterated that Said also underscores, that historically, even thoroughly human-rights-based Palestinian appeals often fell on deaf ears in Euro-American power centers conditioned by imperialist frameworks. Thus, Ilyas’s reading flattens a multi-faceted argument into a simplistic moral directive.

3. Oversimplifying Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage

Ilyas’s Claim

Ilyas invokes Khalidi’s The Iron Cage to assert that Palestinian leaders failed to “comprehend the balance of power in global politics” and should have emulated South African anti-apartheid strategies more effectively. He implies that Khalidi unequivocally faults Palestinian leadership for their shortcomings in securing support from China, Russia, and non-Western nations.

What Khalidi Actually Argues

In The Iron Cage, published in 2007, Khalidi critiques the historical leadership of the Palestinian national movement, pointing out missed diplomatic opportunities and a certain lack of strategic foresight.⁵Khalidi, The Iron Cage, The Story of the Palestinian Struggle. 2007. Beacon press. However, his analysis does not simply blame Palestinians for being “unable to comprehend” global politics.⁶Ishraq US English Edition (January 2025) p.70. Url <https://www.ghamidi.org/ishraqus/> Rather, he situates their struggle in a broader context of colonial legacies, external manipulations, and local divisions. Khalidi acknowledges the internal Palestinian weaknesses—such as factional rivalries and reliance on inconsistent foreign patronage—but consistently underscores the larger structural forces at work, including the powerful role of external actors (the U.S., Israel, and various Arab regimes). It is also difficult to understand how Ilyas could have missed the image of the “iron cage”, which Khalidi uses to describe a political and military system imposed by the British mandatory government; a system which so severely restricted the Palestinian leadership, almost effectively paralyzing its ability to undertake any meaningful political initiatives.

Notice also that Khalidi’s book that Iylas quoted us was from 2006, and so almost 20 years old. Khalidi’s more recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), expands upon these analyses by framing the conflict as one of ongoing settler colonialism supported by Western powers. True, he continues to criticize the Palestinian leadership, but he does so while emphasizing how the asymmetry of power, international complicity, and historical injustices have stacked the deck against Palestinians, a point Ilyas is unable and unwilling to understand. In short, while Khalidi identifies strategic failures, his overall position foregrounds a systemic critique rather than merely lamenting an absence of strategic pragmatism.

Ilyas’s citation of Khalidi to claim that the Palestinians should have simply broadened their global alliances glosses over the complex international machinations that Khalidi painstakingly details. Khalidi does not argue that the primary shortcoming was the leadership’s inability to woo non-Western states; rather, he shows how Palestinian efforts were thwarted by both internal disunity and powerful external forces invested in maintaining the status quo. Summarizing Khalidi as a straightforward condemnation of the Palestinian approach oversimplifies his nuanced historical analysis.

4. Ilyas’s failed attempts at “Appeals to Authority”

Selective Quotations and Context Omission

It is a hallmark of an “appeal to authority” when an author cites well-known scholars primarily for their names, rather than genuinely engaging with or even accurately representing their arguments. In Ilyas’s article, the invocation of Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Rashid Khalidi creates the veneer of thorough scholarship. However, the passages excerpted or paraphrased in the text often omit the complexity and nuance found in these authors’ works.

Reductive Framing

Another issue is the reductive framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a straightforward failing of Palestinian religious leadership. By repeatedly suggesting that Palestinian leaders were either “reactionary” or “belligerent,” Ilyas’s narrative resonates with talking points frequently found in Israeli and certain Western media, which portray Palestinians as ideological zealots, inflexible, or strategically naive. Citing respected scholars who, in reality, lay much of the blame at the feet of U.S.-Israeli policies (while not absolving the Palestinian leadership of flaws) can give an unwarranted gloss of authority to Ilyas’s narrower thesis.

Ahistoricity and Oversimplification

Ilyas’s discussion flattens decades of shifting historical and geopolitical contexts into a single moralizing narrative. In truth, each of the cited scholars meticulously chronicles how the historical record is rife with shifts in leadership, repeated attempts at diplomacy, evolving international alliances, and internal Palestinian debates on strategy. Painting the entire saga as a failure of “religious leadership” disregards the many socio-political and military factors at play, from external patronage and superpower rivalries to ideological factionalism within both Israeli and Palestinian camps.

Conclusion

Hassan Ilyas’s article, while pretending to be rooted in authoritative scholarship, does not offer a substantive or faithful engagement with Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, or Rashid Khalidi. Instead, it deploys them as talismans of credibility—“appeals to authority” that lend weight to an argument lacking the historical depth and nuance that these authors themselves insist upon. In doing so, Ilyas misrepresents the central thrust of each scholar’s work. Noam Chomsky is not primarily lambasting Palestinians for diplomatic failures; he is demonstrating the structural power imbalance and U.S.-Israeli rejectionism that stymied Palestinian efforts. Rashid Khalidi critiques Palestinian leadership but from within a broader historical context of colonialism, external interference, and internal fragmentation, not merely from a vantage of missed alliances. Finally, Edward Said elucidates how deeply entrenched Western biases—and the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians—have shaped the conflict, pointing to Orientalist legacies rather than a simple problem of “religious framing.”

If Ilyas had engaged these texts more closely, he might have crafted an argument that acknowledges both the internal missteps of Palestinian leadership and the external geostrategic forces that have historically undermined Palestinian aspirations. A nuanced reading would demand grappling with questions of colonial history, international law, and the global power asymmetries that persist to this day.

Ultimately, the flaw in Ilyas’s approach is not merely factual—it is methodological. Perhaps in his zeal to exonerate the tone-deaf and ahistorical comments aired from the YouTube Channel of the Institute he runs in recent months, Ilyas has now chosen to double-down on the chutzpah by appealing to the authority of renowned scholars, all of whom have in their lifetimes consistently seen Palestine through the lens of an oppressed, colonized people who have been again and again deprived of their most basic rights and gaslit by the imperial powers as being belligerent and uncompromising. In a context as ethically and politically charged as Palestine, intellectual rigor and historical precision are essential, but perhaps even this is too much to expect from an institute whose platform has been putting out publications about ‘civilized empires’. This article, in its distorted appeals to authority, stripped of context, serves neither intellectual honesty nor the pursuit of just and lasting peace. But then again, Ilyas believes that occupied peoples like the Palestinians can only hope to buy peace by signing off any right to justice.⁷Ishraq US English Edition (January 2025) p.68-72. Url <https://www.ghamidi.org/ishraqus/>

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