Khalidi resists questions that demand a crystal ball. He is a historian who prefers to focus on analyzing what past actions tell us. His next book will focus on Ireland, and how it was a laboratory for Palestine. It stems from a fellowship he had recently at Trinity College, Dublin. He says that to understand Palestine, you have to understand British colonialism more broadly. He is hoping to examine key figures in the British aristocracy whose Irish experience was central to everything they did afterwards – people such as Arthur James Balfour, Sir Charles Tegart and Gen Sir Frank Kitson. He is hoping to show how the Irish experience was exported to India, Egypt and Palestine, and then returned to Ireland again during the Troubles, having been magnified in the colonies. “It is astonishing how personnel and counter-insurgency techniques, like torture, assassination, find their roots with the British in Ireland,” Khalidi says.