De honderdjarige oorlog tegen Palestina: een geschiedenis van kolonialisme en verzet

by Rashid Khalidi, Annemie de Vries (translator)

In 1899 schreef de burgemeester van Jeruzalem, gealarmeerd door de oproep om een joodse staat in Palestina te vestigen, een bezorgde brief aan Theodor Herzl, grondlegger van het moderne zionisme. De brief eindigde met de woorden: ‘In naam van God, moge Palestina met rust gelaten worden.’ Zo begint Rashid Khalidi, de achter-achterneef van deze burgemeester, dit boek.

Op basis van niet eerder gebruikt archiefmateriaal en verslagen van generaties familieleden, zet Khalidi gangbare interpretaties van het Israëlisch-Palestijnse conflict op hun kop. Hij schetst het patroon van een oorlog tegen de Palestijnen, van de Balfourverklaring in 1917 tot de Arabisch-Israëlische oorlog van 1948, de Israëlische invasie van Libanon in 1982 en het steeds weer falende vredesproces.

De honderdjarige oorlog tegen Palestina is geen verhaal van slachtofferschap, noch probeert het de fouten van Palestijnse leiders of de opkomst van nationalistische bewegingen aan beide kanten te ontkennen. Maar door de geschiedenis op een heldere manier in kaart te brengen vanuit Palestijns perspectief, geeft dit boek een nieuwe kijk op een conflict dat tot op heden voortduurt.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Middle East, Audiobook, War, Historical

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2020

About the author

Rashid Ismail Khalidi (Arabic: رشيد إسماعيل خالدي; born 18 November 1948) is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.

He has authored a number of books, including The Hundred Years' War on Palestine and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness; has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association; and has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, and the University of Chicago.

For his work on the Middle East, Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.

In October 2010, Khalidi delivered the annual Edward Said memorial lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington. He is the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Colombia University. On October 8, 2024, Khalidi retired from Columbia University citing the university's crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protests, which he had vocally supported, and the transformation of the university into a "hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education" as reasons for his retirement.

Reviews

[Dr. Appu Sasidharan (Dasfill) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tells us about the war Palestine has been fighting for the last one hundred years. This is written from a Muslim perspective by the author whose family was actively involved in many of the events mentioned in this book.

What I learned from this book
1) Balfour Declaration
On behalf of Britain's cabinet on November 2, 1917, Arthur James Balfour made a declaration known as the Balfour declaration. It supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It comprised just a single sentence that promulgated Jewish people's attempt to settle in Palestine. Many people commented that the declaration threw platitudes at the Palestinian people. The situation was highly poignant as many Palestinian people sadly lost their homeland due to this declaration's long-term effect.

"His Majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

2) Colonialism and its impact over Palestine.
Colonialism is considered one of the leading causes of the degradation of natural resources and economic instability in many countries. Palestine also had to suffer a lot due to this colonialism. There were some positive impacts too for colonialism. But in many instances, we have seen people exaggerating the positive effects of it and avoiding discussing how their imprudent measures affect the proletariat.

"'You cannot do without us,' Lord Curzon said in one of the speeches."

3) Zionism and its impact on Palestinian population.
Zionism is an ideology among Jewish people that support a Jewish state in the region of Palestine. It mainly deals with things on behalf of Israel. The people who support Zionism consider it a liberation movement, while those against it consider it colonialist and racist. The polemic effort of Muslim people in Palestine to prevent encroachment of their birthplace via the channel of Zionism was overcome by Israel's mighty military strength and economic power. It was a precipitous task for the Palestinian people to defend their pristine homeland. Muslims consider Zionism as one of the quixotic ideologies that worsened the conflict in Palestine. In contrast, Jews consider it an indispensable ideology due to the Middle East and European events.

"The Zionists' colonial enterprise, aimed at taking over the country, necessarily had to produce resistance. "If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living," Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, "you must find a garrison for the land or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces." At least initially, only the armed forces provided by Britain could overcome the natural resistance of those being colonized"

4) How Hitler's antisemitism affected Palestine?
Hitler's antisemitic measures have affected the Palestine people to a great extend. Hitler's unjust killing of Jews in the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau is considered one of History's darkest chapters. The amount of pain Jews had to pass through was unfathomable. Some of the Jews who were afraid of the measures taken by Hitler immigrated to Palestine. This, in turn, caused an increase in the Jewish population in Palestine, and the demand for a Jewish state increased. This caused more problems for the Muslims living in Palestine.

"Jewish immigration as a result of persecution by the Nazi regime in Germany raised the Jewish population in Palestine from just 18 percent of the total in 1932 to over 31 percent in 1939. Hitler's ascendancy proved to be one of the most important events in the modern histories of both Palestine and Zionism."

5) Divide and rule policy
The author says that the divide and rule policy adopted by the authorities complicated the Palestine situation to this extent.

"The Palestinians fight against colonialism were undermined by the hierarchical, conservative and divided nature of Palestinian society and politics, characteristic of many in the region, and further sapped by a sophisticated policy of divide and rule adopted by the mandatory authorities, aided and abetted by the Jewish agency. This colonial strategy may have reached its peak of perfection in Palestine after hundreds of years of maturation in Ireland, India and Egypt."

6) Nakba
Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, mark the Nakba, or "catastrophe," referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. The author's grandparents were also displaced among many people in 1948.

"The Nakba represented a watershed in the History of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium- an aboriginal Arab country- into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority."

7) Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the USA
America has been playing a significant role in trying to control the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time. Roosevelt, Truman, Kissinger, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Trump, and even the latest Biden administration had played a crucial role in it. In 1945 Roosevelt met and pledged his support to Ibn Sa'ud. It lasted for just nine months. In November 1945, Harry Truman said that Zionism was a political necessity, supporting its ideology. The reason he told for this support was that he would have to answer hundreds of thousands of Jews who are his constituents. (the number of Arab immigrants was meager at that time while the American Jewish population grew from a quarter of a million to four million between 1880 and 1920 which again grew after the Second World War started.)

America almost always supported Israel after Truman. Leaders like Yasser Arafat didn't give much importance to the relation with the USA, which only worsened the situation. The author says that the Israel people were successful in getting the USA's support mainly due to the above reasons. The global opinion in favor of Jews after the holocaust also helped them. Few violent acts that happened due to the pitfalls from Palestinian Muslims only worsened the situation. Palestinian Muslims were considered terrorists by countries like America due to these reasons. Palestinian attempt to protect their homeland was misjudged as a terrorist act. Palestinians were sadly unsuccessful in rectifying this misjudgment for a long time. Only recently, many countries are understanding what exactly is happening in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

"The Palestinian national movement must recognize the true nature of the American stance and undertake dedicated grassroots political and informational work to make its case inside the United States, as the Zionist movement has done for over a century. This task will not necessarily take generations, given the significant shifts that have already occurred in the key sectors of public opinion. There is a great deal to build on."

8) Children in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The death of many children during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has received a lot of international attention recently. The killing of innocent children can't be substantiated for any reason. The pictures of children who died and were injured are disheartening. Even in the recent conflict in 2021, Joe Biden has voiced his support for a ceasefire after widespread protest after seeing the pictures of children injured and killed during the airstrikes.

"From the beginning of the first Intifada to the end of 1996 1,422 Palesians were killed. Of them, 294, or over 20 percent were minors sixteen and under. ”

9) How gulf war affected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The Persian Gulf war conflict badly affected many countries in the Middle East. During the Iraq invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990, almost all the gulf states, including Egypt joined the US-led coalition to fight against Saddam Hussain. Yasser Arafat's miscalculation of the situation was a severe blow to Palestine.

“Yasser Arafat and most of his colleagues miscalculated the Gulf war. Instead of firmly supporting Kuwait against Iraq, Arafat tried to steer a neutral course, offering to mediate between the two sides. His suggestion was ignored by all concerned. ”

My favourite three lines from this book

“The surest way to eradicate a peoples right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.”

"Since from the Zionist vantage point the name Palestine and the very existence of the Palestinians constituted a mortal threat to Israel, the task was to connect these terms indelibly, if they were mentioned at all, with terrorism and hatred, rather than with a forgotten but just cause. For many years, this theme was the core of a remarkably successful public relations offensive, especially in the United States. ”

"Car bombs were a weapon House for the Israeli forces besieging Beirut, and one of their most terrifying instruments of death and destruction- was described by one Mossad officer as "Killing for killing's sake.'"

What could have been better?
Some of the events where Palestinian Muslims had gone wrong, like the Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, leading to the death of 11 Israelis when Palestinian terrorists invaded the Olympic village, were just mentioned passively in this book. This book is indeed written from a Palestinian perspective. Still, I think that events like these that attracted a lot of international attention should also have been discussed more.

Rating
5/5 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has again come under the international radar due to the recent Jerusalem violence when Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza. After reading the initial ten pages itself, we will understand that the author has done a lot of research and hard work for writing this book. This is a must-read book if you want to know about the Palestinian perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The killing of innocent children should never be allowed, whatever the reason may be. Let us hope that all the nations, together with U.N., Israel, and Palestine, will finally work together to end this conflict.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4yg...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tXxb...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCH8f...

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[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for a book that is both depressing and illuminating. This book tells the story of an indigenous people colonized and deprived of their own land over a 100 year period. The first colonization was by the British who conquered Palestine during World War I from the Ottoman Empire. They had issued the Balfour declaration in 1917, stating their intention to provide a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. Although 94% of the population in Palestine in 1917 was Palestinian, the declaration did not promise them the same political or national right guaranteed the Jews.
Britain then embarked on a program granting Jewish immigrants preferred status in their new colony.
Britain even armed Jewish immigrants to help suppress the great revolt against the British from 1936-1939. Britain was following an old colonial strategy of divide and rule, setting two groups against each other. It had used this strategy before, in India, Muslim against Hindu and Ireland, Protestant against Catholic. Britain savagely suppressed the revolt, killing , wounding or exiling 10% of the adult male population. This provided the Zionist movement 2 advantages: they had a nascent military force and it greatly weakened the native population. The subsequent 1947-48 war between the Palestinians and Jewish settlers saw the Zionists win and steal land and homes from thousands of Palestinians. This theft is continuing today. Israel calls it "settlements."
The Palestinian point of view is rarely presented in the US today.
The author frequently compares the Irish rebellion of 1919-21 to the Palestinian rebellion of 1936-39. He comments that the British even used veteran "Black and Tan" soldiers of the Irish rebellion. The "Black and Tans" were renowned for their cruelty. Many of them were criminals that Britain released in return for being part of the force suppressing the Irish rebellion.
The US is actually complicit in the theft of Palestinian land, in that gives billions of dollars yearly to Israel.
There are extensive footnotes, some of which have links to documents in the public domain.
Thanks to the author and Henry Holt & Co for sending me this eARC through NetGalley.
#TheHundredYearsWarOnPalestine #NetGalley
Update April 2, 2025. I posted this review on Amazon 5 years ago. It was accepted and got 110 up votes. Then about 1 year later, it disappeared without any explanation. I waited 3 years and re-posted it. It is still there. See https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
My 110 upvotes were restored. Amazon owns Goodreads, but the GR review never disappeared.

[Whitney Atkinson]

Credit to the Decolonize Palestine reading list for this recommendation!

After not being taught whatsoever about Palestine (or Israel, for that matter), this was the first resource I picked up in the endeavour of teaching myself. I would recommend the audiobook for this book because at times the writing can be decently lengthy and academic. Since this book is an overview of 100 years of history, it wasn't able to delve deep into each era, so I found that with every question this book answered, it made me ask four more. If it's your first time reading deeply into the history of Palestine and Zionism, I would come into it equipped with a basic overview, or else be prepared to continue researching during and after reading!

Just a tip on if you plan to read this: I would start with the conclusion first because it provides a modern-day context and then you can work backwards in time with chapters 1-7 to learn the backstory. I found that last chapter to be most interesting part of the book and it answered a lot of questions I had at the beginning.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There was no escaping the fact that Zionism had clung tightly to the British Empire for support, and had only successfully implanted itself in Palestine thanks to the unceasing efforts of British imperialism. It could not be otherwise…[for] only the British had the means to wage the colonial war that was necessary to suppress Palestinian resistance to the takeover of their country. This war has continued since then, waged sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly, but invariably with the tacit or overt approval, and often the direct involvement, of the leading powers of the day…Today, the conflict that was engendered by this classic nineteenth century European colonial venture in a non-European land, supported from 1917 onward by the greatest Western imperial power of its age, is rarely described in such unvarnished terms…Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project. Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States. Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a national and a colonial settler movement at one and the same time…”
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance

For me, history is generally emotionally neutral. It’s actually something I turn to when I’m having a bad day. After all, by definition, it happened in the past, to someone else. Obviously, I have been moved to great passions by reading of yesteryear’s triumphs and tragedies, its crimes and achievements, but this is never anything that impacts my life in any measurable way. The First World War, for instance, is an out-and-out bummer, but it doesn’t disrupt my mood. And this is saying something, because my mood is super disrupt-able, and almost everything – politics, finances, sports teams, the weather, my kids – can serve to alter it.

This distance – I fully recognize – is a privilege. There are people in the world for whom history is not a discrete event sandwiched between a start date and an end date, and coded with a lesson, but a force that shapes their lives on an ongoing basis.

There is perhaps no better example of this than the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. Even though the antecedents of this conflict stretch back to Biblical times, it still manifests itself today, in ways that are often extraordinarily violent.

With this in mind, it was with some trepidation that I read Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. This sense of apprehension came from knowing that I’d feel compelled to say something about it once I finished. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the literary equivalent of touching a raw nerve, drinking cold water with a sore tooth, poking a hungry bear, and dancing on the third rail, all at once. No matter what is said, someone is going do disagree vehemently.

Anyway, all this means that we’ll proceed slowly and see where we end up.

***

Perhaps the easiest – by which I mean safest – place to start is to answer a simple question about what The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is, and what it is not.

This book is not comprehensive. It couldn’t be. It doesn’t try to be. At a hair over 250 pages of text, definitiveness is an impossibility. There are fifty topics raised in The Hundred Years War on Palestine that each deserve at least 250 pages to approach understanding. It is also not told in the impersonal, third-person, looking-down-from-a-high-tower style that is typical in most histories.

Rather, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is a hybrid. All of it is based on sound scholarship – for Khalidi is a well-respected historian – and often narrates events that he did not witness. However, there are sections – including some of the book’s best – in which he either filters the larger tale of Palestine through the experiences of his family, or describes what he actually saw on the ground.

***

The concision of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is best expressed in its structure, which consists of six chapters corresponding to what Khalidi refers to as six declarations of war against the Palestinian people. These consist of the Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, covering the years 1917-39; the Arab-Israeli War of 1947-48; the Six Day War of 1967; the Lebanese-Israeli War of 1982; the First Intifada, from 1987-95; and the first fourteen years of the 21st century, which includes the failed Camp David Summit, and the Second Intifada.

Khalidi is very particular about the things he wants to cover in depth, and those he does not. This can be frustrating. Take, for example, the first chapter, which covers the largest swath of time of any single segment. Khalidi mentions the shopworn phrase – “a land without a people for a people without a land” – and dispenses with it peremptorily. The expression is demonstrably false, of course, and if it had been true, we wouldn’t be here. Yet instead of filling in the blanks and defining some sense of Palestinian culture and cohesion at the time of the Ottoman’s fall, he just moves on. Later on, though, Khalidi nails a sequence in which he goes through the British Mandate point-by-point, showing how the Palestinians were written out of the decision-making. This shows how good he can be when he takes the time to focus on a topic.

Ultimately, this is not an objective book, in the sense that it tries to see all sides. Khalidi is telling the Palestinian side. This means that an event like the Camp David Accords – which ended with peace between Israel and Egypt – is described as “devastating.” Oftentimes, a lack of objectivity is put forth as a criticism. To me, it’s only a problem when a book is pretending to be impartial, while hiding or misstating facts. Here, Khalidi is very upfront about the positions he’s taking. Furthermore, there are more than enough books in the world coming from a predominantly Israeli viewpoint, so there is no harm – and much good – in a counterweight.

***

In tackling The Hundred Years’s War on Palestine, I decided to make it a tandem read with Martin Gilbert’s Israel: A History. The two books could not be more unalike, and as they sit on my shelf, they look a bit like Laurel and Hardy: one large and rotund, the other small and thin. In terms of prose styles, they are also vastly dissimilar. Gilbert is a plodding writer, most concerned with piling incident upon incident while he creeps methodically down the timeline. Khalidi is sharp and opinionated, and sometimes vibrates with anger. This works especially well in recounting the Lebanese War, which Khalidi experienced with his family in Beirut.

One of the things that struck me, in toggling back and forth between Gilbert and Khalidi, was the way these two volumes seemed to be in dialogue with each other. Unfortunately, the conversation consisted of one shouting past the other, and the other shouting back in turn.

For instance, one of Khalidi’s chief talking points is his insistence that Israel was a “settler-colonial” project. This is an idea that he introduces within the first few pages, and returns to thereafter, even when we reach the point where Israel has become a country-in-being – with nuclear weapons – making its existence firmly established. Khalidi’s argument is a potent one, and if it stings, it probably stings with truth’s edge.

When I turned to Gilbert, and read about the same moments of Jewish arrival, the difference in verbiage struck me. To Gilbert, these “settler-colonists” were “immigrants,” and his sympathy was by-and-large reserved for their oft-harrowing flights from countries that despised them, robbed them, and sometimes murdered them.

There were moments when I wondered at the efficacy of Khalidi’s heavy reliance on rhetoric. I quickly came to see its value, though. Long after I finished The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, I was still pushing through the vastly longer Israel. As I absorbed Gilbert’s reliably standard Western interpretations, Khalidi’s counterinterpretations kept popping into my head, reminding me – if nothing else – that every proposition regarding the Middle East has an obverse side.

***

The so-called “two state solution” has spent decades just out of reach. Right now, it feels we’re a long way from anything meaningful being achieved to those ends. Indeed, momentum seems to be flowing in the opposite direction. It prompts one to recall that even the best books can only do so much. Still, the only way to get anywhere in this tangle of blood memories and grievances is an understanding that the people involved are people, and so share one commonality with everyone else.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not the whole story, by any means. It is a story, and an important one, because it gets told far less often. This gives it a value bordering on necessity.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rashid Khalidi starts his book by vaguely attacking other books on Israel and Palestine for their one sided narrative that favors Israel, without providing much detail on their historiographic failings. He points out that there is a need to provide a Palestinian narrative using extensive primary sources, which is true. He does not do that however, and instead resorts to primarily relying upon personal and family stories. When he uses historic sources, he proceeds to leave out rebellions, massacres, entire wars and whole sections of essential biographies, that would be easily criticized as callous mistakes, if it was not clear that he carefully left them out to fit his narrative. He left out the Arab revolt of 1929, when Jews were raped and massacred, and the second holiest city in Judaism, Hebron, was ethnically cleansed of Jews. He left out the entire Nazi past of Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husseini. He only mentioned the Yom Kippur War once. Why? Because each of those facts disprove key points in his narrative.

On the the note of the Grand Mufti, the only time Khaldi mentioned Nazi Germany, was to note the damage his “presence” there did to the Palestinian cause. Thus he seemed to care more about image of the cause than the deaths of Jews. He repeats this disregard when talking about how suicide bombers killed innocent Israelis and he talks about how it was foolish, because it looked bad in the media. This highlights another problem with this book. For a book that is oozing with emotion, personal stories and cries for sympathy, he shows almost no empathy to Jews killed in the long conflict or at any other time or place.

He made strong points about Israel’s botched invasion of Lebanon and the failures of the Oslo Accords. Yet by the time I came to that part of the book, I was suspicious of everything he said. I can’t imagine the effect that the trauma of the siege of Beirut of 1982 and the Nakba had on him and his family. However, does not give him the right to produce a false historical narrative void of any empathy towards Jews. Regardless to your feeling on this deeply emotional conflict, this book offers an extremely narrow and one sided narrative, that takes shocking liberties with historic data.

[emma]

🍉

[Lubinka Dimitrova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once a person starts reading about the Palestine conflict, they can never un-see Israel and USA's stance on this issue. It is mind-boggling how this matter has been mishandled, misrepresented and ignored for more than a century now. And one can never go back to seeing Jews as only victims of another mind-boggling genocide. Truly a heart-wrenching and deeply insightful book.

[Gadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot of truth here, but also a lot of strategic omission, to an extent that even I — not a professional historian — felt was deliberate and wrong. I was hoping Khalidi would bring out a new perspective, a way to understand the conflict and the Palestinian view that would be more productive, but instead this felt — in tone, and in the selection of events — like propaganda.

I listened to the book, and noted all of my skepticism about his reporting of history:

Why did Palestinian Arabs not support the Peel commission at all, or offer a cogent counteroffer, either then or in 1947? Khalidi doesn't engage with those proposals in detail; he doesn't confront the Arab belief at the time that Jews had no place in Palestine — a refusal to engage with the Zionist idea that Jews had nowhere to go and that, in hindsight, Palestine was the only solution for them. What would he have done, if he were a Jew in the 1930s? Is asking him to consider this question too much?

Khalidi has nothing but criticism for Abdullah in Jordan, for stifling Palestinian nationalism — though he was one of the only Arab leaders to give them full citizenship after 1948. Why was there no discussion of how they are fully naturalized citizens of Jordan? Does Khalidi wish for refugees to be denied absorption into their new countries?

He mentions Abu Iyad — as an important Palestinian leader, later assassinated — and discusses him admiringly, without mentioning at all that he masterminded the Munich Massacre. Did he ever express regret for helping plan the murder of Israeli athletes? And why would Khalidi completely fail to mention that about Abu Iyad? Why would Khalidi fail to mention the Munich Massacre in the book at all? That seems to have been a central moment in the Palestinian story, an instance in which the Palestinian cause commanded global attention, and perhaps a major backwards step in their struggle — completely ignored by Khalidi. Is this because he intended for this book to target Western audiences that would not sympathize with the strategies of the Palestinian movement?

The failure of the Oslo accords, the Camp David negotiations in 2000 — no mention of the sticking point of refugee return, or of the Clinton Parameters for peace that Barak accepted but Arafat did not? No mention of the 2008 negotiations, in which Olmert drew up an offer on a napkin that Abbas left on the table? Sure, all these negotiations were flawed, the offer may not have been attractive to Palestinians, or the Palestinian leaders may not have felt that they had the popular mandate to accept them (a different problem altogether) — but there was scant or no mention of these discussions in this book. How can Khalidi claim to disagree with the Zionist thesis of Palestinian rejectionism without addressing the most recent and salient points of data that support it?

Khalidi very heavily criticizes the Oslo process and its facade of peace, which he claims concealed the continued entrenchment of Israeli occupation — but he doesn't cite the horrible suicide bombings during this period that cooled the Israeli public's desire for peace. He only brings up the terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada section, and even then more as a strategic failure for the Palestinian movement.

When discussing the start of the Second Intifada, he mentions the tunnel built under the Temple Mount but doesn’t explain its archeological purpose or the defamatory propaganda that inflamed Palestinians' hysteria about it, and about Sharon's ascent to the Temple Mount. He mentions the Israeli bulldozing of the neighborhood adjacent to the Western Wall — which, yes, was awful — but he never mention Jordanian and Palestinian destruction and desecration of the Jewish quarter after 1947. And the most aggravating thing for me, personally, was his language around terrorist attacks: Suicide bombings “followed” other events, "were carried out" by Hamas, etc. — were they not heavily supported by the Palestinian public at the time? Who carried them out? And does he not see that Israelis' response to these attacks would be utter unwillingness of any rapprochement with Palestinians?

Anyway. Those were my thoughts as I was reading, and on the whole I agree with the prism that Khalidi uses to view this conflict: It is at heart a settler conflict vs. native encounter, and Israel is mostly in the wrong, seeing as it has the upper hand in nearly every way. But the book proved to be a wholly minor addition to my understanding of the conflict — saying nothing new, sticking by the Palestinian narrative, while also calculatingly omitting events that could lead a Western audience to lose sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

[S R · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here is a NY Times article review of the book where you can get the gist of the entire book: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/bo...

I feel that the author's narrative is overwhelmingly one of Palestinian victimhood without any responsibility.
I can have compassion for situations throughout history, but my hope is that a people would grow beyond being victims in a healthy manner; get the corrupt leaders who are stealing money from the people out; take the billions of dollars that have been poured into the Palestinian government and create an infrastructure for a healthy state that can help the country to move into an independent country not dependent on all of the welfare dollars. Stop spending the money to build terror tunnels and stop paying the families to kill or be a suicide bomber with the "pay for slay" program.

I took many notes when reading and it would take a few pages, but here are a few things that I noted. The author creates a Palestinian Nationalism that was part of his personal family history, and projects his personal narrative as a representative of the Arab population in the first half of the 20th century who, in fact did not see themselves at that time as a distinctive people.

On moral equivalence, the author's statistics count all Palestinians as victims even those who committed acts of terrorism and all Palestinians are refugees for perpetuity.

He claims that the Palestinians are the only true indigenous people and that they shouldn’t accept Israel in any territorial dimension since the entire area is Palestinian Arab land.
He dismisses the possibility of two states for two peoples as fiction. His goal is not 2 states for 2 people, but the end of the Jewish state.
I see this as his rationalizing the eradication of the entire country.

He claims the Arabs were never going to attack Israel in the six-day war omitting clear evidence of Arab troop movement, removal of UN peacekeepers, and the closure of traffic to Israel via the Red Sea

It is unconscionable that he used classic antisemitic trope, “infestation” of Jews in the Trump administration and highlights “Jewish” neoconservatives for controlling US policy. He describes a dual loyalty when referring to former US ambassador Dennis Ross, whom he claims colluded with Netanyahu and works with the Israel lobby against American interests. Who is really working against American interests?

If all Palestinians are refugees for perpetuity, would Palestinian Americans have a dual loyalty? I would hope not.

I have more notes, but that is probably enough for now.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reminded me of Jakarta Method. A deeply human yet academic and critical look at Palestine and their oppression and resistance. While very critical of Palestinian leadership, Khalidi is still offering a distinctly Palestinian perspective on this story, which is not something I'd gotten before.

In the book and elsewhere, it is mentioned that Khalidi was used as a smear against Obama in 08, as they were colleagues and friends. Obama didn't even bother defending his friend, which is exactly what he did to Palestine when he got into office and ignored Israel's most violent siege against Palestine in the 100 year history of this conflict. I find it interesting that McCain called Khalidi a terrorist, and that Obama didn't defend him, because Khalidi represents a pretty moderate perspective on Palestine. He's critical of violence against civilians, denounces antisemitism, and writes beautifully about Israelis' connection to Palestine, as most were now born there. If there's ever going to be peace, his view should be the starting point for discussion. This does not seem likely while the far right have captured israeli politics and have helped create a deeply racist society.

I highly recommend reading this for a critical and accurate, while also beautifully written story of Palestine.

[Samra Faruki · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book. Very comprehensive and meticulously researched book. What makes this book more amazing is the fact that the author lived through the history himself and witnessed much of what happened. His family had ties to Palestine from the very beginning and he himself met with so many instrumental and influential people that were core in the Palestine world.

This book taught me so much. Not just about Palestine but about imperial powers. That the British empire and other empires still have their previous colonial countries in a chokehold. And they’re not letting go. These previously colonized countries are not independent at all.

Anyway I’m so glad I read this book. It really laid bare what Israel and America have jointly done to Palestine and the people of Palestine.

The reason it took me such a long time to read was because it was so hard to read the atrocities of US and Israel that they levied on the people of Palestine.

[Talkincloud]

Jeżeli chcecie zrozumieć, dlaczego w Strefie Gazy dzieje się to, co się dzieje — przeczytajcie.

[Philoctetes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Propaganda. The book is biased and gives only the “Palestinian “ argument. The Palestinians are Arabs, they’re not indigenous in the region. They conquered the region in the seventh century, during the Muslim conquests of the caliphate. The Zionist movement envisioned a modern state where Muslims and Jews could coexist. Theodore Herzl believed that the Arabs would benefit from the more modern and cultured European Jews. Instead the Arabs in any chance they got tried to annihilate the Jews, like the Hebron massacre of 1929.
The author doesn't even mention this massacre of the Jewish residents of Hebron. 69 civilians were massacred, among them 24 students. Besides Hebron, during the same riots, another 62 Jews were massacred, a total of 131, at the instigation of the Nazi collaborator Gran mufti Al Husseini, who falsely claimed that the Jews were killing Arabs. The author doesn't mention that Al Husseini traveled to Germany and met with Hitler and other Nazi officials. When Hitler told him that he intended to get rid of the European Jews by sending them to Palestine, Al Husseini suggesteda "better" solution. Burn them, kill them.
The Arabs have no more right to the land than the Jews. The Arabs, who the author claims that they live in an apartheid state, have more rights and freedom than any Arab country. In Israel there are Arab opposition parties in the Knesset (parliament). Is there any opposition allowed in any Arab countries? In Gaza, where Hamas expelled all the PLO sympathizers after it took power? Or in Israel, where in the Palestinian authority area Abbas of the PLO won a four year term and never held elections again and has been in power for 19 years?
The author is biased and can’t fool people who are open minded and look for the truth. His truth can only convince naïve and ignorant people. Freedom loving people from the western world can’t be convinced by the halfway truth of the Arab narrative. As I mentioned with examples, the biased author hides the truth. He's not an historia, he's a propagandist.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genocide: (n) The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

It is a sad irony that a nation-state built primarily for a group of people who suffered a near-successful genocidal campaign by a psychotic world leader in the 20th century has, in the 21st century, engaged in a similar genocidal campaign against another group of people, an almost-perfect textbook example of the oppressed becoming an oppressor.

Please don’t twist my words, either. I am not being Antisemitic in that statement. Criticizing the colonial policies of the Israeli government should not imply a hostility or hatred of the Jewish people. Unfortunately, the world being what it is, such a statement will inevitably be misinterpreted.

The truth, though, is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used the Israeli-Hamas War that started on October 7, 2023 as the impetus to continue a deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip that began roughly more than a hundred years ago.

Rashid Khalidi’s 2020 book “The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine” is an immensely eye-opening history of the conflict that has turned an area of the Middle East that is considered sacred by three of the major world religions into a profane killing field.

Blaming Israel is disingenuous, of course, as British Imperialism is as much at fault as the popular Zionist movement at the turn of the last century for creating the Palestinian displacement. In what has now become known as the Balfour Declaration—a single sentence recorded in a November 1917 cabinet meeting by the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arthur J. Balfour—-Britain essentially declared its support for the eventual creation of a Jewish state in what was the country of Palestine. Perhaps nothing more than a statement to appease the growing number of Jews supportive of the Zionist movement in Europe at that time, this statement threw open a door that led directly to the creation of Israel many years later, a prospect that many indigenous Palestinians feared.

Jewish settlements, with the support of Britain, began to appear in Palestine after the First World War, bringing an already-existing Jewish population of roughly 6% of the whole to roughly 18% by 1926.

In 1947, The United Nations General Assembly voted for the partition of Palestine. Known as resolution 181, the plan provided an area of the country (42%) for the Arab population, an area of the country (56%) for the Jewish population, and the remainder (2%)—-an area comprised of the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and surrounds—-designated as an “international zone”.

It was only a year later that Israel officially became a country, under David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency. Helping to establish legitimacy was U.S. President Harry Truman’s recognition of the state on the same day it became the State of Israel, May 14, 1948.

Almost immediately, the violent upheaval that resulted in roughly 750,000 Arab Palestinians expelled from their homes began in earnest by the new Israeli government. Called the “Nakba” (an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe”), this ethnic cleansing of Palestine ushered in a new era of violence on both sides.

The Israeli narrative of this event vastly deviates from the Palestinian perspective. The tendency by some Israelis even today to downplay, ignore, or completely refute the violence committed by its own government during this time period ironically earns it the expression “Nakba denial”.

Palestinian militancy grew stronger in the subsequent years, eventually culminating in the foundation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), initiated by the Arab League (comprised of the seven countries of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, North Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Transjordan), in May 1964. This was the first organization to officially represent the Palestinian people.

The group Hamas was formed many year later, in 1987.

The late 1960s was the beginning of what Khalidi refers to as “the classical period of the Arab-Israeli conflict”, in which the United States and Israel became unofficial “partners” during the Cold War against Russia, which “unofficially” offered support to militant Palestinian groups.

Amidst the violence perpetrated by Israel and militant Palestinian groups, it is important to keep in mind the vast number of innocent Palestinian people—-children, especially—-caught in the crosshairs of this conflict. Just as it is wrong to lump all Israelis together as anti-Palestinian, it is equally wrong to lump all Palestinians as terrorists. Unfortunately, this is essentially what happened.

Over time, the PLO denounced many of its own militant tactics, such as suicide bombing, and became simply a political arm of the Palestinian people. Many times, the group came close to getting countries such as the U.S. and Israel to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian people as a nation-state without a nation. But a two-state solution has never been adequately devised.

If any progress was made with the countless talks and accords over the years (and, frankly, there hasn’t been much), President Donald Trump set the conflict back considerably with his proposed peace plan announced in 2020, a plan rejected almost unanimously by Palestinians.

Then, October 2023 happened, where Hamas launched a full-scale attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip. According to recent data, roughly 1,200 Israelis have been killed and 5,341 injured; roughly 35,091 Palestinians have been killed and 78,827 injured.

Khalidi’s book is a good start if you want to understand the situation overseas. He lays bare his own personal history, one that divulges some of his own potential biases, but his book manages to be as objective an account of the last hundred years as is possible.

[Saman · Rating 5 out of 5]

آقای رشید خالدی در این کتاب به بررسی مفید،خواندنی،جذاب و پر نکته ای از نزاع بین اسرائیل و فلسطین میپردازه که باعث شد بسیاری از سوالات و مجهولات ذهنی من در این رابطه پاسخ داده بشه و تبدیل به یکی از بهترین کتابهایی شد که در زمینه تاریخ جهان مطالعه کردم.او کل تاریخ فلسطین رو بررسی نمی‌کنه، بلکه شش بزنگاه مهم رو مورد بررسی قرار میده که هر کدوم از این شش مرحله، باعث ایجاد یک اتفاق جدید، یک سیاست جدید، یک خروجی جدید در رابطه بین فلسطین و اسرائیل قلمداد میشه. .او در کتاب علاوه بر ذکر جنایات و عهدشکنی ها و انواع و اقسام ظلم و زورگویی های اسرائیل به خوبی به مخاطب ریشه درگیری، علل ادامه دار شدن این درگیری و همچنین یک دید عمیق از صد سال جنگ از سال 1917 تا 2017 به مخاطب ارائه میده.البته بحث کتاب فقط گفتن خیانت ها و اقدامات منفی اسرائیل و حامی همیشگی‌اش آمریکا نیست، بلکه در بیان ویژگی های گروه های مختلف فلسطینی مثل فتح و ساف و حماس و تشکیلات خودگردان، علاوه بر اقدامات و اتخاد سیاست های مناسبشون در برهه های گوناگون از اقدامات اشتباه و منفی و پر هزینه و بی دستاوردشون هم صحبت می‌کنه که ارزش محتوای کتاب رو بالا میبره. در ادامه معرفی این کتاب به غایت خواندنی، خلاصه ای مختصر از مطالب هر فصل رو یادداشت کردم:


فصل اول: نخستین اعلان جنگ، 1917 تا 1939
در این فصل ریشه اصلی نزاع فلسطین و اسرائیل شرح داده میشه. بعد از پایان جنگ جهانی اول و فروپاشی امپراتوری عثمانی، بالفور وزیر خارجه بریتانیا بیانیه ای صادر میکنه که معروف میشه به بیانیه بالفور و در اون اشاره میکنه که دولت بریتانیا تصمیم گرفته یک خانه ملی برای یهودیان در فلسطین تاسیس کنه.این سرآغاز مسائلی میشه که به تعبیر نویسنده یک جنگ صد ساله شروع میشه.بعد از این قضیه مهاجرت یهودیان به فلسطین شدت میگیره و جمعیت یهودی فلسطین که تا سال 1917 فقط 6 درصد کل فلسطین رو تشکیل میدادند تبدیل به 18 درصد تا سال 1926 میشه .این رشد جمعیت یهودیان تا سال 1932 متوقف میشه و پس از اون و با قدرت رسیدن نازی ها در آلمان و آزار و اذیت بیشتر یهودیان، مجددا جمعیت یهودی به سمت فلسطین روانه میشه. فقط در سال 1935 حدود 60 هزار مهاجر یهودی به فلسطین میان که این تعداد از کل جمعیت یهودی فلسطین در سال 1917 بیشتر میشه! رهبران فلسطین در این سالها ضعیف عمل میکنند و به ادعای نویسنده جامعه فلسطین هم واکنش دیرهنگامی به بیانیه بالفور میده و انگار ابتدا متوجه نبودند چه کلاه گشادی داره سرشون میره. در سالهای 1936 تا 1939 یک اعتصاب گسترده و به تبع اون شورش بزرگی از طرف فلسطینیان رخ میده که به بدترین و محکم ترین شکل ممکن توسط بریتانیا سرکوب میشه.اینجا نظر کارشناسان نظامی که معتقد بودند برنامه صهیونیستی جز با زور تفنگ اجرا شدنی نیست شدت میگیره.
فصل دوم: دومین اعلان جنگ، 1948 تا 1949:
انگلیس به دلیل مسائل بعد جنگ جهانی دوم بیخیال قمومیت بر فلسطین میشه و اوضاع رو میسپره به سازمان ملل، سازمان ملل هم با قطعنامه 181 بدترین سناریو ممکن برای فلسطینی ها و بهترین هدیه برای جنبش فعال صهیونیستی رو به ارمغان میارن و یوم النکبت معروف به وجود میاد.در همون سال 1948 اسرائیل بارها و بارها و به شدیدترین شکل ممکن به فلسطینیان ساکن فلسطین حمله میکنه و باعث کشته شدن و آواره شدن بخش کثیری از اعراب فلسطینی میشه.یکی دو نکته مهم تو این فصل یکی اشاره به ناتوانی و بی‌عرضگی دولت وقت فلسطین برمیگرده در برابر فعالیت همه جانیه صهیونیست ها.به اعتقاد نویسنده اصلا دولت مدرنی وجود نداشت و حتی اون زمان یک دیپلمات نداشتند.دیگری بحث کشورهای عربی است که به خاطر زیر سلطه بودن انگلستان کمکی به فلسطین نمیکنند و حتی پادشاه وقت اردن هم خوابهایی در مورد فلسطین داشته که البته تعبیر نشده! در انتهای فصل در مورد حمله اسرائیل به مصر در دهه پنجاه هم اشاره ای میشه.

فصل سوم : سومین اعلان جنگ، 1967:
سومین اعلان جنگ علیه فلسطین از نظر نویسنده، پیروزی اسرائیل در جنگ 6 روزه معروف در سال 1967 علیه کشورهای عربی مصر و اردن و سوریه است.نتیجه این حمله باعث شد کنترل مناطق بیشتری رو به دست بگیره.نکته مهم دیگه این فصل سرآغاز جنبش فتح و آزادی بخش فلسطین و اقداماتی که در سالهای ابتدایی تاسیسشون انجام دادند. حتی در برهه ای ساف موافقت کرد که به پیشنهاد دو کشوری موافقت کنه اما با مخالفت اسرائیل مواجه شدند.حرف اسرائیل یکی بود، یک کشور کاملا یهودی
فصل چهارم : چهارمین اعلان جنگ، 1982:
حمله اسرائیل به بیروت در سال 1982 که با تایید آمریکا انجام شد و این مساله ای بود که نویسنده به اون تاکید داشت چهارمین بزنگاه مهم نزاع فلسطین و اسرائیله. هدف از این جمله خروج ساف(سازمان آزادی بخش فلسطین) از بیروت بوده که در نهایت طی مذاکراتی هم اسرائیل به این هدفش دست پیدا میکنه و بعد از خروج ساف از بیروت هم به توافقات انجام شده پایبند نمیمونه و حتی آمریکا و فرانسه ای که تو مذاکرات حضور داشتند رو دور میزنه. البته یک مساله جالبی که در ادامه نویسنده ادعا میکنه اینه که درسته اسرائیل به همه خواسته هاش از حمله به بیروت رسید، اما ساف که اکثرا خارج از فلسطین بود رو با این کار به داخل فلسطین منتقل کرد و انتفاضه اول رو خروجی این روند دونست.
فصل پنجم: پنجمین اعلان جنگ، 1987 تا 1995:
مهم ترین اتفاق در این بازه زمانی بعد از انتفاضه، پیمان اسلو است. سیر تا پیاز این پیمان و اینکه چرا نفعی برای فلسطین نداشت به طور کامل و با جزئیات خواندنی در این فصل ارائه شده.این فصل یکی از بهترین فصل‌های کتاب بود.

فصل ششم: ششمین اعلان جنگ، 2000 تا 2014:
ابتدای فصل به شکست پیمان اسلو و سرانجام یاسر عرفات می‌پردازه. از دل شکست پیمان اسلو، حماسی که چند سالی میشه تاسیس شده و از ابتدا خودش رو جایگزین اسلام گرا و موافق حملات مسلحانه و مقاومت میدونه؛ کنترل اوضاع فلسطین رو به دست میگیره.سرانجام تلخ پیمان اسلو، محبوبیت و مقبولیت ساف و یاسر عرفات رو بین مردم فلسطین روز به روز کمتر میکنه. در ادامه فصل به سه حمله‌ی وحشیانه اسرائیل به غزه در سالهای 2008 و 2012 و 2014 میپردازه و اطلاعاتی از شدت حملات میده که خوندن این صفحات و این مقدار از جنایات کار ساده ای نیست.

پ.ن: فصل اول کتاب در مورد فروپاشی امپراتوری عثمانی اشاراتی میشه و تاثیراتی که این فروپاشی داشت. اگر علاقه مند هستید حتما کتاب « صلحی که همه صلح‌ها را بر باد داد» اثر دیوید فرامکین که توسط نشر ماهی چاپ شده رو بخونید که اطلاعات بینهایت مفیدی در این زمینه که در واقع خروجی‌اش میشه خاورمیانه به شکلی که امروز ما می‌بینیم میده.

[Bekah J · Rating 1 out of 5]

All lies. 1919: Arabs of Palestine refused nominate representatives to the Paris Peace Conference.
1920: San Remo conference decisions, rejected.
1922: League of Nations decisions, rejected.
1937: Peel Commission partition proposal, rejected.

1938: Woodhead partition proposal, rejected
1947: UN General Assembly partition proposal (UNGAR 181), rejected.
1949: Israel's outstretched hand for peace (UNGAR 194), rejected.
1967: Israel's outstretched hand for peace (UNSCR 242), rejected.
1978: Begin/Sa’adat peace proposal, rejected (except for Egypt).

1994: Rabin/Hussein peace agreement, rejected by the rest of the Arab League (except for Egypt).
1995: Rabin's Contour-for-Peace, rejected.
2000: Barak/Clinton peace offer, rejected.

2001: Barak’s offer at Taba, rejected.
2005: Sharon's peace gesture, withdrawal from Gaza, rejected.
2008: Olmert/Bush peace offer, rejected.
2009 to present: Netanyahu's repeated invitations to peace talks, rejected.
2014: Kerry's Contour-for-Peace, rejected.

[Jena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Education, literacy, and access to history are privileges. Please remember to utilize them. As the world falls apart, the least we can do is be cognizant of politics and listen to survivors' stories.

[Jan-Maat]

I was surprised by this book. I expected a treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the 20th century and that is not want this book offers.

In a comment on one of my updates Ilse wrote "...to me it seems a subject that makes it necessary to read multiple books on, from different angles" . This is a book that bears out that idea, it is a slice or a wedge, not a whole cheese, or any other round slice-able thing.

So, it is not an account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the wars of 1948 and 1967 are passed over very briefly, 1973, I think might get mentioned once or possibly not at all. This is part of Khalidi's point, they were fought over or on Palestine but not much by Palestinians. A theme of the book mentioned negatively by one of the many reviews on this site is that Palestinians are presented as victims, but that I think is part of the point, a colonised people is denied agency, they are rarely active participants in their own history, mostly they are subject to the desires of people around them with agency; occasionally they are supplicants, asking for favours or lobbying for consideration.

Another theme is the war on the idea of Palestine as a potential state, or a palimpsest, that Israel has been written on top of, but which, somehow is still dimly visible, and without constant work by Israelis, might emerge more clearly into vision. Again though this is a theme but does not constitute the bulk of the text.

If there was no Palestinian state, there were Palestinians, and one might expect then that this could be a history focusing on the lives of displaced people, where they survived, how they lived, whether in refugee camps, in different countries, or in territories under Israeli control. This gets a little attention, but is not a main theme of the book.

All in all, this framing, as I progressed felt distinctive and also very odd. Largely this book seems to me to be an abstracted memoir, or in other words, the core is a memoir but the author has thought about their own experience and expanded upon it with other materials, as such another theme is growing older, or maturity as it is sometimes called. The book is divided in to six declarations of war: 1917-39, 1947-48, 1967, 1982, 1987-1995, 2000-2014, rounded off by a conclusion. 1967 begins with the author walking "out of Grand Central Station in Manhattan", while in 1982, he and his pregnant wife were living in Beirut, and in the last two sections the author was involved to some extent in various peace talks. However this book is not just a memoir of his own experiences - although we see that too, Khalidi provides a certain amount of context, a view on the political situation from a Palestinian viewpoint, some background information, he doesn't come across as particularly interested in the internal politics, or development of Israel, except in a broad brush way, but possibly those factors simply doesn't serve the objectives of this book.

The book is always critical of the leadership of the neighbouring Arab states, these pursue their own interests, if they fund or support Palestinians then the implication certainly is that this is because they see a benefit in making use of them. For the period around 1960 Khalidi seems enamoured by the leaders of some of the groups involved in fighting against Israel, those figures are literary men, dashing and heroic. I had the suspicion that he was young then and held on to the impressions of his youth, because further on the leadership of Fatah, the PLO, Hamas, all appear to be at best, below average. He has a degree of respect for 'Arafat, curiously, since he portrays him as both distant from the lives of Palestinians and repeatedly outmanoeuvred politically.

He refers towards the middle of the book to actions committed by Palestinian groups in the 1960s as being described by some people as terrorism. I wanted to know what he described them as. Really just to see another perspective, and if the answer is, acts of war, then one asks how such acts helped those groups achieve their objectives. This is one to the points when I began to feel that this is a memoir, as a young man he is simply impressed by action and activism, while as an older man he sees instead the harm caused to Palestinians.

His most direct engagement in the politics comes in the wake of the first Intifada when he was involved in some of the negotiations between the civilians (meaning not the organised combative groupings that made up the PLO) and the Israelis. These he sees mostly as a missed opportunity, the civil disobedience element of the intifada was something was something in his account that the Israeli government could not suppress through coercion, so it obliged them into a political process, however cunningly they brought the Palestinian armed groups into the talks, the latter assumed leadership over the Palestinians but were intellectually out-manoeuvred. Presumably Khalidi assumed that people like him - from the Palestinian social elite drawing also upon the expatriate community - would have been better placed to deal with Israeli politicians. Perhaps then Paradise Lost is a theme too of this work, the old elites he tells us largely lost their authority in the wake of the 1948 war, leaving a vacuum into which emerged the political groups that formed later.

By the end of the book what is supports is a unitary state that is not exclusively Jewish, but which would be inclusive of Israelis and Palestinians. He sees mobilising expatriates, and I guess that those people are the primary target audience for this book, to lobby for political support, particularly in the USA, as essential to this process. He assumes the support of most of the countries in the UN general assembly - Khalidi's mind is oriented towards taking the decisions of bodies like the UN and before it The League of Nations rather more seriously and as having significance than I would, perhaps reflecting that his father worked in the UN, or that my British upbringing has left me assuming that institutions are essentially political and fluctuating.

I found this an interesting book with a distinctly literary style, which to my mind was, although elegant in expression, not always precise. His perspective is also unusual, his family was part of the Palestinian elite; the book begins with his great, great, great uncle who wrote - via the chief Rabbi of France, to Theodor Herzl in French, in neat handwriting, another relative was mayor of Jerusalem during the British mandate, his father worked for the UN, another relative is briefly prime minister of Jordan. While this gives his book distinctive insights, his perspective plainly is atypical.

To put it another way, he mentions early on that in the Ottoman period absentee landlords - I thought of Lea Ypi's paternal family, possibly that was the kind of thing that they were doing to finance their visits to see the opera in Milan or to pay for university education in Paris - were selling their land in Palestine to Jewish buyers. So one could look at this from the point of view of class - the people who circa 1900 were working and living on the land were excluded from decisions concerning it, which is perfectly normal in a market economy, but equally those same people and their descendants would continue to be excluded from decisions made about them by everybody. Khalidi did mention, but I didn't note the page number, either that the communist party or a trade union had a Jewish leadership and a mostly non-Jewish membership, suggesting a different basis for the political development of the region, but plainly one that was overtaken by events.

As you can see from the sub-title to this book, the idea of Israel as a colonial endeavour is a strong theme. It is a suggestive idea, I think, but it is an idea that the author presents but does not evidence, for example by looking at how the British used the incoming Jewish population during the mandate period, and plainly even if the Jewish population got on the tram in the direction of supporting the British mandate, they got off at the stop of national independence once they could, to adapt Marshal Piłsudski's saying about his own political development.

It is always interesting, and elegant, with a distinctive angle covering a period from circa 1899 to about 2016.

As a note of warning while reading this in public I was approached by someone who recommended that I also read Mornings in Jenin, so possibly this is the kind of book that attracts people to comment upon your reading!

[Benjamin C · Rating 2 out of 5]

Instead of opening my mind to the Palestinian perspective, Khalidi closed my mind. I was, to say the least, very frustrated while reading this, and would probably prefer a treatment of the subject by a different (Palestinian) author.

Khalidi writes how Westerners often think in terms of “the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti Semitic Muslims,” and that “dismantling this fallacy… is a necessary step.” But for me, he only reinforced this fallacy. I enjoyed reading the first third of the book, which paints Israel as a colonialist regime—fantastically written. But then the tide turns, and reading the remainder of the book is like fighting whitewater when trying to surf.

My main criticism is that Khalidi cherry-picks a ton. He leaves out the entire Yom Kippur war, and spends pages on each Israeli sin, full of visceral and concrete detail, whilst waving away the Palestinian sins (that often triggered the Israeli sin, and usually targeted and killed Israeli civilians). And whilst the former may have dwarfed the latter in terms of casualties, I was deeply irked. Irked not because Khalidi is biased-I expected that, and think it’s reasonable-but rather, because he hides it under layers of numbers, imperceptible to the casual reader. This purported history book, which I expected to be an honest compilation of the facts on the ground, instead reads like a heated policy debate case (even accompanied by insults directed against Americans and Israelis) without a rebuttal---not a good thing. In any case, I started second-guessing the author very quickly, and equally quickly he lost my trust (after I checked everything he wrote on Wikipedia. He's not inaccurate-he just leaves stuff out).

Moreover, commentary-wise, the book walks a fine line, trying not to explicitly defend and justify terrorism, yet at the same time not condemning it, because the Palestinians involved lost their land long ago, but not too long ago. I cannot see this being persuasive in the modern day. Israel is here to stay, and justifying terrorism against its civilian population without being at war (or even if at war?) is a line I will not cross. It is a pity that Khalidi nearly crosses that line. Yes, Israel has sinned, and killed or deprived many innocent Palestinians. Probably settlements are a sin. Certainly Palestinians in the West Bank are second-class citizens (and perhaps Arab Israelis are also second class?). But hey, at least admit that Palestine has sinned too. Khalidi tries to have his cake and eat it too, and rarely acknowledges the Palestinian role in the conflict. What is Israel to do when the government of Gaza kills israeli civilians in revenge? When the main political leadership of Palestine has a grenade in its emblem? Why should we support a militant Palestinian state? Do we expect Hamas and Fatah to magically run a democratic, liberal, honest Palestinian state that coexists peacefully with its Israeli neighbors? Despite their incompetence (Khalidi's own words), their own ongoing abuse of human rights, and their militant nature? If not this, then what does Khalidi want?

Those are the questions I wanted answered. Instead, Khalidi gifts us a useless, stubborn, deceptive rant, that will only make people more angry. He has no vision for the future. In the end, his vision is one of hatred, not peace.

I’m very disappointed, because he has forgone his responsibility to build a better tomorrow. He has a political pedigree, the luxury of a Yale education, teaches at Columbia—if not Palestinians like him, who in the world will take responsibility for building a better Palestine? Does he really expect Israel to do it for him? The man has absolved himself of all responsibility.

My opinion is as follows: this conflict is rooted in deep wounds on both sides. Two diasporas. It is useless to compare them. But any work that only considers one wound and not the other---such as this one---cannot hope to foster productive conversation. Nor does this work evoke empathy, or humanity---it's like Khalidi is ranting at a wall. Nor is this work theoretical---I would have appreciated a compelling case for Palestinian nationhood, or even an attempt to morally justify revenge at the ethnic level (even if I disagreed with it). For something so academic, I was hoping for better.

[kezzie ʚ♡ɞ · Rating 5 out of 5]

✩ 5 stars
~
🍉 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒆𝒂 🇵🇸

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Theodor Herzl on his settler-colonial plans for removing Palestinians by force: “We must appropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor (both illegal) must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” While apartheid uses natives as workers, settler-colonialism doesn’t – it wants you GONE. To assist in the theft planned by Theodor Herzl, “the British employed a hundred thousand troops and air power to master Palestinian resistance. Nazi persecution had raised the Jewish population of Palestine from 18% of the total population in 1932 to 31% in 1939.

This increase in numbers gave Zionists the clout “necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The Nakba expulsion then of over half the Arab population of the country …completed the military and political triumph of Zionism.” A power “to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Curzon would say natives did not know what was best for them. “The condescending rhetoric of Theodor Herzl and other Zionist leaders was no different from that of their European peers. Palestine, like the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and Algeria, was meant by Britain to be a “white European settler colony.” “Palestine was terra nullius to those who came to settle it, with those living there nameless and amorphous.” If you could merely pretend Palestinians didn’t exist, then you could ignore their objections.

Leading Zionist Jabotinsky wrote that he knew that natives would resist “colonists as long as it has the slightest hope.” “An iron wall of bayonets was imperative for its success.” “Its roots are as a settler-colonial project.” What was needed was to “control all of historic Palestine and the narrative surrounding it.” In 1910, Jews in Palestine were “mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist.” They had endured “over twenty generations” of Ottoman control.

The Balfour Declaration: the Balfour Declaration itself clearly says the “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” But the Brits also never wrote the words, Palestinian, let alone Arab, and so they were no longer granted political or national rights, but only “civil and religious rights”. Let’s face it if non-Jewish residents could also have voted back then they would logically have ended the privileged position of the Zionists. “This was in contradistinction to every other Middle Eastern mandated territory, where Article 22 of the covenant applied to the ENTIRE population.” The Balfour Declaration also implies that the present population was transient. Quick - name any part on the globe that IS transient. Balfour’s implication was tragic. The Balfour’s third paragraph (and a violation of the mandatory provisions) led to erasing all non-Jewish connections to the land no matter how many generations they had lived there. This was “a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population.” Every book I’ve read on this subject says behind the Balfour Declaration was the British “anti-Semite wish to reduce Jewish immigration” leading to what I call “stealing from Peter (Palestinians) to pay Paul (Israel).” Article 7 of the Balfour made it so any Jewish person could “acquire Palestinian nationality” while all Palestinians abroad when it was declared “were denied it.” Never mind that only recently the British had offered ALL Arabs independence if they fought against the Ottoman’s in WWI.

Balfour said: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.” He also said: “I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs.” Rashid says, “the British Empire was never motivated by altruism.” It saw the Zionist movement demand sovereignty and complete control of the lands of another – “fostering an exclusivist national home at their (the Palestinians) expense.” To slow resistance, “The British authorities did not allow newspapers in Palestine for nearly two years.” Nonetheless, “the bombshell struck a society prostrate and exhausted at this late stage of the war.” The Zionist movement leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy.” “The British treated the Palestinians with the same contemptuous condescension they lavished on other subject people from Hong Kong to Jamaica.”

Britain’s biggest assistance to Zionism was its “armed suppression of Palestinian resistance” which meant 10% of the adult male Arab population were “killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled.” Under British martial law, an 80-year-old rebel leader was executed for the possession of a single bullet. The British tied Palestinian prisoners to the front of their moving vehicles to prevent attack – a trick the Brits learned in Ireland (1919 to 1921) to keep the Irish subjugated. Home demolition didn’t start with Zionists, the Brits were doing that to the homes of rebels or their relatives in Ireland. In 1937, British mandate authorities “deported virtually the entire Palestinian nationalist leadership.” “It took the full might of the British Empire (post-Munich 1938) to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.” “Winston Churchill was perhaps the most ardent Zionist in British public life.” “The primary problem faced by the Palestinians during the Mandate was the British.”

Zionist Pearls of Wisdom: Here’s Jabotinsky in 1925, “If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.” He also said, “Zionism is a colonizing venture and therefore it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.” Woodrow Wilson’s King-Crane Commission wrote that the Zionist program would require “not less than 50,000 soldiers.” Yep, successful settler-colonialism historically always required force and this book shows that the Brit, Yank and Zionist leadership all knew it. The King-Crane cover letter sent to Wilson said it clearly – only by force with US support could the Zionist settler state “be established or maintained.” The end of the Mandate is when the “Arab majority was finally dispossessed by force.” A UN Commission Minority report at the time wrote: “Partition both in principle and in substance can only be regarded as an anti-Arab solution.” Yep.

Fun Facts: The Sykes-Picot agreement, which carved up the Middle East for colonization, was a secret agreement. 1933 is when Nazis begin persecuting the Jews, and that begins the exodus to their assigned settler-colonial land. Hitler’s rise thus fuels Zionism. “Only about 6% of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948.” By 1948, the majority of Palestinian people lived outside the borders of the state of Israel.

The late historian Tony Judt wrote that the Zionist project arrived too late because it “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project onto a world that has moved on.” Rashid says that settler-colonialism ends up taking three forms: You eliminate or subjugate them (United States v Native Americans). They kick your ass out (Algeria). Or lastly, both sides compromise and reconciliation (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Ireland).

NAKBA: This turns 720,000 of the local 1.3 million Palestinians into refugees. The devastation and uprooting of a society sanctioned by the settler-colonial triumvirate Britain, the US, and new kid on the block Israel. You might say, “Hey! Isn’t this a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter”. Why yes! It certainly is, and so is settler-colonialism, but rogue states by definition defy international law. Anyway, the Nakba happens between 1947 and 1948; The ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed. In 1948, Zionist forces sent a chilling message to remaining Palestinians that was worthy of the Mafia - in Dayr Yasin, “one hundred residents, sixty-seven of them women and children, and old people, were slaughtered when the village was stormed by Irgun and Haganah assailants.” In a delightful display of Zionist humor not one Palestinian who fled the country in horror was allowed to return “and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.” Don’t you just hate when you take someone’s land and -knock knock- they’ve returned asking for it back and you have to remind them that’s not how settler-colonialism works? Jeesh! The Nakba transformed Palestine from over a century a majority Arab country which it had been for over a thousand years, into a Zionist “substantial majority.” Nakba Level Achievement Unlocked – the giddy thrill of going from being the oppressed to being the oppressor. And for Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan who were “poor, weak and recently independent”, it was a joy receiving the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Nakba. That sure didn’t destabilize the region – ha ha. Either way, Rashid calls Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, at the time, “Britain’s pawns” and Jordan “firmly repressed Palestinian nationalism.”

Question: why did the Arab countries not come to the Palestinians aid during all this? Well, they did not have the burning desire to go against both Britain and the US since they were clearly the two biggest powers on earth at the time. Palestinians soon realized that only they themselves were going to advocate for their cause.

US Zionist lobby: Truman publicly explained it well, “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” Back then Palestinians were invisible in the press, you didn’t have the PR advantage of a Bella and Gigi Hadid or Roger Waters in front of microphones.

Zionist Myth 1: Since 1967, Israel has lived in constant peril. Playing the victim card gets Israel billions from the US electorate. Zionist Myth 2: Israel’s negationist narrative: Palestinians don’t exist (Security Council Resolution 242 didn’t mention Palestinians therefore they don’t exist). Settler-colonialism requires negation at the highest level – “the indigenous people were a lie.”

In 1982 Israel invades Lebanon and it involves mostly fighting Palestinians rather than the armies of Arab states. In both 1981 and 1982, the US gave $1.4 billion in military aid. You can’t keep a good man down – actually you can, with that much military aid. Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave the green light (a US declaration of war on the Palestinians) to Israel for the invasion. Israel knew that back in 1956, they had attacked Egypt without US approval and was forced to back down. “The 1982 invasion (of Lebanon by Israel) must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor – their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians.” Israel’s attack was so relentless that “even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.” Reagan wrote that he told Begin “the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arm’s blown off.” Comedy Time: When Begin was a terrorist, he called himself a freedom fighter; a few decades later, Palestinians doing exactly what Begin once did for the same reasons are only called terrorists. This invasion put the US in Britain’s old position back in the 1930’s. The passing of the settler-colonial torch from Britain to the US while saying about Israel, “Our baby is growing up!”

The 1982 war weakened the PLO but strengthened “the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself.” The First Intifada lasted from December 1987 through 1993. Israel ended up presenting its case to the world as a well-fed Goliath defending itself against Palestinian David. Israel had spent two decades after the ’67 War creating over 200 illegal settlements. By 1976, you could be imprisoned in Israel for flying a Palestinian flag, or displaying the Palestinian colors. “Detentions and imprisonment usually featured torture of detainees.” “Protesting the occupation publicly or in print could lead to the same result or even to deportation.” During the First Intifada, Israelis killed 1,422 Palestinians. “But this brutality did not put an end to the uprising.” The uprising could not have continued so long without broad popular support. This led Mossad’s director Nahum Admoni to say, “The (First) Intifada caused us a lot more political harm, damage to our image, than anything the PLO had succeeded in doing throughout its existence.” Palestinians were deprived of the ability to travel freely limited to “inferior roads dotted with checkpoints intended for the indigenous population, while settlers rode above them on a network of superb highways and overpasses that was constructed for their exclusive use.”

Hamas was founded at the beginning of the First Intifada on 12/87. Things got worse for Palestinians after Oslo and that led to the Second Intifada where 6,600 Palestinians were killed while only 1,100 Israelis. Palestinian suicide attacks severely damaged sympathy for Palestinians and “Israelis ceased to be seen as oppressors”. Rashid wonders whether the suicide bombings “were meant to achieve anything more than blind revenge.” “By the end of the Second Intifada, according to reliable sources, most Palestinians opposed this tactic.” However, in 2006, Hamas wins the elections “by a handsome margin” which led to an escalation of conflict with Fatah.

Sentence no Zionist wants you to read: “Yet even with the suicide bombings, with targeting civilians in violation of international law, and the crude anti-Semitism of its charter, Hamas’s record paled next to the massive toll of Palestinian civilian casualties inflicted by Israel and its elaborate structures of legal discrimination and military rule.” “But it was Hamas that was stuck with the terrorist label.” With Hamas in control of Gaza, it became “an open-air prison” – the collective punishment for Palestinians voting the wrong way in an election. In three attacks (2008, 2012, and 2014) Israeli forces kill 3,804 Palestinians while only 87 Israelis are killed – that’s a 43:1 scale disproportionate response. In the 2014 assault alone, “over 16,000 buildings were rendered uninhabitable, including entire neighborhoods” while some 450,000 Gazans had to leave their homes.

Imagine any Zionist also telling you about a Brookings Institution poll from 2016 that “showed that 60 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of all Americans supported sanctions against Israel over its construction of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank”. And “most Democrats (55%) believed Israel has too much influence on US politics and policies and is a strategic burden.” And then in 2019, a Pew poll “58% of Democrats favored both peoples (Israelis and Palestinians) or the Palestinians”.

Critical to Know: To avoid liability and prosecution, the US is fixated on the idea that Israel has a legal right to self-defense because the Arms Control Act of 1976 specifies that American supplied weapons must be used ‘for legitimate self-defense’.” This assures all US officials will re-broadcast the Israel as victim story. None of the missiles sent by Hamas and its allies into Israel “had a warhead the size of the over 49,000 tank and artillery shells fired by Israel in 2014.” Rashid says of course he sees the death of civilian Israelis also as war crimes, but notes, as does the world, that they are wildly disproportionate to civilian Palestinian deaths (also war crimes). Being Zionist is very lucrative for US politicians - Pelosi and her husband have a net worth of over $100 million. Since Clinton favored the monied donors over the working poor, Democratic candidates like Keith Ellison who showed sympathy towards Palestine get financially cancelled by donors.

Rashid says at the end of Obama’s time, “the conditions for Palestinians (were) even worse than when he took office eight years earlier.” Rashid sees “full-blown ethnic cleansing” by Israel both in 1948 and 1967. He says vital to Zionism’s survival is where Americans believe the PR that Israel as a “normal” country valiantly and reluctantly defending itself against the “irrational hostility” of “anti-Semitic Muslims”. “Five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all while half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights.” Zionist post-It Note #1: Never consider how Israel is daily undermining the moral legitimacy of its own national existence. Zionism post-it note #2: Coerce remaining Palestinians to accept they are a defeated people before the US public opinion one day cuts the the Zionist purse strings.

Terrific Book – Kudos to Rashid - I’d recommend this to anyone who thinks Palestinians are human beings, or realizes that settler-colonialism (whoever does it) is NEVER okay. Heck, if you even just believe in international law or only the Golden Rule, you will still love this book and learn lots. I have a lot of rabidly pro-Zionist Facebook friends from college posting ZERO concern for lives of the Palestinians, so I’d better go on another ten-book reading spree to better understand the world beyond the blue and white Israel Lobby filters. And so, up next, reviews of the great Palestine books of Gideon Levy, Noam Chomsky, Amira Hass, Ilan Pappe, and Edward Said.

[historyfurby · Rating 1 out of 5]

A student of history says:

Reading this book and taking it as the definitive truth is egregiously unconscionable. Let me explain, and forgive my long-windedness. Believe it or not I could write a lot more.

First off- unlike many other one star reviewers I read the book in its entirety. I am not Jewish- I am not Arab. In fact, I'm a young, non-religious, left leaning, woman from the United States of a minority background. ****I also received a bachelor's degree in history*** and continue my education by reading various non-fiction history books.

I typically do not leave written reviews, but I felt compelled to leave this one being that many people are reading this book in hopes of educating themselves on current events. Though I'm not an expert in Middle Eastern history I hope that if at least one person can be dissuaded from the blatant propaganda in this book I will have made an effort to combat the intense irrationality I see around this subject.

Here are a few things put as simply as possible that signify MAJOR problems with Prof. Khalidi's book (wow, he's a historian and writing this!?!?!).

-In the introduction to this book Khalidi makes an argument that the only tie Jews have to Israel is a religious one. This undermines three millennia of Jewish presence in the area through continuously strengthened by archaeological discovery. A basic knowledge of ancient history supplants the idea of colonialism. Full stop. (You may not like hearing it, sorry)

-Adding to the absurdity of the claim of Jewish colonialism as a whole is the mere timeline Khalidi had chosen to focus on! Hello??!? Arab colonialism is calling and he is just sending to voicemail. When you're starting in 1917 you don't really have to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the location of their genesis or their persecution in their homeland up until 1948. BUT WAIT!

-Khalidi DOES mention SWANA Jews! Once... briefly... early in the book...and then repeatedly asserts that all Jewish Israelis are European colonizers. Acknowledgement of SWANA Jews without the subsequent acknowledgment of their violent expulsions from the countries they were forced to flee to from the land of Israel due to Arab colonialism is extremely suspect. If you'd like to learn more about this: please look into Mizrahi expulsions from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq in the 1930s and 1940s (ALL OCCURRING WITHIN Kahlidi's 100 year timeline).

-The central issue I have with this book is not the justification of, but the DISMISSAL of Palestinian terrorism. Throughout the book, Kahlidi *consistently* uses extremely emotional language in relation to the sufferings and setbacks of the Palestinian people. Why not- he is Palestinian after all. Still- this should be a big red flag for anyone looking for objective truth in this book. It is extremely unsettling that Khalidi downplays the terrorist tactics regularly implemented by Palestinians throughout his chosen time period. Forgive me for not taking notes, but I can recall an example of him saying something like "...in which an Israeli mother and her two children died. Israeli forces then went on to massacre Palestinians..." In this instance and many more like it in the book, I was struck by the casualty of Khalidi to explain the ways in which Palestinians "resisted" their "colonizers." I don't recall any mention of various "massacres" committed against Jews all within the chosen hundred years (notably the multiple massacres of Jews all occurring in British Palestine pre1948).

In no way is my intention to diminish the gravity of Palestinian death or their subjugation by the Israeli government and Palestinian leadership forces alike. I fully recognize the power of the Israeli government and its forces over Palestinians. Reading this book I became conditioned to Khalidi's leaving out of Palestinian terrorism in civilian spaces so much that I was SHOCKED when he discussed Hamas' deliberate use of terrorism to "resist."

The reality is that Palestinians have used terrorism throughout Khalidi's 100years and I seldom see it mentioned by him or anyone else. Additionally- the influence of terrorism on the US/Israeli relationship and on Israel's "need" to defend it's citizens was ignored in this book. Khalidi went over many many attempts of Palestinians or organize and gain recognition, and neglected instigation of violence on their part. That recognition is essential to the nature of the conflict and to the actions of other countries of which Khalidi criticized for not taking action on behalf of the Palestinian people.

IN CONCLUSION:
I am making a concerted effort to get Palestinian viewpoints on this subject. You may dismiss my review (if you've even read to this point) as not concentrating enough on Israeli control of the situation. Reading the book, there was certainly enough of that. What I hope to convey about the book is the one dimensionality of Khalidi's writing. Everything is picked SO carefully to convey his declaration of colonialism that I hope no one would take it as objective truth. I see by majority 5 star reviews that this is not the case. ****This book doesn't even touch Islamic extremism and the establishment of Hamas as "leadership," though both of these things gain prominence well within Khalidi's 100 years.****

Read it if you want to- there were certainly interesting points made and I appreciate the perspective of any person close to this conflict. DON'T read this if you aren't prepared to be critical of the information. I pity those who are reading this as an introduction to the subject. I fear that it's enough to set someone up for blind fellowship with the mass propaganda gaining so much prevalence since Oct. 7th. In fact, nearly every point Kahlidi made in his conclusions that would necessitate a turning on the opinion of Israel seems to have been employed by those wiling to negate a shared suffering of everyone in the area due to extremist governments on both sides.

I'm no expert and likely neither are you. All we can do is try and combat uninformed decisiveness. This book won't help you do that, and I haven't found one yet that will.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians in pursuit of political aims.

Ethnic Cleansing: the forced removal of a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group from an area to make it ethnically homogeneous.

"What happened in the Dahiya quarter will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is the plan. And it has been approved."
Maj. Gen Gadi Eizenkot (Israeli chief of staff)

I'm going to start this off by saying Free Palestine 🇵🇸. If you have a problem with that, unfriend me or block me because it's Free Palestine for life over here.

I started this book months ago, but I just couldn't read it. I've had to limit my intake of Palestine news to 10 minutes a day because it really upsets me. I have the privilege to do that as an American with no personal ties to Palestine. I can turn it off, but there are millions of Americans who can not. A Brookings Institute poll from December 2016 found that 46% of Americans and 60% of Democrats supported sanctions for Israel over its illegal construction of settlements in the West Bank. I don't know anyone in my personal life, and that includes people who are planning to vote for Trump, who dont think Israel is committing Genocide. I finally decided that I needed to finish this book and that I was going to do it in 2 days. Mission Accomplished.

The Hundred Years War on Palestine is a must-read in this time in which my country, the United States, is financially supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people. I unfortunately don't think Palestine will exist in 20 years so it's important to know the history of this occupied nation while it still exists and to tell future generations about all the countries with Palestinian blood on their hands. Rashid Khalidi the author points out the striking parallels between Palestinians and Native Americans. Both groups are cast as backward and uncivilized, a murderous, violent and irrational obstacle to progress and modernity. If you are American than you know how things turned out for the Native Americans....very very not good.

Hamas is painted as the boogie man but it wouldn't even exist with the Oslo Accords. Hamas was able to rise because previous Palestinian leaders had been to cowardly towards the Israeli government. Gaza is an open air prison and has been that way for years. October 7th 2023 wasn't the beginning of anything, it just exposed something that had been bubbling under for more than 60 years. 53% of Palestinians lived in poverty pre October 7th. Unemployment was 52% pre October 7th. Most Palestinians can't work in Isreal without a special permit which are extremely hard to get. They can't travel on certain roads in Palestine without Israeli permission. The vast majority of Palestinians are trapped in Gaza and the West Bank. While American and European settlers have full rights to do anything they please. Palestinians have no sovereignty, no jurisdiction and no authority except what Israel allows. Israel even controls major Palestinian revenues including certain taxes.

As I said before I don't think Palestine will exist in 20 years. Israel and it's biggest supporter The United States want every Palestinian dead or at least displaced. And no other countries seem willing to piss off the U.S. so they won't be coming to the Palestinians aid either. Trump will give Bibi anything he wants and Biden is blood thirsty for a Palestinian genocide. What will Kamala do? Unfortunately I don't think she'll do much so once again I'm ashamed to say that Palestine is fucked. We are all just going to watch an ethnic cleansing and it's soul crushing.

A Must Read!

Free Palestine 🇵🇸

[Maia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..." -Lord Arthur Balfour, 1917, statement made on behalf of the British cabinet (page 24)

"For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country... The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism." -Lord Arthur Balfour, 1919, confidential memo to the British cabinet (page 37)

"'If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living," [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, "you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf... Zionism is a colonizing venture, and therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.'" (page 51)

"In a cover letter to [President Woodrow] Wilson, the commissioners presciently warned that 'if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.' The commission thereby accurately predicted the course of the subsequent century." (page 51-52)

This is an extremely well written, clear, concise book. The author draws extensively from primary source documents going back to 1895. His grandparents, his parents, and his immediate family lived through many of the events he outlines; he personally knew Yassar 'Arafat, long time leader of the PLO; he was an advisor to the negotiations between Israel and the PLO which began in Madrid in 1991 and ran (unsuccessfully) into 1993; he lived in Beirut through weeks of Israel bombardment in 1982; he and his father worked for the United Nations in the 1960s and sat through Security Council meetings on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including a meeting in which an intentional US political delay allowed Israel to make a preemptive attack on Syria. These personal anecdotes enliven what is overall a very grim history of broken treaties, broken promises, and conflict. I pulled the quotes because I want to be able to return to them later, to remind myself how clear it has been since the beginning that Britain and the US considered the Palestinian people necessary and acceptable sacrifices.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is an incredibly helpful introduction to various governments' diplomatic and military decisions that enabled Israel's occupation of Palestine. Each section of this book highlights how since its resurgence, modern Zionism has been supported at all points by the major world powers (first the United Kingdom, and later the United States.)

I wanted to read this because as someone whose tax dollars and prior voting record have contributed towards America's support of the occupation, it felt really important to understand the US-Israeli entanglement at a level beyond the major leftist talking points ("we send $3.8 billion in aid to Israel each year and they train our police departments.") Like many Americans, I have large gaps in my understanding of world history, and so this was my first time clearly understanding how the Ottoman Empire's pre-WW1 control over Palestine and the post-WW1 British mandate over Palestine created the conditions for modern Zionist ambitions to cohere into the settler colonial state of Israel. In particular, I felt that Khalidi does an excellent job of explaining the post-WW2 transition where the U.S. took over as Israel's primary patron, and how long it took before the rest of the world realized the depth of this patronage. His detailing of how "Zionism, once a colonial project backed by the declining British Empire, became part and parcel of the emerging American hegemony in the Middle East" (60) is comprehensive from the government policy standpoint.

My one challenge with this book is its disproportionate focus on the decisions, motivations, and actions of the rulers imposing settler colonial orders, and less on the people impacted by these rulers. Going in, I wasn't clear that this wouldn't be a book where I'd find significant explorations of how various policies impacted the everyday lives of Palestinians. Upon reflection, it feels like the "resistance" component in the title is often an afterthought, which is particularly regrettable in our current moment. While the strongest chapters are the ones furthest from present-day, all parts of this book feel woefully relevant to Israel's current genocidal campaign in Gaza. However, while I feel like many pro-Palestinian sources today are making a point to focus on the significance of each individual person under siege, I felt that Khalidi's (over?)focus on diplomatic action didn't leave much room for the human element.

I think it's okay for that to just not be the purpose of this book, and for the author to stay in his lane. From the initial pages, Khalidi makes it very clear that he comes from an elite Palestinian family, and that he has been most involved with academic and diplomatic opposition to the occupation. However, particularly in Chapter 6's coverage of the Second Intifada, I felt that his limited perspective on the conditions of non-elite Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank became very evident. I found it particularly challenging to stomach his armchair skepticism about the ideological soundness of 21st-century armed Palestinian resistance, and his inflexible pronouncement of the Second Intifada as a "major setback" (213), if not an outright failure.

Moving forward, I am hoping to find sources that focus on everyday Palestinians' experiences of and resistance to the occupation. As always, I try to share alternative selections if I have criticisms of a book, but in this case, I would greatly appreciate recommendations in the comments! There is much more I need to learn here, and I'm sure there are lots of books I haven't yet heard of that could help. So far, one fictional account that does a better job of capturing this is Hala Alyan's Salt Houses, which was my buddy read pick back in July. While I had mixed opinions on some of Alyan's narrative choices, there is no question that this novel offers a compassionate, tuned-in portrayal of one family's diasporic experiences since the Nakba. If you're looking for a shorter non-fiction read that focuses on the people and not just the powers that be, I would also highly recommend Ahmed Al Shanti's 2018 article in the Funambulist, Jabalia and the Intifada: Transforming Precariousness into Strength in Gaza's Refugee Camps. Finally, one of Decolonize Palestine's many great resources is their reading list, which contains books and articles arranged by several different topics. I'll be continuing to use that list for some of my future picks, too.

In summary, I would highly recommend this book to others living in the imperial core who are seeking to understand our government(s)' historical and ongoing role(s) in the occupation. However, if you are looking for a human-scale exploration of the history of Palestinian resistance, I would keep searching.

[Kist · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important entry to the plethora of books covering this divisive topic. Informative, well-written and accessible.

More than any other book I've been told "don't read this biased account... read this (biased) account." As if my tiny brain wouldn't be able to comprehend that this author comes from a clearly pro-Palestinian perspective. This tells me they either want to suppress what's in the book, haven't read it, or don't understand that bias isn't wholly unique to this single book, especially on this topic.

This does not include people genuinely being helpful with additional recommendations.

Overall, would recommend.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sweeping overview of the reality America (and the evangelical community in particular) has willfully ignored for the last century. Rather than packing this with pathos, Khalidi patiently and carefully walks his reader through decades of policy, war, Western support and withdrawal, intifadas, settlements, and lines drawn and redrawn. I lament the US's blind and misguided partnership with a colonizing, ethnically cleansing, nationalistic state so anathema to democracy.

I've thought a lot about the similarities between Israel and the United States the last several weeks—their zionism, nationalism, and brutal systems of oppression swept aside by powerful, foundational myths—and Khalidi speaks to this in a way I'd been probing for:

"Establishing the colonial nature of the conflict has proven exceedingly hard given the biblical dimension of Zionism, which casts the new arrivals as indigenous and as the historical proprietors of the land they colonized. In this light, the original population of Palestine appears extraneous to the post-Holocaust resurgence of a Jewish nation-state with its roots in the kingdom of David and Solomon: they are no more than undesirable interlopers in this uplifting scenario. Challenging this epic myth is especially difficult in the United States, which is steeped in an evangelical Protestantism that makes it particularly susceptible to such an evocative Bible-based appeal and which also prides itself on its colonial past. The world ‘colonial’ has a valence in the United States that is deeply different from its associations in the former European imperial metropoles and the countries that were once part of their empires.
“Similarly the terms ‘settler’ and ‘pioneer’ have positive connotations in American history, arising from the heroic tale of the conquest of the West at the expense of its indigenous population as projected in movies, literature, and television. Instead, there are striking parallels between these portrayals of the resistance of Native Americans to their dispossession and that of the Palestinians. Both groups are cast as backward and uncivilized, a violent murderous, and irrational obstacle to progress and modernity. While many Americans have begun to contest this strand of their national narrative, Israeli society and its supporters still celebrate—indeed, depend on—its foundational version. Moreover, comparisons between Palestine and the Native American or African American experiences are fraught because the United States has yet to fully acknowledge these dark chapters of its past or to address their toxic effects in the present. There is still a long way to go to changes Americans’ consciousness of their nation’s history, let alone that of Palestine and Israel, in which the United States has played such a supportive role."

[Plagued by Visions · Rating 5 out of 5]

Israel is a terrorist colony.

This is why we the colonized wield the word: To free ourselves from the yoke of history.

[Sue Miz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not know how I got myself to finish this book
It brought back so many heartwrenching and devastating memories

As a Lebanese, I cannot say that I lived through what the Palestinians have lived and still are going through, but I can say that we got a long taste. Over 20 years of occupation where we saw the ugly side of a state that claimed to be "the only democratic country in the Middle East"

When I reached chapter four, I was hysterically crying remembering my mother telling us how, in 1982, she and her cousins had to carry their months old babies on foot to leave Beirut to the Syrian Borders and back to Sidon. How the Israeli barricades forbade them from taking any food and water. And how when they learned later what the occupiers did to the people in Sabra and Shatilla, they went into a state of shock that left them unable to speak for weeks.

I opened my eyes to this world living in an occupied South of Lebanon. We grew up on the sounds of the MK hovering daily. We saw weekly the IOF military planes practicing on our hills and villages.
In 1996, during their Grapes of Wrath, I saw my neighbor burned alive after a bomb fell on their building. In 2006, we witnessed the world dismissing our 3000 martyrs under the slogan "Israel has the right to defend themselves"

What Rashid Khalidi wrote in this book was not something new to me. We were taught and saw with our own eyes most of what happened.
However, what really was interesting personally were chapters 1 and 2 because they tell of a time before 1948, a time when there was and still is Palestine and Palestinians, proof that they are the indigenous people of the land.

What I want to say here is some reviews have treated this book as a memoir or a diary of a Palestinian telling stories. This is not that. This is a thesis.
And for those who do not know the difference between a thesis and a book, it is simply the difference between a fictional movie and a documentary.
A thesis must present documents resources and accepted statements from validated archives or sources.
Every sentence you write, every proclamation you make, every theory you raise, and every quote you use must be supported by evidence recorded in the reference pages at the end.

And RK brought all of his receipts.

The chapters of the book follow the timeline that leads to the current situation of the rise of the state of Israel and the conspiracy behind denying the Palestinians their own.

I hope you read this book and know the truth

[Cass Vogel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading if you know nothing about the war on Palestine, or if you know some stuff, or even if you know most stuff....just read it. Free Palestine