John

“Throughout the intervening century, the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them or over their heads, or pretending that they did not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds. Indeed, more than 120 years after the first Zionist congress in Basel and over seventy years after the creation of Israel, the Palestinian people, represented on neither of these occasions, were no longer supposed to constitute any kind of national presence. In their place was meant to stand a Jewish state, uncontested by the indigenous society that it was meant to supplant.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

“Yet for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past. The Palestinians’ resistance, their persistence, and their challenge to Israel’s ambitions are among the most striking phenomena of the current era.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

“Indeed, what was most striking about this White House’s Middle East policy was that it had been effectively outsourced to Netanyahu and his allies in Israel and the United States. Its initiatives seem to have come prepackaged from the Israeli right’s storehouse of ideas: moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the annexation of the Golan, airily dispensing with the Palestinian refugee issue, trying to liquidate UNRWA, and withdrawing from the Obama-era nuclear agreement with Iran. Only a few items remained on Netanyahu’s wish list: annexation of much of the West Bank, formal American rejection of sovereign Palestinian statehood, the creation of a toothless Palestinian Quisling leadership—the entire package meant to coerce the Palestinians to accept that they are a defeated people.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

“Eqbal Ahmad summed it up: “August 1947 marked the beginning of decolonization, when British rule in India ended. It was in those days of hope and fulfillment that the colonization of Palestine occurred. Thus at the dawn of decolonization, we were returned to the earliest, most intense form of colonial menace … exclusivist settler colonialism.”3 In other circumstances or in another era, replacing the indigenous population might have been feasible, especially in light of the long-standing and deep religious link felt by Jews to the land in question—if this were the eighteenth or nineteenth century, if the Palestinians were as few as the Zionist settlers or as fully decimated as the native peoples of Australasia and North America.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017