John

“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

“There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighboring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

“The center of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017