THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ON PALESTINE: A HISTORY OF SETTLER COLONIALISM AND RESISTANCE, 1917–2017 Rashid Khalidi, NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2020, 336 Pgs., ISBN-13: 978-1627798556 (Illustrated HB)
The Zionist dream has had a good press; the Arab nightmare that resulted, not so much. Rashid Khalidi’s book is a Palestinian redress. The book begins in 1899 with the mayor of Jerusalem writing a letter to Theodore Herzl saying the indigenous people of Palestine would not accept their displacement, ending with “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” This book is a consequence of Palestinians not being left alone.
That mayor of Jerusalem was Yusuf Diya, Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle. The letter is in the public Khalidi Library in Jerusalem, which was established by Khalidi’s grandfather, judge Hajj Raghib (whose house is on the cover). Khalidi’s father participated in the UN Security Council meeting about the 1967 War ceasefire which the young Khalidi witnessed. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, co-director of its Center for Palestine Studies, former adviser to the Palestine delegation during Arab-Israeli peace negotiations of 1991-1993, and someone who lived through the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1982. He is eminently eligible to map a first-person memoir onto academic history countering “Israel’s omnipresent narrative in the West, in which the Palestinians scarcely figured except as villains” (p. 118).
Photo by Alex Levac
The 100 Years’ War in the book’s title are six individual “declarations of war”:
- The 1917 Balfour Declaration establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” without mentioning the indigenous Palestinians that were an overwhelming 94 percent of the population.
- The 1947 UN Partition Plan (without consulting Palestinians) and the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) in which 700,000 indigenous Palestinians “were expelled and fled from their homes,” transforming Palestine “from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority” (p.75).
- The 1967 Arab–Israeli War and UN Security Council Resolution 242 “in order to be recognized, the Palestinians were required to accept an international formula designed to negate their existence” (p. 123).
- The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in which 19,000—mostly civilians—were killed and 30,000 wounded (p. 143). Khalidi’s post-mortem on Beirut stated that, escaping judgement, “Shamir and Sharon, as well as Netanyahu, went on to serve as Prime Ministers of Israel” (p. 167).
- The first intifada of 1987 and the 1993 Oslo peace accords. The Americans went so far in those years as to refer to their role as “Israel’s lawyer.” Khalidi argues the accords ought to have been rejected, “occupation would have continued, as it has anyway, but without the veil of Palestinian self-government” (p. 201).
- The devastation of Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014 and the expanding occupation of the West Bank today. Barack Obama did nothing to restrain Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of one of the densest cities in the world. (In 2020, Mike Pompeo became the first Secretary of State to visit an illegal settlement).
Infographic by AA 2017
The subtitle “History of Settler Colonialism” alludes to the conflict as an anachronistic 19th century Settler Colonialism in the modern era with Great Britain—now US—serving as metropole and their extension, Israel, as their European settler colony to supplant the indigenous Palestinians. (Standing on the occupied Golan Heights in his final visit, Mike Pompeo exclaimed “Imagine with Assad in control of this place, the risk of the harm to the West and to Israel” emphasis added). Khalidi spares no one, not Great Britain and US that aided, abetted and endorsed the settler colony, nor the Zionist movement, nor Israel, nor Arab regimes, nor the Palestinian leadership with their perennial disunity that has continued from the Mufti of Jerusalem and his opponents, up to the contemporary falling-out between Fatah and Hamas.
Khalidi’s argument has a precedent. It was made more succinctly by the French historian Maxime Rodinson in “Israel, fait colonial” (1967), later published in English as “Israel: A Colonial Settler State?” Monocausal explanations are ipso facto limiting; ideological factors are not only economic and nationalistic, but also religious. Hence Rodinson tackled the Biblical impulse that makes this settler-colony a special case. After all, treating indigenous people with disrespect came from biblical narratives of land (see chapter 4 of “The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique” by Michael Prior). Khalidi skirts the geo-theological and also does not mention how Israel’s withdrawals from Sinai (1982), Lebanon (2000), and Gaza (2005) appear when viewed through the lens of settler colonialism.
“Resistance” that concludes the subtitle is the books pièce de résistance. It restores the Palestinian voice and no-holds-barred perspective, as no other contemporary work. The indomitableness of the human spirit refuses to be cowed down despite all odds. “A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians” (p. 109).
After a century of wars we arrive at Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ drafted without any input from Palestinian leaders. Khalidi is unequivocal: US had “abandoned even the shabby old pretense at impartiality…becoming the mouthpiece of the most extreme government in Israel’s history” (p. 250) and hence, going forth, had disqualified itself as an impartial mediator. The solution that he leans towards is “creating a democratic, sovereign binational state in all of Palestine with equal rights for all” (p. 251). Try selling that to Israel’s government and to the resistance on the ground in Gaza, Hamas, who has been the one group that Israel has—despite all its efforts—been unable to subdue. Like it or not, they remain the people’s choice having won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. The second century of war on Palestine has begun.
In the middle of the book—amidst intense aerial bombardment of Beirut—the reader encounters an unforgettable image: the author’s four-month pregnant wife, Mona, running a breathless mile before finding a cab to collect their daughters from kindergarten and nursery school. Their son was born a few months later, and grew up to convince Khalidi to write his ninth academic book as a memoir. The reviewer remains pessoptimistic (p. 109) that the author’s muse, along with the Palestinians and Israelis of his generation, may very well find a way to bring the conflict to an early close.
Authors note: Previous reviews on the conflict: Covering The Intifada by Joshua Muravchik & Reporting From Ramallah by Amira Hass
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Architect-Poet-Calligrapher H Masud Taj. This author in The Beacon
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