Metropolitan Books
Review by Brian Tanguay
Of the many books Rashid Khalidi has written about Palestine, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is by far his most personal one. Khalidi traces his family history in Palestine back to the Ottoman Empire, when his ancestors occupied key positions in local government, jurisprudence and academia, and as conscripts in the Ottoman army. In fact, the Khalidi family is so prominent that a library was established in Jerusalem to house its books, documents, and correspondence, some of which became primary source material for this book.
I read Khalidi’s Brokers of Deceit several years ago and was impressed by its scholarship, moral clarity, and accessible prose. This book shares these attributes. Though not a comprehensive survey of Palestinian history, it does explain six pivotal events, from 1917 until 2014. What becomes clear is the extent to which Palestinians have long been threatened with disappearance. In fact, as Khalidi documents, when Arthur James Balfour published his eponymous declaration in 1917 endorsing Britain’s support of a Jewish homeland, the Palestinians were not mentioned by name, even though they comprised 94 percent of the population. This was a precursor of what was to happen in the decades that followed, from United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 to the Oslo accords.
Even before becoming a state in 1948, Israel enjoyed the material and diplomatic support of a great power. Britain’s backing was readily apparent during the Arab uprisings of 1936-1939, which British troops crushed, killing key Arab leaders and driving many more into exile in the process.
When Britain’s global power waned and its empire unraveled, France, and then the United States — for strategic reasons of their own — faithfully aided the Zionist cause to the detriment of the Palestinians. The United States understood, or should have, what it was taking on because in 1919 the American King-Crane Commission warned President Woodrow Wilson that only brute military force could secure a Jewish state. Warned but undeterred, Wilson, followed by a long and unbroken line of American leaders, endorsed the goal of a Jewish state in a majority Arab land, assuming, for all intents and purposes, the colonial project — midwifed by Britain — and its explicit goal of transforming the entirety of Palestine into the Land of Israel.
Although it was published in 2020, this book is even more relevant in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza which has killed upwards of 40,000 Palestinians and rendered parts of the beleaguered enclave uninhabitable. Subsequently, Israel has launched attacks against Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. While the Hamas attack may have shattered the myth of Israel’s invincibility, it also reinforced the narrative that Israel has advanced for decades; first, that all Palestinians, whether combatants or civilians are terrorists, and second, that the conflict is being waged between equals. Neither aspect of this narrative withstands scrutiny, but in most of the West and especially in the United States, it’s accepted as fact. Israel has a sacrosanct right to “self-defense” that is rarely afforded other nations, and never granted to Palestinians.
Khalidi is a fair-minded scholar and he makes clear that Palestinians, in particular PLO chairman Yasser ‘Arafat, bear significant responsibility for failing to establish a competing narrative, especially in the United States. Khalidi also takes Hamas and Fatah, as well as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, to task for infighting that certainly hasn’t advanced the Palestinian cause.
Nonetheless, this seventy-six year old conflict over Palestine is not, and has never been, waged between equals; Palestinians have been at a severe disadvantage from the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Zionist ambitions for a Jewish homeland emerged. Never has a great power taken the side of the Palestinians, not militarily or diplomatically, or even rhetorically. Khalidi reminds us of the foundational, but often obscured, truth that this is a settler-colonial conflict, and as he points out:
“Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native populations, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.”
What this book illustrates most poignantly is the resilience of the Palestinian people. Though millions have been displaced (some repeatedly), robbed of their homes and land, consigned to refugee camps or the apartheid regime in the West Bank, trapped in the Gaza Strip, exiled to neighboring countries or abandoned by the international community, the dream of self-determination in their own homeland will not be extinguished.
Khalidi makes another point that is extremely important to achieving a just resolution of this settler-colonial conflict, though it’s one American policy makers will be very reluctant to accept in that it requires the United States to recognize that it cannot play a role — not as a mediator or peace broker, and certainly not by portraying itself as a neutral party.
