The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017
- Dec 7, 2024
- 4 min read
★★★★★
The New Releases shelf at the Manhattan Public Library might be one of my favorite places on earth, or, at least, amongst built places on earth. If not for it, I very likely would not have found my way to Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, an indispensable book for anyone wanting to make sense of why Israelis and Palestinians seem doomed to perpetual cycles of violence—particularly in light of the latest hostilities, now tragically in their 14th month. In this deeply personal work, Khalidi weaves family history (generations of his family have served as judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists in Palestine, including Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a three-time mayor of Jerusalem spanning from the late 1800s to early 1900s), first-hand experience, and a wealth of archival material to unravel the tragedy and resilience of the Palestinian people during more than a century of settler colonialism and occupation.
Settler colonialism, you ask? Ah, yes: At the time of the Balfour Declaration, made by Arthur James Balfour, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, on November 2, 1917 (World War I would end almost exactly one year later), Palestine was 94% Arab and 6% Jewish. The declaration, just a single sentence, is worth quoting in its entirety, for it is the foundation upon which everything that has happened since was built: “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, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” With its ambiguous language, the declaration sounds benign enough. But to Zionists, who had long been looking for a great-power patron to support their colonization of Palestine, it was seen as a pledge of endorsement for their aims of Jewish statehood, sovereignty, and control of immigration in the whole of Palestine.
If things started poorly for the Palestinians in the wake of the First World War, what Nazi Germany did to the Jews during World War II would accelerate their deteriorating situation. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which called the for partition of Palestine into a large Jewish state and a smaller Arab one. By the summer of 1949, 80% of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end had become the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. More than half of the 1.3 million Palestinians living there were made refugees. Israel controlled 78% of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine and now ruled over the remaining 160,000 Palestinians who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the pre-war Arab population. Between 1947 and 1950, the Jewish population increased by 90% while the Palestinian population decreased by 87%.
In the intervening years, the Palestinians have, for a variety of reasons had little chance to improve their lot: they were outmaneuvered militarily, diplomatically, and public-relationally; neighboring Arab states routinely sold them out, choosing self-preservation and personal gain at Palestinian expense; infighting between various Palestinian factions often weakened or eliminated opportunities, however small, they might otherwise have had; and the terrorism of the Second Intifada weakened or destroyed much of the goodwill Palestinians had managed to gain over the previous 20 years, from Israel’s siege of Beirut though the non-violent First Intifada and the peace negotiations.
Khalidi deftly guides us through the key moments—brilliantly structured as successive Declarations of War against the Palestinians—with a clear eye and steady hand, neither framing unfolding events as Palestinian victimization nor diminishing Palestinian mistakes. Their story, one of resistance and dispossession, has largely been absent from popular discourse as Israel has, not unlike other occupiers throughout history, controlled the narrative, in this case as a people and a country under constant threat of annhilation. Understandable given the horrors of the Holocaust, but the reality is that Israel has long been the dominant military force in the region and has used that power to further its own colonial ambitions at the expense of untold Palestinian suffering.
The book ends before the current conflict, what Khalidi would, no doubt, refer to as the Seventh Declaration of War, and I wonder what he would make of it. On one hand, acts of terrorism commited by the Palestinians have produced diminishing results in the sphere of public opinion since the Second Intifada and the now decades-long War on Terror. On the other, Israel’s disproportionate responses to Palestinian aggression have increasingly undermined its portrayal as victim. Unfortunately, in our highly polarized environment, there is little room for the nuance required to abhor what Israel is doing—and has done for decades—without implying anti-Semitism, nor, I gather, is there the political will to do anything that will fundamentally change the status quo. Though this has long been played out as a zero-sum game, that strategy will have to be rethought if there is to be not just peace but justice for the Palestinians.
Comments