Reviewing The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (June 2024)

Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian and currently the Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. In 2020, he published The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, which begins with the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine and concludes with the end of the second Obama Administration. He divides the century into six periods of war: the period under the British Mandate in Palestine, the post-World War II Nakqa and the Jewish war for independence, the six-day war of 1967 that set the current boundaries of modern Israel and the occupied territories, the 1982 war in Lebanon, the 1^st Intifada and the 2^nd Intifada. In each of these periods, he maintains war was being waged on the Palestinians. The 1973 Yom Kippur War is not included as it was primarily conducted between the armies of Israel, Egypt and Syria.

Khalidi writes that the modern state of Israel would not exist as it does today without the robust sponsorship, first of Britain during the Mandate and second of the U.S. since independence. That is a modest assertion compared to the bolder thesis that it was British and American wars initially in conjunction with the Zionist Movement and ultimately with Israel that created today’s map of Palestine, which is increasingly characterized as the One State Reality. The British were not and the Americans have not been motivated by the spirit of altruism or empathy. That isn’t how nation-states behave. Geopolitical considerations were naturally paramount for Britain and have been for the U.S. In the case of Britain, the Empire was coming undone and Britain was struggling to keep something intact. While in the case of the U.S., strategic positioning vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War and Russia and China since and a stable oil market fueling its rapidly expanding industrial economy have been ever-present and weighty considerations relative to the public relations benefits of demonstrating solicitous and humane feeling towards the victims of the Holocaust.

Even before World War II, the forces of self-determination had been set loose by the collapse of empires in Russia, Germany, Austria and Turkey. The aspirations of subject peoples in these empires were emboldened by the language of the likes of President Woodrow Wilson, who never quite came right out and said, “Self-determination, that’s for you and you, but not you.” Khalidi writes that

Wilson had no intention of applying the principle to most of those who took them as inspiration for their hopes of national liberation. Indeed, he confessed that he was bewildered by the plethora of peoples, most of whom he had never heard, who responded to his call for self-determination.

For the Zionists waiting in the wings since the late 19^th century, self-determination and a homeland were promised. For the Palestinians, it was not so. That much was understood from the intent of the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which was in effect Balfour’s enabling legislation. Referring to the preamble of the Mandate, Khalidi states that

[T]he Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are described as having a historic connection to Palestine. In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups. There were people there, certainly, but they had no history or collective existence, and could therefore be ignored. . . . The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.

Palestinians were expected to accommodate the influx of Jewish immigrants, or repatriated Jews, depending on one’s views of land titles spanning centuries. Palestine, thus served two purposes: creating a homeland for European Jewry in the Middle East and making it unnecessary for Britain or America to take responsibility Jewish refugees.

Britain’s and America’s facilitation of the transfer of Jews from Europe to Palestine was unintentionally supported by the failure of Palestinian leadership to resist the changes wrought by Zionism. Khalidi, from a family of some political influence, knew or knew of many of the Palestinian elite, and he is highly critical of Palestinian leaders from the early years of the Mandate through the feuding Fatah and Hamas parties of the early 21^st century. For Khalidi, the Palestinians have historically been betrayed by their leaders as if their struggle for nationhood against the Zionists, the British and the Americans were not difficult enough.

The on-again, off-again wars have left Palestinians forcibly evicted from their homes and rendered stateless in neighbouring countries. It has been estimated that the Nakba (the Catastrophe) of 1948 displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians. These wars have targeted civilians already expelled from their homes and living in refugee camps as in the case of Sabra and Shatila where refugees were massacred by Lebanese Maronite militias in collaboration with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in 1982. And these wars have turned entire communities into rubble, e.g., Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza in accordance with the Dahiya doctrine, a military strategy of asymmetric force. Dropping 2,000-pound bombs in civilian areas makes it perfectly unambiguous that for the IDF, there is to be no confusion between Palestinian civilians and militants. The following explanation was shared by Major General Gadi Eizenkot, commander of the IDF’s northern front in 2008:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter … will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on.… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Despite all efforts to ignore, expel or eradicate Palestine and put an end to their aspirations of sovereignty in a two-state solution or equality in a one-state solution, the Palestinian cause does not lie in ruins. Like a phoenix it keeps rising from the ashes.

[T]he 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. . . . In their place was meant to stand a Jewish state, uncontested by the indigenous society that it was meant to supplant. Yet for all its might, [Israel’s] 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.

Going forward, Khalidi believes that the U.S. must be removed from its role as mediator between Israel and the Palestinians as its longstanding pro-Israel bias—evidenced by the U.S. veto shielding Israel from U.N. Security Council resolutions and the unconditional U.S. commitment to substantially underwrite the Israeli military—prevents it from serving as an honest broker. In the meantime, he believes it is incumbent on Palestinians to engage the Israeli narrative that has captured North America and Europe. The information war seems to have all but been won by the Israelis. Yet, the Palestinian side has barely made an effort to counter the lobbying of groups like AIPAC. Yossi Klein Halevi has written that there are two valid narratives—the Jewish and the Palestinian. Khalidi argues that the world must be familiarized with the Palestinian narrative.

With respect to the U.S., the Palestinian narrative must be explained in a context that may resonate with Americans, e.g., the struggle for democratic equality. And Palestinians must make the case—and it must be compelling—to persuade the American public to critically examine the morality and legality of exporting offensive weapons to Israel when the U.S. knows that these weapons will be used against civilians. The Dahiya doctrine makes Israel’s intent unmistakable and predictable. And U.S. law forbids abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity. Finally, Palestinians must convince the American foreign policy establishment to recognize that a just and acceptable resolution of the Israel-Palestine issue would not be incompatible with America’s strategic interests in the Middle East. Khalidi acknowledges that will be a challenge.