The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance. Rashid Khalidi. New York: Picador. 2020. 302 pages.
There is a scene in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing when Leo, the White House Chief of Staff, is confronted with a potential crisis (perhaps the one concerning Mad Cow Disease?). Realizing he doesn’t have a grasp of the implications, Leo calls out to the room, “someone needs to teach me something.”
That was the feeling I had last month when war began (again!) between Israelis and Palestinians. Then I thought to myself, “this has been going on my whole life; how do I know so little?”
Someone needs to teach me something.
So I went searching for a book (always a happy solution to a problem), and found The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Khalidi.
I had no idea how much I didn’t know.
In this thoroughly annotated and narratively written account, Khalidi weaves family history with the history of a place, and sets out a framework for understanding current relations. Beginning in 1896 with Der Judenstaat, a manifesto for creation of a Jewish state written by a Viennese Jewish journalist, the Zionist notion was given skin, and grew into a powerful movement culminating somewhat in the establishment of Israel in 1948. (Somewhat, in that the effort continues.) In that manifesto, Theodor Herzl wrote:
“We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
That desire and strategy haven’t changed, despite the eloquent rebuttal written to Herzl by Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle, indicating that Palestine was already inhabited. “In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone,” he said in 7 passionate and respectful pages. But Herzl’s dream held, and in the intervening 125 years, Palestinians — the people indigenous to the land — have borne the brunt of both international aggression and apathy.
After a helpful introduction of background (including Herzl’s manifesto), Khalidi’s work is divided into six declarations of wars, some covering multiple decades, some covering mere days.
The first, the period between world wars, involved a realignment of Arab peoples following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, “the only system of government known for over 20 generations,” and the sudden occupation by European armies. This period saw colonization by Britain under the Balfour Declaration, put forth by Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, James Arthur Balfour:
“His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors 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.”
The devil, as they say, is in the details, and this declaration notably pledged civil and religious rights, not political or national rights, a nuance that became the foundation for the century that followed. The intent was always Jewish state, wholly controlled by Israel and always to the deprivation, dehumanization and disappearance of the Palestinian people. As an example, Khalidi reported that “in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that ‘there were no such thing as Palestinians… they did not exist’ and they had never existed…. She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.”
The second declaration of war came with the end of WWII and the rise of the US as a superpower — a title we’ve wielded in menacingly imperial ways ever since. While Britain controlled the fortunes of Palestine between world wars, after WWII, the US was utterly in charge, and because of the desires for oil, position, and to stick it to the Soviets, we cast our lot with Israel. Eighty percent of the Arab population of Palestine lost its land and property to the new state of Israel, defined by the UN and aided and abetted predominantly by the US. Half the Palestinian population became refugees. This was Nakba, “the catastrophe,” and it depleted Palestine of its autonomy, wealth and well-being. From Truman to Trump, every American president since has favored Israel and cast aside any regard for the Palestinian people; we’ve come to be known, not as a peace broker, but as “Israel’s lawyer” anytime there is a peace table — a term coined by Henry Kissinger.
The third declaration was the Six-Day War in 1967, by which time Israel was the best-resourced army in the Middle East (thanks to us). With US and UN collusion, duplicity, and acquiescence, Israel was able to win the brief and deadly war and also the PR battle for public opinion. Writes Khalidi, the myth prevailed of Israel as “a tiny, vulnerable country (which) faced constant, existential peril.” Palestinians had little knowledge of how Washington worked and no understanding of how to shape public opinion.
The collusion, duplicity and acquiescence continued through the 4th, 5th and 6th declarations, as Palestinians have been repeatedly lulled into false security, coerced into accords and agreements against their best interests, divided in order to be conquered, or ignored on the world stage, referred to as “a refugee problem,” or acknowledged “under the rubric of terrorism purveyed by Israel and eventually adopted by the United States.”
Arab countries, too, were manipulated to suit Israeli-American interests. In just one episode of siphoning Arab would-be support for the Palestinians, the Egypt-Israel peace talks of 1978-79 were proposed by President Jimmy Carter to include Palestinians as well, with the agenda of a homeland for the Palestinian people, but pressure from Israel’s Menachim Begin got them uninvited. Then, Israel was able to bind Anwar Sadat and Egypt to a bilateral agreement and eliminate Egyptian solidarity with Palestinians. Egypt got the Sinai Peninsula, but Egyptian alliance might have been leveraged to bring Israel into a new relationship with the Palestinians; without that alliance, only Iraq and Saddam Hussein remained as sympathetic or amenable Palestinians patrons. Which further diminished American sympathies, plus led to other ugly things, as we know. (The deal with Egypt by Sadat was also said to be the cause of his assassination in 1981.)
Throughout, Israel has continue to expand and annex more and more territory, far beyond the UN agreements, sanctioning, containing, controlling and killing the remaining Palestinian people — unloading millions of pounds of munitions on an area, in the case of Gaza, the size of Detroit. The Palestinians have learned to put up a fight, but the wars are always one-sided and Palestinian casualties are always ten to 50 times those of Israel. We may hear reports of 4,000 Hamas rockets fired from Gaza, but never a footnote that they lack any sophisticated targeting system that would allow them to be effective, or that Israel has a missile defense system provided by us that allows most to be preempted. Those 4,000 Hamas rockets killed 5 people. From 2008-2014, in three major attacks, Israel killed 3800 Palestinians, 1/3 of them children. Just 87 Israelis were killed, mostly military.
The good-faith negotiations never come. In 2008, Israeli leadership affirmed the “Dahiya doctrine”: “…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.” In one assault in 2014, the “military” targets included “277 UN and government schools, seventeen hospitals and clinics …all 6 of Gaza’s universities… and over 40,000 other buildings.”
The issues that continue to be fodder for negotiations, even negotiations held in bad faith, haven’t changed in decades (and perhaps you also know this from watching The West Wing): land and self-determination for the Palestinians, control of Jerusalem, the right of refugees to return to their homes, removal of the (illegal) Israeli settlements and an end to the occupation of areas presumed still to belong to Palestine — Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. (The Golan Heights were also annexed by Israel, but that area was previously held by Syria, not Palestine.) The Israeli modus operandi has been to isolate these small areas — disconnecting them from one another and crippling their economic life. Gaza, now called “the world’s largest open air prison,” is barricaded on land by fences, walls, roads and checkpoints that allow Israeli but not Palestinian movement, and blockaded on the coast by the Israeli navy, unable to import or export goods — even daily necessities. More than 50 percent of Gaza Palestinians now live in poverty; unemployment is likewise above 50 percent.
Given all that, it is actually remarkable that the Palestinians are as strong and resolute as they are.
The author, Khalidi, is a Palestinian academic and diplomat, with a long family involvement in peace work and his own instances of outrunning Israeli assaults. He has no blinders regarding the failures of Palestinian leadership to engage, and discusses frankly the strategic errors and self-serving decisions of some Palestinian leaders that have contributed to the current state. I’m pretty sure he used the word “idiocy” at one point. The volume seems balanced, clear, well-documented and frankly indisputable. (In case you worry he’s not clear-eyed enough, my next read will be a deeper look at a single one of these eras, 1967: Israel, The War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. The writer, Tom Segev, is an Israeli journalist and historian living in Jerusalem.)
Ultimately, Khalidi concludes, the Zionist movement has failed, at least so far. “With the establishment of Israel, Zionism did succeed in fashioning a potent national movement and a thriving new people in Palestine. But it could not fully supplant the country’s original population, which is what would have been necessary for the ultimate triumph of Zionism.” So the battle continues, with “growing fears” that Israeli victory “has become more possible in the past few years than at anytime since 1948…”
Khalidi also then ponders the reasons for American entrenchment. Oil, surely; a strategic place to conduct business in the Middle East. A realization that we have committed war crimes and desire not to be held to account. A failure on our part to get honest about our own history of colonization and imperialism, especially in regard to Black and indigenous peoples here. And I might add our own national proclivity to play “Risk” with the rest of the world as our game board.
But also, he notes, and this is where I face my own culpability, our “Christian” nation’s alignment with biblical stories of a land covenant. Evangelicals are more likely to be intractable, but even us mainstream Protestants have a hard time separating the Israel of faith from Israel the modern tyrant state. I have struggled with this myself, and come to realize that, as I said in my sermon this week, “I either have to find another way to read scripture, or I have to quit reading it.” It is that simple now. There is nothing about this war on Palestinians that deserves biblical sanction or ignorant Christian endorsement.
Most of what I thought I knew has actually come from the New York Times and the Washington Post, but also The West Wing and other dramatic tellings, all of which I now see heavily favor Israel. All of which. But I have also always heard the stories in the context of the deeply ingrained bias toward Israel that I’ve learned from a lifetime in church. The bias runs deep. In America, we are just loathe to dig behind the propaganda and hear or tell the Palestinian story.
Khalidi cites another historian positing a critical future look back at Israel. Zeev Sternhell hopes a century hence scholars will wonder:
“When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty toward the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hope for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?”
I hope they will say that this was the moment.
So, this is a good book. You might need your search engine from time to time (I’m trying to quit saying/using “google” since I discovered google maps doesn’t label Palestine, only Israel), but you’ll learn a lot, even if you know more than I did at the outset. The issue is fraught and deserves our attention. Especially if we claim to be people of faith.