The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017

“Coming to his main purpose, Yusuf Diya said soberly that whatever the merits of Zionism, the ‘brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.’ The most important of them were that ‘Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others.’”

In the Introduction, Khalidi focuses on the letter his great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, wrote to Theodor Herzl. In the letter, Yusuf Diya emphasizes that while he has great respect for Herzl, Judaism, and Jewish people, the Zionist movement should leave Palestine alone. Yusuf Diya underscores that indigenous people occupied the land. These indigenous people would not allow another group to try and forcibly remove them. To Khalidi, Yusuf Diya’s letter is prophetic. Yusuf Diya warns that trying to remove Palestinians from their land would cause deep unrest, conflict, and harm to well-established Jewish communities throughout the Middle East. All three of these warnings came true.

“As this book will argue, the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.”

The central tenet of Khalidi’s book is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply rooted in colonial decisions made by the Zionist movement with backing from superpowers (primarily Great Britain and the US) and regional (other Arab countries) and local (Palestinian leadership) players. Khalidi dispels what he considers a myth: that the conflict is a clash between two peoples, both of whom have rights in the same land. Khalidi believes that Palestinians are the rightful indigenous people of Palestine. This passage constitutes an emphatic thesis statement.

“Political figures have explicitly denied the existence of Palestinians, for example, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: ‘I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs.’ While returning from a trip to Palestine in March 2015, the governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, said ‘There’s really no such thing as the Palestinians.’”

Another key theme that Khalidi introduces in the Introduction is The Role of Outside Players in a Conflict’s Trajectory. Throughout the book, Khalidi expresses frustration with US government officials, diplomats, and politicians whom he believes are biased in their perspective of the conflict. Decades of machinations show that the US government always sides with Israel over Palestine. Some Americans, such as Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, even go so far to say that the Palestinians are not a real people. Khalidi suggests that narratives like this dehumanize Palestinians, making it easier for the Zionist movement to stake its claim on Palestinian land.

“The momentous statement made just over a century ago on behalf of Britain’s cabinet on November 2, 1917, by the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arthur James Balfour—what has come to be known as the Balfour Declaration—comprised a single sentence:

‘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.’”

To Khalidi, the Balfour Declaration is the first declaration of war on the Palestinians. There are two important components. First, the declaration amounted to a pledge by Great Britain to support the Zionist movement in Israel. Second, Palestinians are missing from the declaration. Instead, Balfour lumped the indigenous population, which comprised the majority of the total population, as non-Jewish. This tone set the precedent of trying to make Palestinian national identity invisible. Khalidi presents this in full to the reader to convey fact before interpretation, as he often does throughout the text.

“The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.”

Khalidi narrates the role of the League of Nations in this passage. In the Mandate for Palestine, the international community recognized only one group’s national rights: Jewish people. By not recognizing the Palestinians as the indigenous peoples of the territory and at a minimum as equal stakeholders, the League of Nations denied the Palestinians their right to their land. The Mandate enabled the Zionist movement to achieve their goal: a place to create a Jewish sovereign national state.

“Of all the services Britain provided to the Zionist movement before 1939, perhaps the most valuable was the armed suppression of Palestinian resistance in the form of the revolt. The bloody war waged against the country’s majority, which left 14 to 17 percent of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled, was the best illustration of the unvarnished truths uttered by Jabotinsky about the necessity of the use of force for the Zionist project to succeed.”

A reoccurring theme in Palestinian history is that outside parties use undue force to suppress the Palestinian people. One of the earliest examples of this is the British. Once Palestinians realized that the Zionist movement was intent on taking their land with support from Great Britain, they began to revolt. To suppress the revolt, the British employed tactics it had developed in other colonies, such as Ireland. Khalidi lists these tactics in a relentless way to impress upon the reader the scale of the oppression.

“In a cover letter to Wilson, the commissioners presciently warned that ‘if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.’”

Khalidi recounts one of the conclusions of the King-Crane Commission. The King-Crane Commission traveled throughout former Ottoman empire territories, including Palestine, to survey local public opinion and assess how European and American officials should handle them. The commissioners warned the American president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, that Americans would need to use force in Palestine if they wanted to follow the British and support the survival of the Jewish state. Khalidi often quotes from primary sources in the text to shift away from an interpretive tone and state facts.

“The resolution [Resolution 181] was another declaration of war, providing the international birth certificate for a Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land, a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter.”

Khalidi details how various parties continued to support the Zionist movement and prevent the creation of a Palestinian nation-state. The United Nations represents one example. Khalidi finds Resolution 181 especially egregious since it enabled the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Khalidi appeals to moral sense when he suggests that this resolution violates the entire mission of the UN which is to enshrine self-determination, promote human rights, and maintain peace and security around the world.

“Among those displaced in 1948 were my grandparents, who had to leave their Tal al-Rish home where my father and most of his siblings were born. Initially my grandfather, now eighty-five years old and frail, stubbornly refused to leave his house. After his sons took most of the family to shelter in Jerusalem and Nablus, he remained there alone for several weeks. Fearing for his safety, a family friend from Jaffa ventured to the house during a lull in the fighting to retrieve him. He left unwilling, lamenting that he could not take his books with him. Neither he nor his children ever saw their home again. The ruins of my grandparents’ large stone house still stand abandoned on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”

One of the most significant aspects of Khalidi’s work is his inclusion of family stories and his own experiences, which convey the impacts of the war on actual Palestinians. Khalidi presents the facts of the Nakba, yet he humanizes the event by showing how it impacted his own family. The Nakba forced his elderly grandparents from their home, which they never saw again. Their pain, sadness, and trauma shine through in the story. This event still clearly affects Khalidi, which he shows by noting that the house remains abandoned. This story illustrates an irony of forcing people from a home that is not then used.

“At the United Nations and elsewhere, the Palestine question was generally subsumed under the rubric of the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict,’ and the Arab states took the lead, feebly representing Palestinian interests.”

Khalidi shows again and again how the international community did not engage with Palestinians themselves to create a solution to the conflict. At the United Nations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab leaders, rather than Palestinians themselves, represented Palestine. Khalidi emphasizes that this was a colossal mistake. The Arab leaders did not truly care about the Palestinian cause. Rather, they used their representation to avoid further conflict with Israel and build ties with the US.

“Yet the myth prevails: in 1967, a tiny, vulnerable country faced constant, existential peril, and it continues to do so. This fiction has served to justify blanket support of Israeli policies, no matter how extreme, and despite its repeated rebuttal even by authoritative Israeli voices.”

Throughout the book, Khalidi seeks to dismantle myths surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One such myth is that Israel is a vulnerable country constantly under attack from Palestinian extremists and hostile Arab neighbors. Khalidi finds the prevalence of this myth dangerous because Israel and its allies can use it to justify the systemic oppression of the Palestinian people.

“Only two years later, in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that ‘there were no such as Palestinians…they did not exist,’ and they never had 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.”

Khalidi condemns the UN Security Council Resolution 242 in Chapter 3, which does not reference Palestinians. The quote by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir supports this assertion. Most of the territory captured by Israel in the Six-Day War has yet to be returned to the Palestinians.

“In January 1979, Israeli agents in Beirut assassinated Abu Hassan Salameh, the key PLO figure involved in these contacts, by bombing his car, causing a ‘huge explosion’ that resulted in a ‘ball of fire.’ Salameh had been the head of Yasser Arafat’s personal security service, Force 17, and Israel claimed that he had been involved in the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. However, an account based on interviews with Israeli intelligence officers involved in the operation states that ‘the Mossad eventually reached the conclusion that ‘cutting this channel was important…to give the Americans a hint that this was no way to behave towards friends.’”

This passage highlights two aspects of the conflict. First, Israel used political assassinations of high-ranking PLO leaders to try and suppress Palestinian nationalism. Other colonizers also vilified and assassinated political leaders from indigenous groups, reinforcing the colonial nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine to Khalidi. Second, Israeli government officials believed that the US must stick to the US-Israel Memorandum Agreement of 1975. In this agreement, the US pledged to not negotiate with the PLO. The US broke this pledge in 1979. The Israeli officials reminded the US of their diplomatic promise by assassinating one of the leading PLO figures in the negotiations.

“Our daughters, and later our son, were born in Beirut in the midst of the war, and by virtue of the fact of having parents who were politically involved (as were almost all of the 300,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon), they were seen as terrorists by the Israeli government and some others, as were Mona and I. To my distress, those most likely to label us in this way were now preparing to invade the city.”

Khalidi and his family’s personal experiences with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 humanize the topic and convey an absurdity of labelling children as terrorists. Khalidi lived in Lebanon with his family at the time. While discussing the events of the war, he shares how he and his family experienced these events firsthand. Through these experiences, he shows readers the impact the conflict has on everyday Palestinians, including how Palestinians are affixed with a terrorist label by Israeli propaganda and the deep trauma experienced in the aftermath of the war.

“Although his editors at the New York Times removed the offending word from his article, reporter Thomas Friedman at one point described the Israeli bombardment as ‘indiscriminate.’ He was referring specifically to the sporadic shelling of neighborhoods like the area around the Commodore Hotel, where he and most journalists were staying, and which certainly contained nothing whatsoever of military interest.”

In this chapter, Khalidi reveals the important role the international media plays in telling the Palestinian story to an international audience. During the war, the international media documented many atrocities committed by Israeli forces. For example, journalists detailed how Israeli forces targeted apartment buildings, resulting in huge civilian casualties. Journalists were also the first to report on the massacres that took place at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Images from the war also changed public perception. Some segments of Israeli society ramped up their efforts to advocate for peace and a two-state solution. American and European audiences also became more sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause (at least temporarily). Media stories also helped to hold Israeli, American, and other officials accountable after the war ended.

“Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to ‘mop up’—as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.”

In this passage, Khalidi recounts his own personal experience with the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. To Khalidi, this experience embodies how the Israeli, US, and Arab officials are all complicit in the atrocities committed against the Palestinian people over the last century. He includes the detail of “men, women, and children” and uses the emotive term “defenseless” to convey his view that the violence is indiscriminate.

“‘If it bleeds it leads,’ the saying goes, and television viewers were riveted by repeated tableaus of wrenching violence, which inverted the image of Israel as a perpetual victim, casting it as Goliath against the Palestinian David.”

To Khalidi, one success of the First Intifada was that it cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new light. The Israeli government and security forces brutally suppressed the largely peaceful Palestinian demonstrations. International media outlets disseminated disturbing images of Israeli overuse of force against Palestinians, especially minors. These images negatively affected Israeli’s reputation abroad. People around the world stood in solidarity with Palestinians over Israelis.

“American negotiator Aaron David Miller later regretfully used the term ‘Israel’s lawyer’ to describe his stance and that of many of his colleagues.”

This quote emphasizes how the US was not an impartial arbitrator in the Oslo Accords. Rather, the US continued to support Israel at the expense of the Palestinian national movement. During the negotiations over Oslo I, many American negotiators took the 1975 US-Israel Memorandum of Agreement to the extreme. They only supported what Israeli negotiators found acceptable.

“I am convinced that rejecting Israel’s bare-bones offer in Washington and Oslo would have been the right course. Had the PLO taken such a tough stance, the outcome would not have been worse than the loss of land, resources, and freedom of movement suffered by the Palestinians since 1993. On balance, a failure to reach a deal would have been better than the deal that emerged from Oslo. Occupation would have continued, as it has anyway, but without the veil of Palestinian self-government, without relieving Israel of the financial burden of governing and administering a population of millions, and without ‘security coordination’—the worst outcome of Oslo I—whereby the PA helps Israel police the restive Palestinians living under its military regime as their lands are gradually appropriated by Israeli colonizers.”

Khalidi staunchly opposes the Oslo Accords. He believes they made the situation far worse for Palestinians. Khalidi also blames these worsening conditions on the PLO leadership. To him, the PLO leadership should have rejected the Oslo accords. However, they arrogantly believed that they could extract more concessions from Israel in future negotiations, such as Palestinian sovereignty. This did not happen. In fact, further negotiations constricted Palestinian life and economy in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“With the new checkpoints and walls and the need for hard-to-obtain Israeli permits to pass through them, with Israel blocking free movement among the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and with the introduction of roads forbidden to Palestinian travel, the progressive constriction of Palestinian life, especially for Gazans, was underway. Arafat and his colleagues in the PLO leadership, who sailed through the checkpoints with their VIP passes, did not seem to know, or care, about the increasing confinement of ordinary Palestinians.”

In Chapter 5, Khalidi describes the worsening conditions for Palestinians living in Israel and Israeli-occupied territories. Khalidi expresses deep frustration with the PLO leadership. To him, their arrogance and short-sightedness made them ignorant to the fact that the Oslo accords would make life worse for Palestinians. The PLO leadership escaped some of the tightening restrictions that everyday Palestinians faced because of their standing.

“Another consequence was that the terrible violence of the Second Intifada erased the positive image of Palestinians that had evolved since 1982 and through the First Intifada and the peace negotiations.”

Khalidi expresses frustration with the biased media coverage during the Second Intifada. While he does not deny that Palestinians (mostly militant groups) committed acts of violence against Israelis, he argues that these attacks did not reach the scale of Israeli attacks. Yet, media outlets, especially in the US, did not discuss this difference. Khalidi uses the Second Intifada to show how control of a narrative can shape global perception. As he discusses increasingly contemporary events in the text, Khalidi expresses more personal frustration, since these are events that he witnessed and sometimes with which he was personally involved.

“In 2014, the 4,000 rockets that Israel claimed were fired from the Gaza Strip killed five Israeli civilians, one of them a Bedouin in the Naqab (Negev) region, and a Thai agricultural worker, for a total of six civilian deaths. This does not mitigate Hamas’s violation of the rules of war by using these imprecise weapons for indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas. But the casualty toll tells a different story than the one that emerged from the near-total media focus on Hamas rocket fire.”

Throughout the book, Khalidi tries to show how Israeli government and security forces brutally subdued Palestinian uprisings (both violent and nonviolent). Despite this cycle of violence, Khalidi remains hopeful that Palestinians and Israelis can achieve peace.

“Indeed, there are striking parallels between these portrayals of the resistance of Native Americans to their dispossession and that of the Palestinians. Both groups are cast as backward and uncivilized, a violent, murderous, and irrational obstacle to progress and modernity.”

In the Conclusion, Khalidi underscores one of the central themes of his book: The Impact of a Colonial Mindset on Palestine. Like other colonizers, including the US, Israel has reframed the indigenous peoples of Palestine (i.e., Palestinians) as backward, uncivilized, antisemitic, and unwilling to negotiate. Khalidi vehemently disputes this narrative. To him, the Palestinians are oppressed since they are trying to liberate themselves from the Israeli colonizers backed by superpowers.