Hugh Pope

A review of “The Hundred Years War on Palestine: a History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance”, by Rashid Khalidi

We talk a lot about the “news”. It’s a shame there is not a better supply of something we might call “olds”. Because when the world gets confused by a storm of what looks like new information, the best antidote is often a fair, intelligent and honest dose of history.

A case in point: the “news” of last week’s new orgy of violence in Gaza, in which Israelis killed more than 400 Palestinians in a single night. Or the way this week that Israel struck and killed yet another brave Palestinian journalist, this one in his car.

If you feel the same, help of a kind is at hand: Rashid Khalidi’s excellent A Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conflict and Resistance. Reading it over the past month did not make me feel optimistic about any imminent slowing of the killings or resolution of the underlying dynamics. But it was in many ways a relief.

I found it deeply reassuring to see the Palestinian story laid out from the 19th century onward, calmly, expertly, authentically and accessibly. The book contains many of the facts that are missing in the news, facts that anyone who wants to try to end the assymetric Israeli/Palestinian duel will have to master and take into account.

Indeed, for me it is in the same league of essential background reading that I and others in my 1980s generation of Middle East correspondents found in David Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch or Jonathan Randal’s Going all the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and the War in Lebanon.

As one might expect from the scion of a leading family of Palestinian dignitaries from Ottoman times until today, Khalidi describes many “olds” that most of us can’t remember. For instance, in the late 1930s, he shows exactly how old imperial Britain ruthlessly suppressed the emergence of Palestinian institutions, paving the way for Israel even as it (sometimes) fought the old Jewish “terrorists”.

Unlike much of what I remember reading from the Palestinian side in the past, Khalidi is succinct and avoids too much competitive victimhood. He addresses with clear-eyed honesty why Palestinians have struggled so much to form a truly coherent national representation. He criticizes the Palestinian leadership for several wrong turns, like, for instance, suicide bombing.

The book is highly contemporary too. Originally published in 2020, the quality of the argument is shown by the seamlessness with which Khalidi’s 2024 afterword is easily able to encompass and explain the current phase of the war in Gaza.

Hand-holds on history

Khalidi’s precious hand-holds on history allow us to regain our critical faculties when judging key issues right now. Some examples:

• Anti-Palestinian commentators often allege there were amazing Israeli/US deals that the various old Palestinian leaderships walked away from. But were there really any viable offers?
• The new Israeli state has created a new sense of nationhood for the Jewish inhabitants, most of whose families arrived from somewhere else. But is it fair to deny that a similar sense of nationhood exists for the Palestinians, whose families have been there for much longer, and who have now been fighting for Palestine for more than a century?
• Does Israel’s special history mean that it can helpfully be understood as a latter-day colony as well as a nation state? Put another way, is it fair to deny the Palestinians the mantle of taking part in a liberation struggle?

Importantly, reading this book gives the lie to those spokespeople from Israel’s radical government and its supporters who frame the current round of violence as being uniquely caused by Hamas’s bloody breakout on 7 October 2023.

For instance, if the problem didn’t begin on the 7 October, when did this all really start, and why? Which side is the victim? Is it morally superior to rip a human being into pieces with a knife or by pressıng a button on a joystick? And when did the US and its Western allies become joined at the hip with the Israeli project – regardless of what the Israelis decided that project would be?

A reader of Khalidi’s account will lose any sense of surprise that the US fully backs Israel in Gaza, regardless of what Israel does there. Indeed, he shows how the trend has been towards having ever-more indistinguishable policy positions. (Even in my day, a great paradox about reporting for US media was that the Israeli press sometimes seemed freer to write about the situation than we were).

As for the rulers of the nearby Arab states who might be expected to help Palestinians, Khalidi shows time and again how “most of these dictatorial leaders are beholden to the US and are valuable clients of American defence, aerospace, oil, banking and real estate interests.”

Eliminating the Palestinians and Palestine

President Trump’s proposal to deport Palestinians from Gaza went even further than the public statements of most Israeli spokespeople. But the overall idea isn’t new. Khalidi shows how getting rid of the native population of areas inhabited by Jews was part of the original old thinking, starting with founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border,” Herzl wrote in his diary in 1895.

Khalidi’s command of the back story also explains how Palestinians never managed to break the chain of international agreements that blocked their right to be heard on equal terms. These range from London’s 1917 Balfour Declaration through Britain’s 1922 League of Nations Mandate over Palestine to UN Security Council 242 in 1967. “In order to be recognized,” Khalidi points out, “the Palestinians were required to accept an international formula designed to negate their existence.”

Best of all, having Khalidi’s thoughtful voice in my head is a welcome counterweight to the ugly line so often repeated in the “news” by supporters of the Israeli government’s actions: that somehow Hamas and the Palestinians brought this whole volcano of destruction on their own heads.

After reading all these “olds”, I’m little closer to knowing exactly what formula can solve all the competing forces over Palestine. When I published my own book on trying to understand the Middle East in 2010 (Dining with al-Qaeda), I argued for one state of Israel/Palestine in which all inhabitants had equal rights. (As seen in the picture above, Khalidi graciously introduced Dining with al-Qaeda alongside his own book of the same year, Sowing Crisis, at an event in New York’s Strand Books.)

Universal principles

In his new book, Khalidi highlights the need base any solution on respect universal principles and human rights. That seems to point in the same general direction of a one-state solution for both Palestinians and Israelis, even if he doesn’t say so explicitly. Still, he reminds us that the one-state idea is much older than many remember and was adopted by the Palestinian leadership in the 1960s (a key change of its original radical policy, and an opportunity that outsiders ignored at the time).

Khalidi also believes that exposing the colonial side of the undeniably potent Israeli nation state is essential to “making the true nature of the conflict evident … a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other … absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights must be enshrined in whatever future scheme is ultimately accepted by the two societies.”

Will the all-or-nothing Middle Eastern actors and their foreign supporters ever get there? Khalidi sees signs of hope in growing awareness of Israel’s real actions in parts of US society, youth and public opinion. He points out that encouraging such an enlightenment was long ignored by Palestinian leaders.

But reading his account of all the waves of war against Palestine and the Palestinians – often enabled by the US – does not give the reader much confidence that a new turning point will come anytime soon. The events and what people say about them over the past century seem to have the same blood-red threads running through them. Khalidi has done a great job in showing us how to see them for what they are.