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

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The pro-Israel crowd could benefit from this history to understand the roots of today’s war. Instead they are probably reading what Tishby herself calls a “history-ish book”. An Israeli producer and actor who made it in Hollywood, she worked as Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism and delegitimization. Her writing is strongest when describing the formative roles her grandparents played in the Zionist movement in Europe and in the early days of the state of Israel. Her book begins by cementing the Jewish people’s biblical and religious connections to “their tiny piece of ancestral land”, and then recounts in detail antisemitism in Europe. In his book, Khalidi breaks the hundred years of war on Palestine into six periods. He describes the Balfour declaration and all the British bias in favor of Jewish Zionists that followed, especially between 1917 and 1939, as the first declaration of war on Palestine. He shows with skill and documentation the simple fact that the great colonial power at the time, Great Britain, not only acquiesced with Jewish Zionists but also went overboard in denying the existence of the Palestinian people and Palestinian nationalism. Khalidi argues that while settler colonialism was ending in the middle of the 20 th century, in Palestine it was just beginning. Morris, Benny (3 April 2020). "The War on History". Jewish Review of Books . Retrieved 11 November 2023. The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years Waron Palestine is Rashid Khalidi's powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms.

It’s only toward the end of her book that Tishby’s goal becomes clear: this is a guide to countering Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activism and the swelling of anti-Zionist perspectives on US college campuses — all told in the voice of Carrie Bradshaw. IN 1922, THE new League of Nations issued its Mandate for Palestine, which formalized Britain’s governance of the country. In an extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement, the Mandate not only incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim, it substantially amplified the declaration’s commitments. The document begins with a reference to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which states that for “certain communities … their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.” It continues by giving an international pledge to uphold the provisions of the Balfour Declaration. The clear implication of this sequence is that only one people in Palestine is to be recognized with national rights: the Jewish people. This was in contradistinction to every other Middle Eastern mandated territory, where Article 22 of the covenant applied to the entire population and was ultimately meant to allow for some form of independence of these countries. After the failure of a conference held in the spring of 1939 at St. James’s Palace in London involving representatives of the Palestinians, the Zionists, and the Arab states, Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab, and Indian Muslim opinion. This document called for a severe curtailment of Britain’s commitments to the Zionist movement. It proposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and on land sales (two major Arab demands) and promised representative institutions in five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands). Although immigration was in fact restricted, none of the other provisions was ever fully implemented.71 Moreover, representative institutions and self-determination were made contingent on approval of all the parties, which the Jewish Agency would never give for an arrangement that would prevent the creation of a Jewish state. The minutes of the cabinet meeting of February 23, 1939, make it clear that Britain meant to withhold the substance of these two crucial concessions from the Palestinians, as the Zionist movement was to have effective veto power, which it would obviously use.72 In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

She assures readers that she is a liberal, centrist/lefty and feminist, but in her casual millennial tone she reaches for tired caricatures of Palestinians and Arabs that are dismissive if not mildly racist. Tishby repeats without context Golda Meir’s infamous denial of Palestinians’ existence, and notes: “There has never been a coherent Palestinian national, religious, or political identity.” The occupied West Bank city of Hebron “felt like a hostile Arab country” to her as a young soldier hanging out there with Ayelet Shaked before she became a rightwing minister.

However, in spite of the extraordinary capacity of the Zionist movement to mobilize and invest capital in Palestine (financial inflows to an increasingly self-segregated Jewish economy during the 1920s were 41.5 percent larger than its net domestic product,48 an astonishing level), between 1926 and 1932 the Jewish population ceased to grow as a proportion of the country’s population, stagnating at between 17 and 18.5 percent.49 Some of these years coincided with the global depression, when Jews leaving Palestine outpaced those arriving and capital inflows decreased markedly. At that point, the Zionist project looked as if it might never attain the critical demographic mass that would make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English,” in Weizmann’s words.50 a b c Anderson, Lisa (11 August 2020). "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017". ISSN 0015-7120 . Retrieved 12 October 2022. The second chapter has the United States replacing Britain in 1947 as the imperial power, with its moves to gather international support to ensure the passage of UN partition resolution, which approved the establishment of a Jewish state on 56% of Arab majority land, thereby violating the Palestinians' right to "national self-determination" as guaranteed in the UN Charter. [3] It was followed by civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the Establishment of the State of Israel, the First Arab-Israeli War, and the Nakba, in which about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled to neighboring Arab states. [3] Land that had been owned and abandoned by fleeing and ousted Palestinians was expropriated by the Israeli government to be used solely for the benefit of the Jewish people, being added to extant Jewish settlements or coming under the control of the Israel Lands Authority and Jewish National Fund. [3] "The Third Declaration of War, 1967" [ edit ] Throughout, Khalidi engages in nuanced self-criticism, interviewing former diplomats to understand how Israel outmaneuvered the PLO in the 1990s, during the Oslo peace process that followed from Madrid, and how Arafat and the old guard had grown out of touch with a new generation of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He uses the framework of settler colonialism to explain the success of the Zionist movement in taking the land and emptying it of its inhabitants. He reads primary sources and documents conveying displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, to demonstrate how Israel has prevented an independent Palestine through six historical periods that constitute a century-long war against Palestinians. Palestinian resistance endured, helped by the law of unintended consequences: Israel’s crushing of Egypt in 1967 boosted the PLO, while the 1982 Lebanon invasion prompted the 1987 intifada. Israel unintentionally resurrected Palestinian resistance by its heavy-handed actions. Arafat looms large in the book’s final chapters, and not to his credit. He started as he meant to continue, by cheating in student elections as a young man in Cairo. The peace after 1993 brought Arafat into Israel, where it monitored and controlled him. Nothing changed. Fatah militants who had spent time in Israeli jails tortured Hamas detainees. The Greater Israel settlement project on the West Bank continued apace, Israel arguing that Palestinians neither wanted peace nor accepted Israel, a point Khalidi contests.

Genre

Although the tactics of divide and rule were fairly successful until the mid-1930s, the six-month general strike of 1936 constituted a popular and spontaneous explosion from the bottom up that took the British, the Zionists, and the elite Palestinian leadership by surprise, and that obliged the latter to put aside its divisions, at least nominally. The result was the creation of the Arab Higher Committee, which was set up to lead and represent the entire Arab majority, although the British never recognized the AHC as representative. The committee was made up entirely of men, all people of substance, and all members of the Palestinian elite in its service, landowning, and merchant wings. The AHC tried to take charge of the general strike, but unfortunately their most important achievement was to broker an end to it in the fall of 1936 at the request of several Arab rulers, who were essentially acting at the behest of their patrons, the British. They promised the Palestinian leadership that the British would provide redress for their grievances. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017. By Rashid Khalidi. (Macmillan) New York, 2020. 336 pp. In the two decades after 1917, the Palestinians had been unable to develop an overarching framework for their national movement such as the Wafd in Egypt or the Congress Party in India or Sinn Fein in Ireland. Nor did they maintain an apparently solid national front as some other peoples fighting colonialism had managed to do. Their efforts were undermined by the hierarchical, conservative, and divided nature of Palestinian society and politics, characteristic of many in the region, and further sapped by a sophisticated policy of divide and rule adopted by the mandatory authorities, aided and abetted by the Jewish Agency. This colonial strategy may have reached its peak of perfection in Palestine after hundreds of years of maturation in Ireland, India, and Egypt. As war clouds loomed in Europe in 1939, however, momentous new global challenges to the British Empire combined with the impact of the Arab Revolt to produce a major shift in London’s policy, away from its previous full-throated support of Zionism. While the Zionists had been delighted by Britain’s decisive smashing of Palestinian resistance, this new shift confronted their leaders with a critical situation. As Europe slid inexorably toward another world war, the British knew that this conflict would be fought, like the previous one, in part on Arab soil. It was now imperative, in terms of core imperial strategic interests, to improve Britain’s image and defuse the fury in the Arab countries and the Islamic world at the forcible repression of the Great Revolt, particularly as these areas were being deluged with Axis propaganda about British atrocities in Palestine. A January 1939 report to the cabinet recommending a change of course in Palestine stressed the importance of “winning the confidence of Egypt and the neighbouring Arab states.”69 The report included a comment from the secretary of state for India, who said that “the Palestine problem is not merely an Arabian problem, but is fast becoming a Pan-Islamic problem”; he warned that if the “problem” was not dealt with properly, “serious trouble in India must be apprehended.”70