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The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is Ongoing

In his The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi has written a landmark work that unpicks many of the conflicting narratives regarding Palestinian history and nationhood, writes Thomas Gorguissian. ^[1]

In his The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance,^[2] Rashid Khalidi draws on hundreds of untapped archival materials to chronicle the sweeping history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. He supplements this material with personally documented multi-generational testimonies and conversations with pivotal local figures.

As a result, we are also able to bear witness to the ongoing human tragedy in the Gaza Strip, suffused throughout with pain, grief, and anger. The work looks into the possible role of the international community and the European countries in putting an end to the Israeli aggression against Palestinian civilians and children, which is still ongoing under the pretext of the “war on Hamas and terrorism.” 

Amidst the daily footage of buildings reduced to rubble, the brutality of the Israeli armed forces, and the suffering of the Palestinians in the current Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, one question comes to mind: Is history repeating itself? There are also other questions, such as what is the good of studying this history when it seems to make no difference to actions in the present? Is history simply shaped and written by the victor (the oppressor), who overlooks the anguish of the vanquished (the oppressed)?

Bearing such questions in mind, the history that Khalidi tells will be most valuable to those who are able to read it with the appropriate understanding, always also considering that what we commonly read in the history books can contain a reshuffling of the facts, arranged with the intention of distorting the truth. Reading Khalidi’s work, I wondered about the years to come: How will future historians address what is happening in Gaza at present? How will future generations remember it? How will the history books grapple with the conflicting narratives inundating us since the outbreak of the “Al-Aqsa Storm” in October 2023?

Attempts at Understanding

The staff of Foreign Policy magazine have recently included The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine – translated into Arabic and published in 2021 by the Arab Scientific Publishers –in their top-ten list of books for a better and more comprehensive understanding of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Born in New York in 1948, Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York and a former editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is the author of seven books, including Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, and The Iron Cage. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. He has also played a prominent role in a group of Palestinian-American academics that has provided advice to the Palestinian leadership. He was an advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 to June 1993.

In the introduction to his book, Khalidi writes:

Rather than write a comprehensive survey of Palestinian history, I have chosen to focus on six turning points in the struggle over Palestine. These six events, from the 1917 issuance of the Balfour Declaration, which decided the fate of Palestine, to Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and its intermittent wars on Gaza’s population in the early 2000s, highlight the colonial nature of the hundred years’ war on Palestine, and also the indispensable role of external powers in waging it (18).

The book comprises six chapters, following a lengthy introduction where the author traces his family history and its roots dating back to the 19th century. He does not neglect to mention the Khalidi Library in Jerusalem, founded in 1899 by his grandfather, Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, with a bequest from his great-grandmother, Khadija al-Khalidi, and housing more than twelve hundred manuscripts.

The author also meticulously delineates the life of his great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi. A worldly man with a broad education, Yusuf Diya was fluent in various languages and was fully aware of the Zionist Movement when it was still in its nascency. On March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya sent a prescient seven-page letter to Theodore Herzl, intending for it to be passed on to the founder of modern Zionism, who replied to it on March 19 the same year. Khalidi reveals that Yusuf Diya “spoke ‘with full knowledge of the facts” in his letter, asserting that it was “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take over Palestine. “Nothing could be more just and equitable” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find a refuge elsewhere, he said. But, he concluded with a heartfelt plea, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone” (9-10). 

Khalidi says of his work that “this book does not correspond to a ‘lachrymose conception’ of the past hundred years of Palestinian history, to reprise the great historian Salo Baron’s brilliant critique of a nineteenth-century trend in Jewish historical writing” (19). Instead, it reflects the Palestinians’ “resilience and helps recover some of what has thus far been airbrushed out of the history by those who control all of historic Palestine and the narrative surrounding it” (19).

The first chapter, entitled “The First Declaration of War, 1917–1939,” starts with an epigraph from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, who once said, “There are plenty of cases of war being begun before it is declared” (21). It struck me as pertinent that Edward Said is quoted at the beginning of Chapter Six, “The Sixth Declaration of War, 2000–2014,” as stating, “This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass” (201).

Writing during Hard Times

Flipping through the pages of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine against the backdrop of the ongoing war on Gaza contextualizes the contemporaneity of what we are seeing, living through, and experiencing within a historical framework with its own merits and demerits. The text elucidates how plans for Zionist settlement have existed, been formed, and evolved over the years, with the aim of obliterating Palestinian identity, perpetrating collective genocide, and forcibly or voluntarily displacing Palestinians, thereby creating a new demographic reality that no longer corresponds to that which previously existed. This ultimately delays or stifles the idea of a viable, growing, and stable Palestinian state.

Khalidi is aware that his readers are coming to his text a hundred years after the issue of Palestine first emerged. He is also aware that the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis in the 1990s were mediated by the United States, which was then called a “neutral party.” That period of benign intentions – or what was described as such – was determined by American promises and guarantees that had once seemed poised to help and contribute to the Palestinians’ self-determination and self-governance within defined areas, with the objective of building an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Khalidi tackles the events that transpired without overlooking failures prompted by Israeli intransigence, occasional Palestinian-Arab divisions, or the blind American bias towards Israel. The care with which he writes throughout is to be admired, considering that chronicling historical events is not an easy task, primarily since Khalidi also addresses his family’s personal history alongside the history of the Palestinians.

Regarding the 1967 War, Khalidi writes:

For Israel, the reemergence of the Palestinian national movement as a force in the Middle East and increasingly on the global stage constituted a great irony: its victory in 1967 had helped to precipitate even more intransigent Palestinian resistance. This constituted a sharp reversal of one of Israel’s great successes of the 1948–1967 period, in which the very issue of Palestinian nationhood had almost been fully eclipsed in both arenas. The return of the Palestinians, whose disappearance would have signified a final victory for the Zionist project, was a most unwelcome apparition for Israel’s leaders, as unwelcome as the return of any indigenous population would be for a settler-colonial enterprise that believed it had dispensed with them. The comforting idea that “the old will die and the young will forget” – a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion, probably mistakenly – expresses one of the deepest aspirations of Israeli leaders after 1948. It was not to be (114).

Although the attacks by militant groups did create serious security problems, “the Palestinian resurgence posed little or no threat to Israel in strategic terms.” Khalidi adds that “it constituted an entirely different kind of challenge on the discursive level, one that was existential. The ultimate success of the Zionist project as hard-line Zionists defined it depended in large measure on the replacement of Palestine by Israel. For them, if Palestine existed, Israel could not. Israel was in consequence obliged to focus its powerful propaganda machine on a new target, while still having to counter the efforts of the Arab states” (114-115).

Clash of Narratives

Khalidi’s well-researched book does not offer a historical narrative that fundamentally differs from the existing texts. However, he examines this history from multiple perspectives, some of which are unconventional. “My purpose throughout has been to show that this conflict must be seen quite differently from most of the prevailing views of it,” he says, setting out his aims from the very beginning (19). This aligns with what Edward Said has called the “permission to narrate,” defined as the Palestinians’ “right to tell their story themselves, taking back control of it not only from Israel’s omnipresent narrative in the West,” which stereotypes Palestinians as terrorists and villains (115). Thus, Khalidi narrates evidence of the Palestinians’ success in imposing “themselves on the map of the Middle East in spite of the best efforts of Israel, the United States, and many Arab governments” to limit it (115).

Looking forward, perhaps an additional chapter, titled “The Seventh Declaration of War, 2023,” could be added. The narrative here would be more painful, sorrowful, infuriating, and undoubtedly more tragic. What is happening in the region today, and what will likely unfold in the coming months, would more clearly and comprehensively reveal the clash of narratives and the components of the Israeli, more precisely Zionist, plans aimed at obliterating the Palestinian identity through aggression, bombardment, destruction, forced displacement, and genocide.

Khalidi showcases the American perspective, stating:

Finally, the reemergence of the Palestine question posed a problem for US diplomacy, which with SC 242 had chosen to ignore it and act as if the Palestinians did not exist. For a decade thereafter, the United States strove to keep its head in the sand, even as much of the international community began to extend to the Palestinian movement some degree of recognition. This US stance was in keeping with pronounced Israeli preferences, and it was made possible by the inadequate representation by the Palestinians of their own cause in the US arena, and the weakness of pro-Palestinian sentiment in American public opinion. At the same time, administrations from that of Nixon onward also gave various forms of covert and overt support to military action directed against the PLO by Israel, Jordan, Lebanese factions, and Syria (115).

He adds:

The Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations maintained close relations with Israel, extending economic aid to the new state, although they did not see it as a principal element in their regional policies and did not approve of all of its actions. Eisenhower had forced Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai and the Gaza Strip after the 1956 Suez War, and later Kennedy tried and failed to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s Kennedy came to see Arab nationalism and Egypt’s Nasser as a bulwark against communism, which was the prime American concern in the Middle East (101).

His book thoroughly discusses the Palestinian mentality in dealing with members of the Diaspora, with Khalidi saying that “respected Palestinian-American academics in the United States, notably Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Walid Khalidi, Hisham Sharabi, Fouad Moughrabi, and Samih Farsoun, repeatedly tried to impress on Palestinian leaders that they needed to take American public opinion into account and devote to it sufficient resources and energy, but to no avail” (118).

Finishing the book, one wonders if it has succeeded in providing a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of what is often called “the Palestinian issue,” even if opinions differ on its details, demands, and methods of resistance. Undoubtedly, it is remarkably successful in describing the development of this issue over time in a more diverse and comprehensive way for the Western reader, as well as one invested with a certain emotional authority (the book was originally written in English). This leads me to wonder how the Palestinian or Arab reader might interact with a different presentation of the hundred years of war on Palestine.

Rashid Khalidi has seamlessly used his talent for historical research when constructing his narrative. His academic expertise has allowed him to produce a text that addresses displacements, attempts at obliterating the Palestinian identity, the Nakba, and the Palestinian Diaspora, while at the same time scrupulously tackling the American interference in Palestinian matters over the past 30 years from the Oslo Accords to the first presidency of Donald Trump.

The latter is especially pertinent as Khalidi personally witnessed and took part in several American initiatives and deals proposed by Washington. As a correspondent working in Washington, I also followed most of the American-Israeli-Palestinian-Arab meetings that took place as part of the so-called “Peace Process.” Khalidi’s historical and personal narrative is a landmark work in unpicking the many intermingled and conflicting narratives regarding Palestinian history and nationhood.