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

Product Information

Anderson, Scott (28 January 2020). "Is There Any Way to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 12 October 2022. One of the key provisions of the Mandate was Article 4, which gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status as a “public body” with wide-ranging powers in economic and social spheres and the ability “to assist and take part in the development of the country” as a whole.

Article 2 of the Mandate provided for self-governing institutions; however, the context makes clear that this applied only to the yishuv, as the Jewish population of Palestine was called, while the Palestinian majority was consistently denied access to such institutions. (Any later concessions offered on matters of representation, such as a British proposal for an Arab Agency, were conditional on equal representation for the tiny minority and the large majority, and on Palestinian acceptance of the terms of the Mandate, which explicitly nullified their existence—only the first Catch-22 in which the Palestinians would find themselves trapped.) Representative institutions for the entire country on a democratic basis and with real power were never on offer (in keeping with Lloyd George’s private assurance to Weizmann), for the Palestinian majority would naturally have voted to end the privileged position of the Zionist movement in their country. The Palestinians might have gained an advantage, albeit a slight one, had they accepted the 1939 White Paper, in spite of its flaws from their perspective. Husayn al-Khalidi, for one, did not believe that the British government was sincere in any of its pledges.73 He stated acidly that he knew at the St. James’s Palace conference, which he was brought out of exile in the Seychelles to attend, that Britain “never seriously intended for one moment to be faithful to its promises.” From the first sessions, it was clear to him that the conference was a means “to gain time, and to drug the Arabs, no more and no less … to please the Arabs so they would stop their revolution,” and give the British “time to catch their breath as war clouds gathered.”74 He nevertheless came around to favoring a flexible and positive response to the White Paper, as did other Palestinian leaders such as Musa al-‘Alami and Jamal al-Husayni, the mufti’s cousin.75 In the end, however, the mufti, after indicating that he was inclined toward acceptance, insisted on outright refusal, and his position carried the day. After the St. James’s Palace conference, the British once again sent Husayn al-Khalidi into exile, this time to Lebanon. When he saw how the revolt had degenerated in the face of massive British repression and how dire the situation was in Palestine, he argued for halting the resistance. But here, too, his views were overruled.76 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 addition to the more traditional sources and methods employed by a historian, the author in this book draws on family archives, stories passed down through his family from generation to generation, and his own experiences, as an activist in various circles and as someone who has been involved in negotiations among Palestinian groups and with Israelis. [1] [4] Synopsis [ edit ] Introduction [ edit ] The book begins with an examination of correspondence from 1889 between Yusuf Diya ad-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and relative of the author, and Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism. [5] In his response, Herzl ignores the main concerns raised by the Pasha and in reference to the indigenous, non-Jewish population of Palestine, Herzl quips: "But who would think of sending them away?" [5] [6] :7 The author sees this early exchange as revelatory that Zionism was an essentially colonial project from its inception, and that the Palestinians were never taken seriously and only rarely were their opinions consulted in matters that would determine their future. [5] "The First Declaration of War, 1917–1939" [ edit ]Just before his arrest and exile, Husayn al-Khalidi, who served on the AHC and as Jerusalem’s elected mayor for three years before he was removed by the British, encountered Major General Sir John Dill, the officer in command of the British forces in Palestine. In his memoirs, my uncle recalls telling the general that the only way to end the violence was to meet some of the Palestinians’ demands, specifically stopping Jewish immigration. What would be the effect of arresting the Arab leadership? Dill wanted to know. A senior Arab figure had told him that such arrests would end the revolt in days or weeks. My uncle set him straight: the revolt would only accelerate and spread out of control. It was the Jewish Agency that wanted the arrests, and al-Khalidi knew that the Colonial Office was considering it, but solving the Palestine question would not be so simple.62 Khalidi, for his part, goes into great depth on the “violent transformation” of that year, notably the ethnic cleansing and land theft that would shape Israel’s establishment. He details the “post-Nakba political vacuum” of Arab disunity and complex intra-Palestinian politics, which Tishby tends to dismiss as a hot mess and indicative of the absence of a real Palestinian identity or a claim on the land. Israeli historian Benny Morris, a self-identified Zionist once associated with the New Historians, [8] has described the book as "simply bad history". Morris has criticized the book for what he argues is an oversimplification of the conflict (including minimizing the role of Palestinian political violence), distortion of the role played by Western powers, and portrayal of Zionism as a “colonialist enterprise" as opposed to a national movement itself. [9] Translations [ edit ] The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017. By Rashid Khalidi. (Macmillan) New York, 2020. 336 pp.

Seven of the Mandate’s twenty-eight articles are devoted to the privileges and facilities to be extended to the Zionist movement to implement the national home policy (the others deal with administrative and diplomatic matters, and the longest article treats the question of antiquities). The Zionist movement, in its embodiment in Palestine as the Jewish Agency, was explicitly designated as the official representative of the country’s Jewish population, although before the mass immigration of committed European Zionists the Jewish community comprised mainly either religious or mizrahi Jews who in the main were not Zionist or who even opposed Zionism. Of course, no such official representative was designated for the unnamed Arab majority. Hillel Cohen (22 October 2015). Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929. Brandeis University Press. pp.253–. ISBN 978-1-61168-812-2.

Contact Us

This chapter is the most personal, as the author lived in Beirut for 15 years with his family. [7] It also presents damning evidence, based on documents leaked from the Israel State Archives in 2012 as well as secret appendices from the Kahan Commission that weren't published in the original 1983 report, of the Israeli government's conscious decision to send Christian militias into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps with the clear intention of instigating the Sabra and Shatila massacre. [7] "The Fifth Declaration of War, 1987–1995" [ edit ] Two further things must be said in conclusion about the revolt and about Britain’s repression of it. The first is that it proved the clear-sightedness of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the self-delusion of many British officials. The Zionists’ colonial enterprise, aimed at taking over the coun Riveting and original … a work enriched by solid scholarship, vivid personal experience, and acute appreciation of the concerns and aspirations of the contending parties in this deeply unequal conflict ' Noam Chomsky In this brutally frank summary, Balfour set the high-minded “age-long traditions,” “present needs,” and “future hopes” embodied in Zionism against the mere “desires and prejudices” of the Arabs in Palestine, “who now inhabit that ancient land,” implying that its population was no more than transient. Echoing Herzl, Balfour airily claimed that Zionism would not hurt the Arabs, yet he had no qualms about recognizing the bad faith and deceit that characterized British and Allied policy in Palestine. But this is of no matter. The remainder of the memo is a bland set of proposals for how to surmount the obstacles created by this tangle of hypocrisy and contradictory commitments. The only two fixed points in Balfour’s summary are a concern for British imperial interests and a commitment to provide opportunities for the Zionist movement. His motivations were of a piece with those of most other senior British officials involved in crafting Palestine policy; none of them were as honest about the implications of their actions. My uncle had been right. In the months after his exile and the mass arrests of others, the revolt entered its most intense phase, and British forces lost control of several urban areas and much of the countryside, which were taken over and governed by the rebels.63 In the words of Dill’s successor, Lieutenant General Robert Haining, in August 1938, “The situation was such that civil administration of the country was, to all practical purposes, non-existent.”64 In December, Haining reported to the War Office that “practically every village in the country harbours and supports the rebels and will assist in concealing their identity from the Government Forces.”65 It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in September 1938, and nearly a year more of fierce fighting, to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the “independent nation” of Palestine than in that of the “independent nation” of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.… The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. 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. In the third paragraph of the Mandate’s preamble, the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are described as having a historic connection to Palestine. In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups. There were people there, certainly, but they had no history or collective existence, and could therefore be ignored. The roots of what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the “politicide” of the Palestinian people are on full display in the Mandate’s preamble. The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it. Full Book Name: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017a b c d e f g h i j k l m Rubner, Michael (June 2020). "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017". Middle East Policy. 27 (2): 173–177. doi: 10.1111/mepo.12504. ISSN 1061-1924. S2CID 225827969. 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. His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours 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 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:

a b c Hughes, Matthew (7 May 2020). "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi review – conquest and resistance". the Guardian . Retrieved 13 October 2022. Perhaps the most detailed chapter in the book is what Khalidi calls the third declaration of war on Palestine, namely Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut, followed by the departure of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters to Tunisia and the ensuing massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 (for which U.S. guarantees to protect the safety of Palestinian civilians proved worthless). 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. after newsletter promotion This is a guide to countering BDS activism and the swelling of anti-Zionist perspectives on US college campuses – all told in the voice of Carrie Bradshaw The personal stories give important credence to the conclusions that Khalidi draws from both his academic research and his front-row seat to history. Khalidi heaps huge responsibility regarding all that has happened to Palestine on the British and the Americans, as well as other Western countries.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. a b c Bartu, Peter (1 January 2021). "Book review". Arab Studies Quarterly. 43 (1). doi: 10.13169/arabstudquar.43.1.0075. ISSN 0271-3519. In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish. Whatever the intentions of these two leaders, the apparent endorsement of the national aspirations of peoples the world over by ostensibly anticolonial powers had an enormous impact. Clearly, Wilson had no intention of applying the principle to most of those who took them as inspiration for their hopes of national liberation. Indeed, he confessed that he was bewildered by the plethora of peoples, most of whom he had never heard, who responded to his call for self-determination.31 Nevertheless, the hopes aroused and then disappointed—by Wilson’s pronouncements in support of national self-determination, by the Bolshevik Revolution, and by the indifference of the Allies at the Versailles Peace Conference to the demands of colonized peoples for independence—sparked massive revolutionary anticolonial upheavals in India, Egypt, China, Korea, Ireland, and elsewhere.32 The dissolution of the Romanov, Hapsburg, and Ottoman Empires—transnational dynastic states—was also in large measure a function of the spread of nationalism and its intensification during and after the war. In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonised with the declaration, the Covenant, or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry.