The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
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A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history
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.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
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Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He is one of the foremost experts on the history of Palestine, having authored numerous books on the topic since the 1980s. Although this book is Professor Khalidi's first book written primarily for a non-academic audience, the 45 pages of endnotes attest to its exhaustive survey of the preceding literature. Despite the attention to detail, the book is quite readable. Professor Khalidi hails from an old, influential Jerusalem family (a number of his ancestors appear in the book) and has himself been a character (albeit a relatively minor one) in the diplomatic history of the conflict. There are many well regarded books by academics covering similar terrain (eg, James Gelvin's “The Israel/Palestine Conflict”, 4th ed), but Professor Khalidi's book uniquely blends a lifetime of study and scholarship with generations of family history. It is my first recommendation to people who are looking to understand the historical context for what we are seeing unfold today.
