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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Rashid Khalidi (The Author)

Rashid Khalidi was born in New York City in 1948. Over the last 100 years, Khalidi’s family has played a prominent role in Palestinian history. Family members have been leaders of the Palestinian national movement, served as mayors of Jerusalem, and were well-known scholars. Founded in 1899, his family library (known as the Khalidi library) contains manuscripts dating back to the 11th century. He used some of these manuscripts in the writing of this book. The ruins of his family home, which his grandparents were forced to abandon during one of the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, can still be seen in the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Khalidi himself has been actively engaged in politics. As one example, he lived In Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and talked with media outlets about the invasion. The Israeli government considered him and his wife, Mona, and their children terrorists at this time because of the family’s political activism. Khalidi also served as a negotiator on the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation during the 1991 peace conference in Madrid. Khalidi is also a historian, specializing in Middle Eastern and Palestinian studies. For all these reasons, Khalidi presents himself both as a historian and as an individual with personal interest in a book on Palestine. He combines conventional methods of history with a first-person narrative.

Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received his bachelor of arts from Yale (1970) and his PhD from Oxford (1974). Khalidi is the editor of the Journal of Palestinian Studies. He has written numerous articles and eight books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Khalidi regularly writes op-eds and appears on major news outlets to discuss the Palestinian national movement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi

Yusuf Diya (1842-1906) is Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle. There is a photo of him on page 3. Through Yusuf Diya’s writings and family stories, Khalidi discovered that Yusuf Diya was a “worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna, a man who was deeply interested in comparative religion, especially in Judaism, and who owned a number of books in European languages” (2). Yusuf Diya’s broad training enabled him to serve in several key roles as an Ottoman government official, including mayor of Jerusalem for 10 years. His wide reading also made him fully conscious of the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Europe. He also knew about the debates and views of the Zionist movement and its founding members. Khalidi therefore partly presents his great-great-great-uncle as a counterexample to accusations that anti-Zionism equates to antisemitism and that those who oppose Zionism simply don’t know enough about it.

In the Introduction, Khalidi spends a significant amount of time on Yusuf Diya’s letter to Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. This letter represents the “first meaningful exchange between a leading Palestinian figure and a founder of the Zionist movement” (8). In the letter, Yusuf Diya expresses his admiration for Herzl, Judaism, and the Jewish people. However, his letter is especially important since it serves as the first written warning to Zionist movement members about the conflict their aspirations will cause if they try to remove Palestinians from their land. Herzl did not heed Yusuf Diya’s concerns, which turned out to be prophetic. Khalidi injects a sense of poignancy into the text, therefore, on two levels: On a political level, he highlights the fact that nothing has changed despite diplomatic warnings, and on a personal level, he highlights the fact that he suffers alongside his people just as older generations of his family did.

Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish writer, lawyer, and political activist. He is best known for founding the Zionist movement. He convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. This launched his attempt to form a Jewish nation-state in modern-day Palestine and Israel, which included unsuccessfully petitioning the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II and German emperor Wilhelm II.

From the beginning, Herzl intended Jewish settlers from Europe to remove the indigenous people of Palestine from their lands. Like many Europeans at the time, Herzl held contempt for the Palestinians, believing that Jewish immigration would help civilize them. Herzl’s own writings show his paternalistic and colonial perspective: “In allowing immigration to a number of Jews bringing their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result” (7). His attitude highlights The Impact of a Colonial Mindset on Palestine. Khalidi argues that Zionist, British, and American leaders repeated this condescending attitude toward the indigenous population of Palestine for the last century. Herzl is therefore an antagonist figure in the text who is presented in opposition to the pleas of Khalidi’s great-great-great-uncle. Khalidi’s own authorial relationship to his subject is therefore both personal and political.