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

To Khalidi, superpowers, international organizations, and regional players all played a major role in shaping the trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He therefore uses the text to highlight the way people are victimized when they become part of a vast political game. Khalidi focuses primarily on two superpowers: the British and the Americans. Khalidi argues that British policies between 1917 and 1939 launched the hundred years’ war on Palestinians. During this timeframe, British leaders, including Lord Arthur Balfour, enacted policies to support the creation of a Jewish nation-state over a Palestinian nation-state. Balfour explicitly discussed this bias in a confidential September 1919 memo. In the memo, he states that “for in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country” (38). This memo shows the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attitudes prevalent throughout the British government. British officials held the indigenous population in contempt and viewed them as backward and uncivilized. This attitude made them unwilling to negotiate with Palestinians in good faith.

Great Britain lost its hold over Palestine after World War II to the US. Khalidi emphasizes that the US has never been an impartial arbitrator. The US has always been on Israel’s side. Khalidi states that, “over the decades, the United States has wavered, going back and forth between paying lip service to the existence of the Palestinians and trying to exclude them from the map of the Middle East” (238). Khalidi blames the suffering of Palestinians on US policy.

In regard to international organizations, Khalidi highlights the League of Nations and the United Nations. The League of Nations could have treated the Palestinians like it did other people from former Ottoman empire territories. The League established mandates which eventually enabled these people to form independent countries. This was not the case with Palestine. Through the Mandate for Palestine, the League gave political and national rights only to Jewish people. This approach kicked off the bias that international organizations have shown in favor of the Jewish national movement over the Palestinian national movement. The United Nations perpetuates this bias in favor of Israeli political leaders as seen with Security Council Resolution 242.

Khalidi also highlights the role of Arab leaders. In the immediate post-World War II years, many Arab leaders, such as King ‘Abdullah, did not help the Palestinian cause because of their alliance with British government officials. When the US became the primary superpower in the Middle East, Khalidi argues that Arab leaders switched their capitulation from the British to the Americans. An especially significant example is Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. While the Arab governments loudly proclaimed their support of the PLO, they did not come to the PLO’s defense. They also refused to force an end to Israel’s siege of Beirut or secure better terms for the PLO’s departure from Lebanon despite immense public pressure.

These examples highlight the text’s idea that the conflict is not one of two sides but one with many players, and this reinforces Khalidi’s point that Israel and Palestine should not be considered two equal sides in a conflict. Khalidi argues that Israel has been successful in casting the conflict as two states in an equal fight. Khalidi dismantles this myth by emphasizing that the world’s superpowers backed Israel, in contrast to Palestine, for the last century. Thus, there is a great imbalance between the two states. To Khalidi, there can be no peace unless the global community recognizes that Palestine, rather than Israel, is the David against Goliath in this conflict.

In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Khalidi wrestles with the question of why the colonial-settler reality faced by Palestinians remains “invisible to most Americans and many Europeans” (240). To Khalidi, the reason rests on the importance of narratives in defining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and shaping global perceptions. There are several facets to this theme. Scholars committed to the Zionist movement have tried to prove that “Palestine was barren, empty, and backward” before Zionist settlers (10). They suggest that nomadic groups with no set identity inhabited the land. Since these groups moved around, they did not form attachments to the land. These scholars use this narrative to argue that Zionist settlers turned the land “into the blooming garden it supposedly is today, and that only they had an identification with and love for the land, as well as a (God-given) right to it” (11).

Some Zionists also tried to argue that the concept of Palestinian national identity is a recent phenomenon. Khalidi counters this perspective by discussing newspaper articles, family memoirs, and other sources written by Palestinians between 1917 and 1939. These sources all show the evolution of a Palestinian national identity. As one example, newspaper articles written by leading journalists, such as Isa al-Isa, increasingly use the terms “Palestinian” and “Palestine.”

The Palestinian perspective remains largely invisible in writings about the conflict, and Khalidi aims to shift that through his writing. Furthermore, he suggests that the Israeli perspective is more dominant in Western media because the Zionist movement and the Israeli government lobbied the American government and public more effectively than Palestinian leadership. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Zionist leaders developed deep connections in the US, in part because a large segment of the surviving European Jewish population moved to the US. The US also already had a fairly large Jewish population since it was seen as a more tolerant refuge for Jewish people than European countries. The horrors of the Holocaust led many Americans to agree with Zionists’ calls for a Jewish nation-state. After World War II, some American diplomats tried to warn American politicians and presidents that a strictly pro-Zionist policy would hurt long-term US interests in the Middle East. Politicians ignored this advice in part because of the strength of the Jewish lobby in convincing Americans of the validity of Zionism. President Truman even admitted this, stating, “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents” (79).

Khalidi also writes that the modern state of Israel continues to claim their biblical connection to Palestinian land. American Evangelical Protestants are especially persuaded by this claim, making it difficult for Palestinians to challenge this myth. Nevertheless, while Israel has generally won the battle of the narratives, there are times when this monopoly weakens. One example is in the aftermath of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. International media disseminated images of extreme suffering by Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. These images temporarily made Western audiences, especially in the US, more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. The First Intifada also won over much global public support, although this support decreased during the Second Intifada.

Edward Said, a Palestinian American academic and political activist, noted that “Zionism triumphed in part because it ‘won the political battle for Palestine in the international word in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue’” (240). Khalidi agrees with this statement, although he hopes that his book helps to change readers’ perspectives about the conflict.