Rashid Khalidi: The Hundreds Years' War on Palestine

The history of the palestinian plight from before the Balfourd declaration to today told as six declarations of war on the palestinian people with both academic and personal perspectives.[1]

S. F. Jakobsen <sfja2004@gmail.com>, 3. January 2025

I've just finished reading the book in the title, and I thought I'd try start writing down a few thought, about the books I read. This is the first edition of that series. The plan is to discuss 3 points and then compare the book to some other literature I've read. The ambition for quality of this and hopefully following articles, are low. These are more or less a one-to-one scribbling of my thoughts on the book. The goals are 1) to engage with the text and 2) to practice writing.

To start, a bit about the author. The author, Rashid Khalidi, is from a prominent palestinian family (Khalidi family), which has an extensive history in palestinian political life. The author is a lifetime academic and has lived in america for decades. The author is in large part engaged in american politics. This is very explicit in the book and has a big influence on the contents. While the author has great insight into the political aspect of the palestinian struggle, especially negitaions, the fact that the author mainly deals with the political aspect from a somewhat American perspective, may cause a tendency to be a bit america-centric in regards to politics. The author shows certain liberal tendencies in a few places in the books, such as orating about shared values and ideals. The author has an explicit bias for Ghandi-style peaceful protest and diplomacy over armed struggle. The main argument the author provides is that armed struggle is politically bad for the palestinian cause on the international stage, especially in western countries and in the US. This will be investigated further below.

The author criticizes the PLO (Palestinian Liberal Organization) on many factors. Incompetence, elitism, ignorance, among others. One of the critiques pertains to the issue of armed struggle.

Trading on this significant new asset enabled the PLO leadership to abandon formally its strategy of armed struggle from bases outside Palestine, which in any case was increasingly impossible after 1982, and in their hands, had never had much chance of success, if it was not actually harmful to the Palestinian cause. (p. 179)

The author makes it explicit that the criticism of armed struggle is in no way a moral criticism. It is obvious to anyone aware of the oppression of the palestinian people, that armed struggle is not a decision as much as it is something the oppressed have been forced into by their oppressors. But this point seems irrelevant to the current point, as the author's criticism is explicitly regarding political strategy.

The point of the criticism is that armed struggle, especially the methods used in the second intifada, including suicide bombing, is damaged to such an extent for political image, that it may negate whatever positive effects it might have, whatever they may be. Armed will help the settler-colonial entity sell the idea, that it needs to maintain an aggressive 'defensive' posture to defend itself. This criticism was especially valid, in my opinion, before The Great March of Return in 2018. The aforementioned was a Ghandi-style peaceful protest by the residents in Gaza.[2] The March was largely ineffective at bringing the palestinian question on the global stage, which was the stated goal, and which has also been the goal of earlier political movements in Palestine.

The point also needs to be re-examined with al-Aqsa Flood (October the seventh) taken into the equation. The latter proved that, from my current perspective in early 2025, been very succesful at promoting the palestinian questian, though at an enourmous cost to human life.

I'll let the author finish off this first point.

Another consequence was that the terrible violence of the Second Intifada erased the positive image of Palestinians that had evolved since 1982 and through the First Intifada and the peace negotiations. With horrifying scenes of recurrent suicide bombings transmiing globally (and with this coverage eclipsing that of the much greater violence perpetrated against the Palestinians), Israelis ceased to be seen as oppressors, reverting to the more familiar role of victims of irrational, fanatical tormentors. The potent negative impact of the Second Intifada for the Palestinians and the effect of suicide bombings on Israeli opinion and politics certainly bear out the trenchant critique of the Palestinians’ employment of violence expressed by Eqbal Ahmad back in the 1980s.

Such considerations were undoubtedly far from the minds of the men (and a few women) who planned and carried out these suicide bombings. It is possible to speculate on what they sought to achieve, even while showing how flawed their aims were. Even if one accepts their own narrative which sees suicide bombings as retaliation for Israel’s indiscriminate use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators for the rst several weeks of the Second Intifada, and its attacks on Palestinian civilians and assassinations in Gaza, that begs the question of whether these bombings were meant to achieve anything more than blind revenge. It also elides the fact that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which launched two-thirds of the suicide bombings during the intifada, had carried out over twenty such attacks in the 1990s before Sharon’s visit to the Haram. It may be argued that these attacks were meant to deter Israel. This is risible, given the long-established doctrine of the Israeli military that irrespective of the cost, it must gain the upper hand in any confrontation, and establish its unchallenged capacity not only to deter its enemies, but to crush them. Sharon did just that during the Second Intifada, faithfully implementing this doctrine, as had Rabin before him during the First Intifada, although in that previous case at great political cost, as Rabin himself recognized.

Equally risible is the idea that such attacks on civilians were hammer blows that might lead to a dissolution of Israeli society. This theory is based on a widespread but fatally flawed analysis of Israel as a deeply divided and “articial” polity, which ignores the manifestly successful nation-building efforts of Zionism over more than a century, as well as the cohesiveness of Israeli society in spite of its many internal divisions. But the most important factor missing in whatever calculations were being made by those who planned the bombings was the fact that the longer the attacks continued, the more unied the Israeli public became behind Sharon’s hard-line posture. In effect, suicide bombings served to unite and strengthen the adversary, while weakening and dividing the Palestinian side. By the end of the Second Intifada, according to reliable polls, most Palestinians opposed this tactic. Thus, besides raising grave legal and moral issues, and depriving the Palestinians of a positive media image, on a strategic level these attacks were massively counterproductive. Whatever blame attaches to Hamas and Islamic Jihad for the suicide bombings that produced this fiasco, the PLO leadership that eventually followed suit must also share it. (p. 215)

The second and third point I'll bring up are not particular to this book or author, but rather general points that need promotion.

The second point is the entity's violence and brutality towards the palestinian people, especially the people in Gaza.

Multiple times in the book, the author list figures of casualties of both palestinians and israelis. The figures mostly consist of civilians killed, civilians unjured, often with the proportion of children mentioned, and civilians displaced. These figures, if one gives them the opportunity to speak for themselves, paint a soberingly clear picture of both the history and the situation at hand.

During the eight-plus years of the First Intifada, some 1,600 people were killed, and average of 172 per year (12 percent of them israelis). ... While rivaly between Hamas and the PLO played a role in this escalation, the israelis forces' massive use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators from the outset (they fired 1,3 million bullets "in the first few days" of the uprising) was a crucial factor, causing a shocking number of casualties. (p. 213)

By combining analysis with the actual figures for comparison, the author efficiently shows the huge and clear disparity and power imbalance between the palestinian people and the America-backed settler-colonial entity.

This second point then leads into the third, which is in regard to media coverage of the conflict. Legacy media in western country is heavily biased towards the American- and European-aligned entity. The author demonstrates this, by examining how the media reported the 2014 assault on Gaza. Hamas, for comparison, fired about 4,000 rockets in the same period.

In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians. ... One might not have known this, however, from much of the mainstream US media coverage, which focused heavily on Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket fire at Israeli civilian targets. ... In 2014, the 4,000 rockets that Israel claimed were fired from the Gaza Strip killed five Israeli civilians. (p. 222)

This is then followed up by the grusome actual figures of the 2014 assault on Gaza.

According to American military sources, eleven Israeli artillery battalions, employing at least 258 of these 155mm and 175mm guns, fired over 7,000 shells into this single neighborhood over a period of twenty-four hours. is included 4,800 shells during one seven-hour period. ... Beyond the horrific injuries they inflict on human flesh, air bombardment and artillery fire on this scale cause unimaginable destruction to property: in the 2014 assault, over 16,000 buildings were rendered uninhabitable, including entire neighborhoods. A total of 277 UN and government schools, seventeen hospitals and clinics, and all six of Gaza’s universities were damaged, as were over 40,000 other buildings. Perhaps 450,000 Gazans, about a quarter of the population, were forced to leave their homes, and many of them no longer had homes to go back to afterward.

Another example of disproprtionate power and absolute subordination is the sheer amount of palestinian leaders killed or "liquidated" by the supposedly "democratic" settler-colonial entity.

One of the few surviving members of the old guard of the Fatah Central Commiette that had long dominated the PLO, ‘Abbas was neither charismatic nor eloquent; he was not renowned for personal bravery or considered a man of the people. Overall, he was one of the least impressive of the early generation of prominent Fatah leaders. While a few of this group died of natural causes, many of them--Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, Sa‘d Sayel (Abu al-Walid), Majid Abu Sharar, Abu Yusuf Najjar, Kamal ‘Adwan, Hayel ‘Abd al-Hamid (Abu al-Hol), and Abu Hassan Salameh ad been killed by assassins of the Mossad or of groups backed by the Syrian, Iraqi, and Libyan regimes. With Ghassan Kanafani and Kamal Nasser, they had been among the movement’s best and most effective leaders and spokespersons, and their loss left the Palestinians with a less dynamic and feebler organization. Israel’s systematic liquidations under the rubric of “targeted killings,” continued throughout the Second Intifada and during the ‘Abbas years, as Fatah, PFLP, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad leaders were also killed. That some of these assassinations were driven by political rather than military or security considerations was made clear with the killing of Isma‘il Abu Shanab, for example, who was a vocal opponent within Hamas of suicide bombings.

If the political establishment of the setter-colonial entity were serious about negitiating an actual peace deal, they would have stopped killing palestinian leaders representing the palestinian people, so as to have someone to negotate with.

To conclude.

As the centenary of the war on Palestine came and went, the American metropole, the irreplaceable base for Israel’s freedom of action, was as committed to the Zionist colonial project as had been Lord Balfour one hundred years earlier. The second century of the war would be marked by a new and even more destructive approach to the issue of Palestine, with the United States in close coordination with Israel and its newfound friends in the absolute monarchies of the Gulf.

But hopefully.

Configurations of global power have been changing: based on their growing energy needs, China and India will have more to say about the Middle East in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous one. Being closer to the Middle East, Europe and Russia have been more affected than the United States by the instability there and can be expected to play larger roles. The United States will most likely not continue to have the free hand that Britain once did. Perhaps such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.

What follows is a brief comparison to the book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe.[3]

I think that the latter (Pappe, I.) is decent to compare with, as the two books in broad strokes tacke the same issues: chronicling and mediating the palestinian story.

First, the authors are different. Rashid Khalidi is a middle eastern studies academic heavily involved in negotiation and politics, especially US-politics. Khalidi is also, as mentioned above, from a prominent palestinian family, with deep roots in Palestine and many ties to current, but mostly former palestinian political-elite.

Ilan Pappe is a Jewish-Israeli historian and political activist. He is part of the New Historians, who led a development in Israeli history, to study more critically the consequence of the setter-colonialism on the native population throughout the entity's history.

It's obvious from the outset that the latter is strictly an academic work, relying on archival sources and interviews, while the former (Khalidi, R.) in addition to academic sources and interviews, also incorporate retellings of events involving the author himself. Most notable is the telling of the invasion of Beirut in 1982 when the author and his family was living in the capital.

The former book covers the main events spanning 100 years, from the Balfourd declaration to today. The latter book covers only the events of the 1948 ethnic cleansing compaign, the Nakba, perpetrated by Jewish settlers with British support, expelling about 750,000 palestinians from their home.

While they both give insight into palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian politics, the latter does so purely by implication and consequence of documenting the Nakba and analysis of the events. The former is more engaged in the political aspect, and therefore provides valuable insight and analysis, especially regarding details of the negotiation processes. The latter book is more impartial, in my opinion, not in terms of israeli or palestinian points of view, but in the sense, that the book doesn't stray away from the academic rettelling. This is in contrast to the former book, in which the author has a very clear bias, especially regarding American politics and the quetion of armed struggle. Neither book loses any value by the two directions the authors went in.

Both books are readable and highly recommendable. I'd recommend prioritizing The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, if the reader is one who prioritizes. Though, Ilan Pappe has other works, which are more urgent reads, these being A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Ten Myths about Israel.

Sources

1. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, Metropolitan Books, 2024, ISBN 9781781259344
2. PoliticsJOE, Norman Finkelstein on Israel Palestine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu4OMmoo5mw, at 21:17 Jewish-American political scientist Norman Finkelstein explains his involvement in, and the consequences of The Great March of Return.
3. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, Second edition 2007, ISBN 9781851685554