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

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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. Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now desired to return to their homeland.42 Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs who happened to be abroad when the British took over were denied it. Finally, other articles allowed the Jewish Agency to take over or establish public works, allowed each community to maintain schools in its own language—which meant Jewish Agency control over much of the yishuv’s school system—and made Hebrew an official language of the country.

IN SPITE OF the sacrifices made—which can be gauged from the very large numbers of Palestinians who were killed, wounded, jailed, or exiled—and the revolt’s momentary success, the consequences for the Palestinians were almost entirely negative. The savage British repression, the death and exile of so many leaders, and the conflict within their ranks left the Palestinians divided, without direction, and with their economy debilitated by the time the revolt was crushed in the summer of 1939. This put the Palestinians in a very weak position to confront the now invigorated Zionist movement, which had gone from strength to strength during the revolt, obtaining lavish amounts of arms and extensive training from the British to help them suppress the uprising.68 It was their consistent support for the Zionists that most angered Dr. Husayn. Even if British officials in Palestine became convinced of the unsustainable manifold costs of maintaining the iron wall to protect the Zionist project (whose leaders were often ungrateful for all that was done for them), their recommendations were almost invariably countermanded in London. At least until 1939, the Zionists were able to place their supporters, or sometimes their leaders, like the formidable Chaim Weizmann, at the elbow of key British decisionmakers in Whitehall, some of whom were also fervent Zionists. Dr. Husayn notes caustically that when official British commissions came out to Palestine to investigate the situation in the 1920s and 1930s, any conclusions they reached that were favorable to the Arabs were countered by Zionist lobbying in London, where an extraordinary degree of intimacy prevailed between Zionist leaders and senior British political figures.80 The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi's powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms. During the 1930s the Jewish economy in Palestine overtook the Arab sector for the first time, and the Jewish population grew to more than 30 percent of the total by 1939. In light of fast economic growth and this rapid population shift over only seven years, combined with considerable expansion of the Zionist movement’s military capacities, it became clear to its leaders that the demographic, economic, territorial, and military nucleus necessary for achieving domination over the entire country, or most of it, would soon be in place. As Ben-Gurion put it at the time, “immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all Palestine.”52 Many Palestinians came to similar conclusions.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. In the 1860s, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi had to go all the way to Malta and Istanbul to acquire an education along Western lines. By 1914, such an education could be had in a variety of state, private, and missionary schools and colleges in Palestine, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. Modern pedagogy was often introduced by foreign missionary schools, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, as well as by the Jewish schools of the Alliance israélite universelle. Partly out of fear that foreign missionaries in league with their great-power patrons would come to dominate the instruction of the younger generation, the Ottoman authorities established a growing network of state schools, which eventually served more students in Palestine than did foreign schools. Although universal access to education and widespread literacy were still far in the future, the changes leading up to World War I offered new horizons and novel ideas to more and more people.3 The Arab population benefited from these developments. Greater mobility and access to education accelerated these shifts, and the burgeoning press and availability of printed books also played an important role: thirty-two new newspapers and periodicals were established in Palestine between 1908 and 1914, with even more in the 1920s and 1930s.5 Different forms of identification, such as nationhood, and novel ideas about social organization, including working-class solidarity and the role of women in society, were emerging to challenge previously fixed affiliations. These modes of belonging, whether to a national or class or professional group, were still in formation and involved overlapping ties of loyalty. Yusuf Diya’s 1899 letter to Herzl, for example, evokes religious affiliation, Ottoman loyalty, local pride in Jerusalem, and a clear sense of identification with Palestine. 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). 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

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.

A paradigm shift in the hundred years’ war on Palestine?

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017. By Rashid Khalidi. (Macmillan) New York, 2020. 336 pp.