Book Review: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
This book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi is a landmark history. The history of one hundred years of war. The war waged against the Palestinians. From the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history.
About the author – Rashid Khalidi
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East. The Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He is also the director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He also is known for serving as editor of the scholarly journal Journal of Palestine Studies.
Khalidi’s research covers primarily the history of the modern Middle East. He focuses on the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, with an eye to the emergence of various national identities. And the role played by external powers in their development. He also researches the impact of the press on forming new senses of community. The role of education in the construction of political identity. And the way narratives have developed over the past centuries in the region. Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as “preeminent in his field.”
He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1994 and is currently the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
The book in review The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem. Frightened by the Zionist call to make a Jewish public home in Palestine. He composed a letter focused on Theodore Herzl. The nation had a native group who might not effectively acknowledge their own removal. He cautioned of the hazards ahead, finishing his note, “for the sake of God, let Palestine be left alone.”
Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s incredible extraordinary nephew, starts this broad history. The primary general record of the contention told from an expressly Palestinian point of view.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members 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. 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.
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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.