The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
June 2020
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
BY RASHID KHALIDI, METROPOLITAN BOOKS,
HENRY HOLT AND CO., 319 PAGES, S39.99
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, former mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the
Zionist call to transform Palestine into a Jewish state, wrote a letter
aimed at Theodor Herzl, the leading Zionist of the 19th century. In this
letter he pointed out that Palestine had an indigenous population who would
not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead,
ending his note, “In the name of God, leave Palestine alone.”
In this book, Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s grandnephew and professor of
Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, presents the first general
account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Traditional interpretations of the conflict tend to describe a clash between
two peoples with claims to the same land. Drawing on archival materials and
the reports of generations of family members—-judges, scholars, diplomats
and writers—-who were present at key events, this book argues that the
conflict has always been colonial in nature, waged against the native
population, first by the Zionist movement, then by Israel, backed first by
Britain then by the United States. Khalidi highlights crucial episodes in
what he views as a long colonial campaign, from the Balfour Declaration in
1917, to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, to the war of 1967 and
beyond.
Herzl’s Response
In Herzl’s response to Yusuf Diya, the Zionist leader assured him that the
arrival of European Jews in Palestine would improve life for the indigenous
population because of Jewish “intelligence” and financial acumen. He
declared, “No one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would
be the happy result.” Herzl’s response concealed Zionism’s real intentions.
Khalidi writes: “Most revealingly, the letter addresses a consideration
Yusuf Diya had not even raised. ‘You see another difficulty, Excellency, in
the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think
of sending them away?’” In fact, Herzl wrote in his diary of his plan to
“spirit” the country’s population “discreetly” across the borders.
It is clear, writes Khalidi, that “Herzl grasped the importance of
‘disappearing’ the native population of Palestine in order for Zionism to
succeed. Moreover, the 1901 charter that he co-drafted for the Jewish-
Ottoman Land Company includes the same principle of the removal of the
inhabitants of Palestine to ‘other provinces and territories of the Ottoman
Empire.’ ...With the smug self-assurance so common to nineteenth century
Europeans, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement, that the occupation,
and ultimately the usurpation of their land by strangers would benefit the
people of that country. Herzl’s thinking...appears to have been based on the
assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring
what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine.”
The existing Jewish population in Palestine was ultra-Orthodox and were not
in any way supportive of Zionism. Khalidi describes them: “...a large
proportion of Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar
to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and
Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist mizrahi
(eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites
of Middle Eastern origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish...in spite of
marked religious differences between them and their neighbors, they were not
foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, they saw
themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim
majority society. Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled
in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-
Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the
president of Israel) even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and
learned Arabic and Turkish.”
Zionism and European Colonialism
Zionism has many characteristics of European colonialism, but there are also
important differences, which has caused the conflict to be viewed by many as
one between two national entities. In this connection, Khalidi notes that,
“Underlying this feature...was the profound resonance for Jews, and also for
many Christians, of their biblical connection to the historic land of
Israel. Expertly woven into modern political Zionism, this resonance has
become integral to it. A late-nineteenth century colonial-national movement
thus adorned itself with a biblical coat that was powerfully attractive to
Bible-reading Protestants in Great Britain and the United States, blinding
them to the modernity of Zionism and to its colonial nature...”
In Khalidi’s view, “There is no reason that what has happened in Palestine
for over a century cannot be understood as both and a national conflict. But
our concern here is its colonial nature, as this aspect has been as
underappreciated as it is central, even though those qualities, typical of
other colonial campaigns are everywhere in the modern history of Palestine.
...As in North America, the colonization of Palestine —-like that of South
Africa, Australia, Algeria and parts of East Africa—-was meant to yield a
white European settler colony.”
The basic thesis of this book is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
best understood as a war of colonial conquest, similar to those of other
settlement movements of the nineteenth century. Khalidi points to the early
Zionist slogan, “A land without people for a people without a land” which
discounted the presence of the estimated 700,000 Palestinians already there.
Consolidating this colonial settler paradigm was the 1948 Israeli war of
Independence—-or the. “Nakba” (Catastrophe) as viewed by Palestinians.
Israel seized control of nearly 80 per cent of the land that constituted the
British Mandate. This was followed by the expulsion or flight of a similar
percentage of its indigenous Arab population. Khalidi argues that Israeli
settlers were emulating the model of earlier settler groups. After the 1967
war and the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, things got even
worse for Palestinians.
Displaced Palestinians
Khalidi contends that vital to the “settler-colonial enterprise has been an
Israeli effort to sever the link of displaced Palestinians to their
homeland. “the comforting idea,” he writes, “that the old will die and the
young will forget”—-a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion...expresses one
of the deepest aspirations of Israeli leaders after 1948.”
In the years after 1948, Khalidi points out, Israel has regularly
characterized the Palestinian opponents of their displacement as
“terrorists. The world, he notes, has largely ignored the Zionist terrorism
which led to the creation of Israel. There was a regular assassination of
British officials by the Stern gang, such as the 1944 murder of Lord Moyne,
the resident minister in Egypt, and was followed by a sustained campaign of
violence against British troops and administrators in Palestine. This
culminated in the 1946 blowing up of the British headquarters in the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem with the loss of 96 lives.
Among those displaced in 1948 were, Khalidi writes, “...my grandparents, who
had to leave their Atallah al-Rish home where my father and most of his
siblings were born. Initially my grandfather, now eighty five years old and
frail, stubbornly refused to leave the house. After his sons took most of
the family to shelter in Jerusalem and Nablus, he remained there alone for
several weeks. Fearing for his safety, a family friend from Jaffa ventured
to the house during a lull in the fighting to retrieve him. He left
unwillingly, lamenting that he could not take his books with him. Neither he
nor his children ever saw their home again. The ruins of my grandfather’s
large stone house still stand abandoned on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”
Palestine is Transformed
The 1948 war, notes Khalidi, “transformed most of Palestine from what it had
been for well over a millennium—-a majority Arab country—-into a new state
that had a substantial Jewish majority. This transformation was the result
of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited
areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian
land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned
by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to
achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its
inception.”
Those Palestinians who managed to remain Israel after 1948 became second
class citizens. Until 1966, most Palestinians lived under strict martial law
and much of their land was seized, along with that of those who had been
forced from the country and were now refugees. Khalidi makes the case that,
“This stolen land, an expropriation deemed legal by the Israeli state,
including the bulk of the country’s arable areas, was given to Jewish
settlements or the Israel Lands Authority, or placed under the control of
the Jewish National Fund, whose discriminatory charter prescribed that such
property could only be used ‘for the benefit of the Jewish people.’ This
provision meant that dispossessed Arab owners could neither buy back nor
lease what had once been their property, nor could any other non-Jew. “
These moves, Khalidi points out, “...were crucial to the transformation of
Palestine from an Arab country to a Jewish one, since only about 6 per cent
of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948. The Arab population
inside Israel, isolated by military and travel restrictions, was also cut
off from other Palestinians and from the rest of the Arab world. Accustomed
to being a substantial majority in their own country and region, they
suddenly had to make their way as a despised minority in a hostile
environment as subjects of a Jewish polity that never defined itself as a
state of all its citizens. ...Most significantly, the martial regime under
which the Palestinians lived, granted the Israeli military near-unlimited
authority to control the minutiae of their lives.”
U.N. Resolution 242
After the 1967 war, the United Nations passed Resolution 242, demanding that
Israel return to its pre-war borders. Khalidi points out that while SC42 is
generally regarded as the basis for future Arab-Israeli peace talks, for the
Palestinians it was more complex. Nowhere in the resolution are they
referred to by name—-they are merely ‘refugees’—-while a return to the 1967
borders meant the world was accepting their 1948 expulsion. Khalidi argues
that each subsequent diplomatic “breakthrough” in the region has served to
further marginalize the Palestinians. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty
between Israel and Egypt meant that the Palestinians had lost a key ally in
the region. The 1993 0slo Accords, he states, served to co-opt the
Palestinian leadership—-of whom he is highly critical—-and confine the
Palestinians into small enclaves under Israeli control.
There is much in this book about Khalidi’s role as an adviser to
Palestinians during the Madrid Conference of 1991 that led to the Oslo
Accords. He was originally skeptical of the peace process and now regards it
as an illusion. He describes meetings he had with Yasser Arafat in which he
warned about Israeli control of the occupied territories. He characterizes
leading American peace processors as biased in behalf of Israel and has
urged the Palestinians to stop regarding the United States as an honest
broker in negotiations.
In 1917, he writes, “Arthur James Balfour stated that in Palestine, the
British government did not ‘propose even to go through the form of
consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.’ The great
powers were committed to Zionism, he continued, ‘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.’ One hundred years
later, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,
saying, ‘We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it
anymore.’ Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, ‘You won one point, and you’ll give
up some points later on in the negotiations, if it ever takes place.’ I
don’t know that it will ever take place.’ The center of the Palestinians’
history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of
without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.”
Colonialism in a Post-Colonial Age
The U.S., Khalidi declares, has been “trying to do the impossible: impose a
colonial reality on Palestine in a post-colonial age. Eqbal Ahmad summed it
up: ‘August 1947 marked the beginning of decolonization, when British rule
in India ended. It was in those days of hope and fulfillment that the
colonization of Palestine occurred. Thus, at the dawn of decolonization, we
were returned to the earliest, most intense form of colonial
menace...exclusivist settler colonialism.’ In other circumstances or in
another era, replacing the indigenous population might have been feasible,
especially in light of the long-standing and deep religious link felt by
Jews to the land in question—-if this were the eighteenth or nineteenth
century, if the Palestinians were as few as the Zionist settlers or as fully
decimated as the native peoples of Australasia and North America. The
longevity of the Palestinians’ resistance to their dispossession, however,
indicates that the Zionist movement, in the words of the late historian Tony
Judt, ‘arrived too late’. as it ‘imported a characteristically late
nineteenth century separatist project into a world that has moved on.
Many prominent Israelis, Khalidi points out, are concerned about Israel’s
mistreatment of Palestinians and are dubious about its claim that it can be
both “Jewish” and “democratic.” Imagining scholars looking back one hundred
years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked: “When exactly did the
Israelis understand that their cruelty toward the non-Jews in their grip in
the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’
hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees
began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence.”
“Deal of the Century”
Today, Palestinians confront circumstances more daunting than perhaps any
time since 1917. “With his election,” writes Khalidi, “Donald Trump began
pursuit of what he called ‘the deal of the century,’ purportedly aimed at a
conclusive resolution of the conflict. Closing the deal has so far involved
dispensing with decades of bedrock U.S. policies, outsourcing strategic
planning to Israel, and pouring contempt on the Palestinians.
Inauspiciously, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman (his bankruptcy
lawyer and a longtime financial supporter of the Jewish settler movement),
spoke of an ‘alleged occupation’ and demanded that the State Department stop
using the term. In one interview, he declared that Israel has the ‘right’ to
annex “some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.’ Jason Greenblatt, for over
two years envoy for Israel-Palestine negotiations (previously Trump’s real
estate lawyer and also a donor to Israeli right-wing causes). Stated the
West Bank settlements ‘are not an obstacle to peace,’ rejected the use of
the term ‘occupation’ in a meeting with EU envoys and endorsed Friedman’s
views regarding annexation.”
With these two pronouncements, the Trump Administration unilaterally took
issues, such as the status of Jerusalem, which Israel is treaty bound to
negotiate with the Palestinians, off the table. As well as reversing decades
of American policy, the Trump Administration rejected an entire body of
international law. What Trump has done, Khalidi argues, is fully accept
“Israel’s stand on the vital issue of Jerusalem and did so without any quid
pro quo from Israel and without any acknowledgement of Palestinian demands
for recognition of the city as the capital of Palestine. Equally important,
by implication, Trump endorsed Israel’s expansive definition of ‘unified
Jerusalem,’ including the extensive Arab areas in and around the city
appropriated by Israel since 1967. Although the administration stated that
actual borders were still to be negotiated, its proclamation meant in effect
that there was nothing left to negotiate.”
Money in Return For Derogation of Rights
What the future holds for Israel and the Palestinians is difficult to
predict. There are, however, some examples from history that may be
relevant, Khalidi provides this assessment: “With the establishment of
Israel, Zionism did succeed in fashioning a potent national movement and a
thriving new people in Palestine. But it could not fully supplant the
country’s original population, which is what would have been necessary for
the ultimate triumph of Zionism. Settler-colonial confrontations with
indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the
elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North
America; with the defeat or expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which
is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the
context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe and
Ireland.”
American public opinion, Khalidi shows, is moving away from Israel as a
result of its more than 50-year occupation and plans for annexation. A poll
released by the Brookings Institution in December 2016 showed that 60 per
cent of Democrats and 46 per cent of all Americans supported sanctions
against Israel over its construction of illegal Jewish settlements in the
West Bank. Most Democrats (55 per cent) believed Israel “has too much
influence on U.S. politics and policies and is a strategic burden.”
Subsequent polls show Americans continuing to move in this direction. There
is, however, a deep partisan divide, with Republicans, particularly
Evangelicals, supporting Israel’s maximalist demands. Thus far, there has
been little apparent change in the formulation of U.S. policy.
Evidence For A Re-Evaluation of Western Views
This book combines scholarship, personal and family experience and an
appreciation of the concerns of the contending parties. It puts Zionism in
the context of other colonial-settler movements, something which many
Americans may not have previously considered. The Israeli historian Avi
Shlaim declares that Rashid Khalidi “presents compelling evidence for a re-
evaluation of the conventional Western view of the subject.” The Israeli
understanding of the events which led to the establishment of the state are
well known to Americans. Now, Rashid Khalidi has provided another
perspective which is much needed if we are to understand what has really
happened in Palestine during the past hundred years.*
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
|