A landmark history
of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the
foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events
and family history
In 1899, Yusuf Diya
al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create
a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore
Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily
accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending
his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus
Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this
sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from
an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth
of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of
family members—mayors, judges, 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.
Instead, 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 invation of Lebanon to the endless and futile
peace process.
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 reevaluting the forces arrayed against the
Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that
continues to this day.
