The promised conquered land

Mr Khalidi has written a sharply analytical and even-handed history of the nature of the Israeli state that would make educative reading even for Israel's supporters

In Fauda,  that riveting and thoroughly flawed TV series, a Palestinian girl tearfully asks the Israeli security service chief: “How long will you people persecute us?” The questioner is the daughter of a Palestinian fighter who spent decades in an Israeli prison only to be murdered by Israeli forces soon after his release. The Israeli is trying to persuade her to reveal the whereabouts of her brother, an ambitious boxer who turned radical after his father’s murder. Her mother has been arrested and the family home in Gaza destroyed by Israeli forces to persuade her (unsuccessfully) to change her mind. 

This is a familiar experience for Palestinians living in their attenuated former homeland. The Israeli interlocutor’s steely reply is familiar too: “As long as it takes”. He did not need to offer the extended answer “…as long as it takes to evict Palestinians from the land the Jews claim as their homeland”. 

So far, it’s taken a century and counting, going by Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years War on Palestine. The use of the preposition “on” and the blunt subtitle,  A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, have the virtue of clearly setting out the framework of this book. But they run the risk of preaching only to the converted. This is a pity. Mr Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian at Columbia, has written a sharply analytical and even-handed history of the nature of the Israeli state that would make educative reading even for Israel’s supporters. 

This story is partly autobiographical. Mr Khalidi participated in several negotiations involving the two states. His father’s role as a UN official gave him a ringside seat to key events in this conflict. 

The Hundred Years War on Palestine: 

A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance

Author: Rashid Khalidi

Publisher: Hachette

 

In presenting the creation of the storied Promised Land as an imperial project, Mr Khalidi seeks to change the narrative — to help recover “some of what has been airbrushed out of history”.  “Palestinians have been accused by those who sympathise with their oppressors of wallowing in their own victimisation. It is a fact, however, that like all indigenous people the Palestinians faced odds that were daunting and sometimes impossible.” They have often been divided and badly led, he adds, but “we cannot overlook the formidable international and imperial forces arrayed against them, the scale of which has often been dismissed, and in spite of which they have displayed remarkable resilience.” 

Mr Khalidi divides his history into six “wars of independence” – 1917-1939, 1947-48, 1967, 1982, 1987-1995, 2000-2014. He chooses 1917 as the start rather than 1948, when Israel came into being, because that marks the Balfour Declaration, under which the British promised Europe’s Jews Palestine as a homeland. The mover and shaker of this infamous declaration — named for the British foreign secretary — was the ardent Zionist Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president. 

Mr Khalidi does not say so but expediency more than ideology dictated British actions. Weizmann, a chemist then at the University of Manchester, had discovered a process that was critical for the British military-industrial complex during World War I. On such quid pro quos has world history turned.

The Palestinian tragedy was the result of the flawed notion on which Zionism was predicated — that the region was an “empty quarter”. When it became evident that many people did, in fact, inhabit this land, Theodor Herzl, the lead Zionist ideologue of the late 19th century, offered an amoral solution of expropriation. “This process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly…,” he mused in his diary.

Before World War II, Zionists furthered the movement by buying land from absentee local landlords and ejecting peasant tenants and sharecroppers. After the war, the tragedy of the Holocaust accelerated immigration and legitimised the process of violent dispossession. In this, the European diaspora’s lobbying power in the United States proved immeasurably useful. On recognising Israel, President Harry Truman told a group of doubting American diplomats: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” 

Mr Khalidi  is also unsparingly critical of the Palestinian leadership (including the current one). Yasser Arafat and the PLO, come in for particular opprobrium, especially the programme of terrorism. Alienating global opinion weakened Palestinians’ negotiating clout and led to the terrible compromises of the Oslo Accords (1993, 1995), which imprisoned them into what the late Edward Said called “Bantustans” on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 
 

In identifying Israel as a colonial occupier, Mr Khalidi may be investing his compatriots with the hopes embedded in the failure of similar enterprises in Asia and Africa. Who knows if this will be Palestine’s fate. History is always full of surprises.