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

Most books on the Middle East and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict fall into one of two categories. One category is marked by a brand of writing executed by academics, historians, journalists, and other observers in one capacity or another. Those are highly academic and full of footnotes with a thesis backed by documents and interviews. The other kind are personal books that make use of diaries and observations, mostly by journalists, diplomats, and cosmopolitans. Rashid Khalidi, a well-known Palestinian historian and the Edward Said Professor of Modern History at Columbia University, has written something unique. His latest book The One Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is a high-quality academic effort ripe with vital facts and figures. Khalidi uses 459 footnotes to document all the issues he refers to. Yet at the same time, his book is highly personal, weaving personal family stories, reflecting on his own wide-ranging extended family, and spanning continents. One of those stories is that of his uncle Husayn Fakhri Al-Khalidi, who was imprisoned by the British in the Seychelles islands, and spent decades in exile in the first half of the 20^th century. Readers take an imaginary walk with Rashid as he drops in on his father, Ismael Raghib Al-Khalidi, an Arab diplomat working in New York’s UN headquarters, and witness his shock as American Jews march and fundraise to support the Israeli occupation in 1967.

During the 1970s, readers get a front-row seat in Beirut before and during the Israeli invasion, while Mona, Rashid’s wife (who is pregnant at the time with their son Ismael) works as an editor for the official Palestinian news agency Wafa. Ismael would at an older age help his dad review this book, as Khalidi notes in his acknowledgment. Readers also follow Khalidi during the First Intifada and on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference. Khalidi’s visit to east Jerusalem would result in his being seconded to help the Palestinian delegation to Madrid and Washington. He would soon become privy to the disastrous results that the alternative talks in Oslo have come to represent in the terrible years since the intifada. Khalidi also shares his own thoughts on his Chicago university colleague, and later president, Barack Obama.

The personal stories give important credence to the conclusions that Khalidi draws from both his academic research and his front-row seat to history. Khalidi heaps huge responsibility regarding all that has happened to Palestine on the British and the Americans, as well as other Western countries.

In his book, Khalidi breaks the hundred years of war on Palestine into six periods. He describes the Balfour declaration and all the British bias in favor of Jewish Zionists that followed, especially between 1917 and 1939, as the first declaration of war on Palestine. He shows with skill and documentation the simple fact that the great colonial power at the time, Great Britain, not only acquiesced with Jewish Zionists but also went overboard in denying the existence of the Palestinian people and Palestinian nationalism. Khalidi argues that while settler colonialism was ending in the middle of the 20^th century, in Palestine it was just beginning.

In the second declaration of war, Khalidi deals with the 1947-8 Nakbeh with similar precision in identifying the Western world’s complicity with Zionists and with some Arab regimes (notably King Abdullah I of Jordan) to continue denying Palestinian nationalism. In the run-up to the 1967 war, Khalidi exposes the myth that Israel was in danger of extinction (personified in David fighting the Arab Goliath) when in fact the consensus of three U.S. intelligence services had been that if Egypt were to attack, Israel would “whip the hell out of them”. Of course, it would be Israel that made the first attack on June 5, 1967.

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).

Khalidi concludes his book with the first and second intifadas, praising the relatively unarmed 1987 uprising and criticizing the Second Intifada of 2000 as having literally wasted all the public relations gains that Palestinians made during the First Intifada. He references here their heroic early resistance to Sharon’s brutal Israeli war machine and Israeli defense minister’s Yitzhak Rabin’s alleged orders to “break the bones” of Palestinian youth in an effort to stop the first uprising.

In addition to the colonial settler theme and total western bias favoring Zionists and Israel throughout his book, Khalidi also deals in a harsh way with Arab leaders’ failure to genuinely support the Palestinian cause. He details how certain Arab countries were active in weakening the Palestinian national movement in various ways, including supporting a number of assassinations of top PLO leaders by means of Palestinian groups aligned to them.

Rashid Khalidi has succeeded in bridging the heart and the head in tackling the wars that have been declared on Palestine and the Palestinian people. He has combined the highest academic standards and brought in the human and personal aspects often ignored in the worldwide narratives that deal with this conflict.

The hundred years’ war unfortunately has not ended and an honest appraisal of the situation brings about the conclusion that it will be a long time before Israel, a powerful settler colonial country supported by the West, would be willing to recognize and deal with a proud Palestinian people.