The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: Story of a forgotten people
Long ago when Jews were being massacred in thousands and the Jewish state was all but a dream, father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote, “The Jewish state would form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism.”
On November 2, 1917, British secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arthur Jamesh Bulfour, put out a 67-word, single-sentence statement, known as Bulfour Declaration, turning Herzl’s dream into reality:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
In 2020, Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, draws attention to how the Bulfour Declaration and subsequent statements, declarations and treaties deliberately omitted the use of the word ‘Palestinians’, presenting Palestine as a land without people which rightfully belonged to the Jews.
There were Jewish people, there are non-Jewish communities, but no Palestinians staying on this land. This was a project, Khalidi says, to dispossess a people of their land. Khalidi argues that creation of Israel was not a project aimed at giving Jews a homeland they could call their own, but a sinister plan to turn the entire state of Palestine into Israel.
Khalidi tells the tale of this dispossession through the time span of six declaration of wars, from 1917 to 2014. Each of them helped Israel expand further, forcing Palestinians into ghettos and pigeon holes. The accounts of all undeclared wars and killings flow through the narrative.
Many books and movies, sometimes adaptations of books and at other times original ideas, have won awards and accolades raising enough awareness about the persecution of Jews in European countries. Such a book or movie on the plight of the Palestinians in their own homeland is still to be written.
Leon Uris's novel Exodus went on to be the biggest bestseller after Gone With the Wind. When the novel was adapted into a movie in 1960, it went on to win an Academy Award. The story of the Palestinian nakba (exodus), which began in 1948, is also a story of memory against forgetting. More than 7,00,000 Palestinians became homeless during the nakba.
Khalidi, an American-Palestinian, partakes in that storytelling process while also trying to explain why the story has been struggling to be told. Most people see the Israel-Palestine conflict purely as an Isreal-Arab conflict, which again obliterates the presence of Palestinians, who to begin with, were victims of their own Arab neighbours’ desire to rule them as the British began leaving their colonies in the late 1940s.
By the time the Arabs decided to unite against the atrocities committed against Palestinians, local Palestinian terrorists had taken to an armed struggle against Israeli expansionist policies, and thus beyond the Arab world, Palestinians began to lose global support. Khalidi etches out the lines between when the Palestinian struggle, as a fight of a people for survival, blurs with the struggle being seen as a terrorist armed struggle.
Khalidi’s father worked for the United Nations and he was at the UN office on June 9, 1967, the fifth day of Israel’s war on Arab countries.
The UN Security Council passed Resolution 235 demanding an ‘immediate’ ceasefire. The UNSC set a two-hour deadline asking the Secretary-General to report back within the time limit on the resolution’s enforcement.
When the deadline ended with Israel still not complying, UNSC adjourned for another two hours. A confused Khalidi asked his father what the delay was about, to which his father responded, “Don’t you understand? The Americans are giving the Israelis a little more time.” The ‘little more time’ was for Israel to consolidate its hold on the territory it had come to occupy.
If the Israeli occupation project in Palestine was ambitious, Khalidi’s book is unrelenting in exposing both that ambition and Israel’s collaborators who made the realisation of the project possible.
From Herzl’s voicing of the plan of a ‘Jewish state’ to US President Donald Trump’s move to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, Khalidi gives a point-by-point account of how this project gained global legitimacy.
History reading can be boring for those who aren’t history buffs, but the addition of anecdotes in the book make it a book both for lovers of history and those who find dates and years daunting to take note of.
When Israel launches a major operation to target Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) men who had taken refuge in Lebanon and were using it as a launchpad to strike Israeli civilians and military, Khalidi was in Lebanon. With two daughters and wife Mona, pregnant with their child, Khalidi had to escape the city which was fast coming down to rubble as bombs and mortars exploded all around. His son born shortly after the escape, Khalidi says, remained particularly sensitive to loud sounds for a long time.
Khalidi's family suffered a great deal because of the conflict, like all Palestinians did. The book thus is not an unbiased account. But in sticking to facts and by quoting facts and declassified documents, Khalidi does a fine job in documenting a Palestinian perspective of the conflict where Palestinians have been the forgotten people.
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