Hundred Years' War On Palestine

Hundred Years' War on Palestine

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 historyIn 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 invasion 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 reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.Review"Informed and passionate . . . Khalidi's is an elegy for the Palestinians, for their dispossession, for their failure to resist conquest."?The Guardian"The Hundred Years? War is one of the best-researched general surveys of 20th and early 21st century Palestinian life, but it?s also a deeply personal work. . . . For a people whose history is all but criminalized, this act of retelling is itself a form of resistance."?The Nation"Rigorous and lucid . . . Rashid Khalidi, the intellectual heir to Edward Said, has written one of the great books on the Israeli-Palestinian question."?Financial Times"A book of witnessed historical accounts and enlightening deep analysis . . . each chapter is rich with revelations . . . I doubt if my experience of reading this great intellectual contribution could have been any more enriching." ?Mondoweiss"Masterful . . . brilliant . . . This major work will occupy a central position in the literature of Palestinian history."?Al-Quds?After decades of scrupulous objectivity, Khalidi has now written a very personal book. . . . The Hundred Years? War on Palestine is a roller-coaster ride through Palestinian history, one hundred years without a moment of solitude.??The Baffler?For those who want to learn about the course of the Israel-Palestine conflict up till now, and are open-minded: read this book. It comes over as a brilliant synthesis of high scholarship and experience, fair-minded, and highly readable.??Jacobin"Meticulous . . . Rashid Khalidi's exhaustive research leaves no doubt that the Jewish colonizers were acutely aware from the start that the Palestinian people had to be subjugated and removed to create the Jewish state."?Chris Hedges, TruthDig"This book is a masterful work of scholarship and personal history excavating unlike any I?ve seen before; this will become a major force in the Palestinian historical canon in the years to come."?Literary Hub "A richly informed, personalized account of a century of repression of a peoples? national aspirations. . . . original and distinctive . . . a remarkable testament to the stubborn resistance that characterizes the Palesti