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 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.
