Summary of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

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The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is a comprehensive account of the ongoing conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, tracing a hundred years of colonial war. The book, written by Rashid Khalidi, focuses on the Zionist movement, Israel, Britain, and the United States, and highlights key events from the Balfour Declaration to the 1948 destruction of Palestine. It offers an illuminating new view of the ongoing conflict, highlighting the mistakes of Palestinian leaders and the emergence of national movements on both sides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215051511

Willie M. Joseph

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Introduction

The author spent several months in Jerusalem during the early 1990s, researching private libraries of some of the city's oldest families, including their own. They stayed in an apartment belonging to a Khalidi family waqf, or religious endowment, in the heart of the Old City, which had a view of two of the greatest masterpieces of early Islamic architecture: the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Khalidi Library, founded in 1899 by the author's grandfather, houses over twelve hundred manuscripts, mainly in Arabic, dating back to the early eleventh century. The collection is one of the most extensive in all of Palestine that is still in the hands of its original owners.

The author discovered Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, a worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna. He was deeply interested in comparative religion, especially in Judaism, and owned a number of books in European languages on this and other subjects.

Yusuf Diya was aware of the pervasiveness of Western antiSemitism and gained impressive knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism, specifically its nature as a response to Christian Europe's virulent anti-Semitism. He was familiar with Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl and was aware of the first two Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898.

As mayor of Jerusalem, Diya witnessed the friction with the local population prompted by the first years of proto-Zionist activity, starting with the arrival of the earliest European Jewish settlers in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Yusuf Diya, a prominent Palestinian leader, was aware of the Zionist movement's ambition and its potential to conflict with the rights and well-being of the country's indigenous inhabitants. He sent a letter to French chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn, expressing admiration for Herzl and respecting Judaism and Jews. However, Diya warned of the dangers of implementing Zionism, such as sowing dissension among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Palestine and imperiling the status and security that Jews had always enjoyed throughout the Ottoman domains.

Herzl responded to Diya's letter, dismissing the interests and existence of the indigenous population. He used a justification that Jewish immigration would benefit the indigenous people of Palestine, stating that their well-being and individual wealth would be increased by bringing in Jewish immigrants. However, Herzl underestimated his correspondent, al-Khalidi, who understood that the issue was not the immigration of a limited number of Jews but the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state.

Diya could only have concluded that either the Zionist leader meant to deceive him by concealing the true aims of the Zionist movement or that Herzl did not see Yusuf Diya and the Arabs of Palestine as worthy of being taken seriously. Herzl's thinking and reply to Diya appear to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine. This condescending attitude toward the intelligence and rights of the Arab population of Palestine was repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed.

Theodor Herzl's letter to Yusuf DIYA and his response to the Zionist movement have been widely criticized for not fully acknowledging the colonial nature of the century-long conflict in Palestine. The dismantling of indigenous Palestinian society began after World War I with the large-scale immigration of European Jewish settlers, supported by the British Mandate authorities. This led to the creation of a separate Jewish-controlled sector of the economy, which was bigger than the Arab-owned part of the economy.

The Great 1936–39 Arab Revolt against British rule further diminished the indigenous population, while a massive wave of Jewish immigration from Germany raised the Jewish population in Palestine from