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.