At the same time, the sense of identity of large parts of the population was also evolving and shifting. My grandfather’s generation would have identified—and would have been identified—in terms of family, religious affiliation, and city or village of origin. They would have cherished their descent from revered ancestors; they would have been proud speakers of Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, and heirs to Arab culture. They might have felt loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty and state, an allegiance rooted in custom as well as a sense of the Ottoman state as a bulwark defending the lands of the earliest and greatest Muslim empires, lands coveted by Christendom since the Crusades, lands in which the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem were located. That loyalty had begun to weaken in the nineteenth century, however, as the religious foundation of the state was diminished, as Ottoman military defeats and territorial losses mounted, and as the ideas of nationalism evolved and spread. Throughout, Khalidi engages in nuanced self-criticism, interviewing former diplomats to understand how Israel outmaneuvered the PLO in the 1990s, during the Oslo peace process that followed from Madrid, and how Arafat and the old guard had grown out of touch with a new generation of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He uses the framework of settler colonialism to explain the success of the Zionist movement in taking the land and emptying it of its inhabitants. He reads primary sources and documents conveying displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, to demonstrate how Israel has prevented an independent Palestine through six historical periods that constitute a century-long war against Palestinians. After the failure of a conference held in the spring of 1939 at St. James’s Palace in London involving representatives of the Palestinians, the Zionists, and the Arab states, Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab, and Indian Muslim opinion. This document called for a severe curtailment of Britain’s commitments to the Zionist movement. It proposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and on land sales (two major Arab demands) and promised representative institutions in five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands). Although immigration was in fact restricted, none of the other provisions was ever fully implemented.71 Moreover, representative institutions and self-determination were made contingent on approval of all the parties, which the Jewish Agency would never give for an arrangement that would prevent the creation of a Jewish state. The minutes of the cabinet meeting of February 23, 1939, make it clear that Britain meant to withhold the substance of these two crucial concessions from the Palestinians, as the Zionist movement was to have effective veto power, which it would obviously use.72 Well-informed Palestinians were aware of what the Zionists were preaching both abroad and in Hebrew in Palestine to their followers—that unlimited immigration would produce a Jewish majority that would permit a takeover of the country. They had been following the doings and sayings of Zionist leaders via the extensive reportage on the subject in the Arabic press since well before the war.38 While Chaim Weizmann had, for example, told several prominent Arabs at a dinner party in Jerusalem in March 1918 “to beware treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power,”39 most knew that such assertions were strategic and meant to cloak the Zionists’ real objectives. Indeed, the Zionist movement’s leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy,” but knowledgeable Palestinians were not deceived.40 My uncle had been right. In the months after his exile and the mass arrests of others, the revolt entered its most intense phase, and British forces lost control of several urban areas and much of the countryside, which were taken over and governed by the rebels.63 In the words of Dill’s successor, Lieutenant General Robert Haining, in August 1938, “The situation was such that civil administration of the country was, to all practical purposes, non-existent.”64 In December, Haining reported to the War Office that “practically every village in the country harbours and supports the rebels and will assist in concealing their identity from the Government Forces.”65 It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in September 1938, and nearly a year more of fierce fighting, to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.

Hillel Cohen (22 October 2015). Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929. Brandeis University Press. pp.253–. ISBN 978-1-61168-812-2.In the 1860s, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi had to go all the way to Malta and Istanbul to acquire an education along Western lines. By 1914, such an education could be had in a variety of state, private, and missionary schools and colleges in Palestine, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. Modern pedagogy was often introduced by foreign missionary schools, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, as well as by the Jewish schools of the Alliance israélite universelle. Partly out of fear that foreign missionaries in league with their great-power patrons would come to dominate the instruction of the younger generation, the Ottoman authorities established a growing network of state schools, which eventually served more students in Palestine than did foreign schools. Although universal access to education and widespread literacy were still far in the future, the changes leading up to World War I offered new horizons and novel ideas to more and more people.3 The Arab population benefited from these developments.

The British government’s intentions and objectives at the time have been amply analyzed over the past century.22 Among its many motivations were both a romantic, religiously derived philo-Semitic desire to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic wish to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain, linked to a conviction that “world Jewry” had the power to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting in the war and bring the United States into it. Beyond those impulses, Britain primarily desired control over Palestine for geopolitical strategic reasons that antedated World War I and that had only been reinforced by wartime events.23 However important the other motivations may have been, this was the central one: the British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project, just as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (enshrined in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France—the Sykes-Picot Agreement—in which the two powers agreed to a colonial partition of the eastern Arab countries.24 Beyond making the Jewish Agency a partner to the mandatory government, this provision allowed it to acquire international diplomatic status and thereby formally represent Zionist interests before the League of Nations and elsewhere. Such representation was normally an attribute of sovereignty, and the Zionist movement took great advantage of it to bolster its international standing and act as a para-state. Again, no such powers were allowed to the Palestinian majority over the entire thirty years of the Mandate, in spite of repeated demands. Palestinian resistance endured, helped by the law of unintended consequences: Israel’s crushing of Egypt in 1967 boosted the PLO, while the 1982 Lebanon invasion prompted the 1987 intifada. Israel unintentionally resurrected Palestinian resistance by its heavy-handed actions. Arafat looms large in the book’s final chapters, and not to his credit. He started as he meant to continue, by cheating in student elections as a young man in Cairo. The peace after 1993 brought Arafat into Israel, where it monitored and controlled him. Nothing changed. Fatah militants who had spent time in Israeli jails tortured Hamas detainees. The Greater Israel settlement project on the West Bank continued apace, Israel arguing that Palestinians neither wanted peace nor accepted Israel, a point Khalidi contests. Khalidi, Rashid (26 January 2021). The hundred years' war on Palestine: a history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917–2017. Picador. ISBN 978-1-250-78765-1. OCLC 1150009229. WHAT DID THESE contradictory British and Allied pledges, and a mandate system tailored to suit the needs of the Zionist project, produce for the Arabs of Palestine in the interwar years? The British treated the Palestinians with the same contemptuous condescension they lavished on other subject peoples from Hong Kong to Jamaica. Their officials monopolized the top offices in the Mandate government and excluded qualified Arabs;46 they censored the newspapers, banned political activity when it discomfited them, and generally ran as parsimonious an administration as was possible in light of their commitments. As in Egypt and India, they did little to advance education, since colonial conventional wisdom held that too much of it produced “natives” who did not know their proper place. Firsthand accounts of the period are replete with instances of the racist attitudes of colonial officials to those they considered their inferiors, even if they were dealing with knowledgeable professionals who spoke perfect English.

This chapter is the most personal, as the author lived in Beirut for 15 years with his family. [7] It also presents damning evidence, based on documents leaked from the Israel State Archives in 2012 as well as secret appendices from the Kahan Commission that weren't published in the original 1983 report, of the Israeli government's conscious decision to send Christian militias into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps with the clear intention of instigating the Sabra and Shatila massacre. [7] "The Fifth Declaration of War, 1987–1995" [ edit ] IN 1922, THE new League of Nations issued its Mandate for Palestine, which formalized Britain’s governance of the country. In an extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement, the Mandate not only incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim, it substantially amplified the declaration’s commitments. The document begins with a reference to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which states that for “certain communities … their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.” It continues by giving an international pledge to uphold the provisions of the Balfour Declaration. The clear implication of this sequence is that only one people in Palestine is to be recognized with national rights: the Jewish people. This was in contradistinction to every other Middle Eastern mandated territory, where Article 22 of the covenant applied to the entire population and was ultimately meant to allow for some form of independence of these countries. In the two decades after 1917, the Palestinians had been unable to develop an overarching framework for their national movement such as the Wafd in Egypt or the Congress Party in India or Sinn Fein in Ireland. Nor did they maintain an apparently solid national front as some other peoples fighting colonialism had managed to do. Their efforts were undermined by the hierarchical, conservative, and divided nature of Palestinian society and politics, characteristic of many in the region, and further sapped by a sophisticated policy of divide and rule adopted by the mandatory authorities, aided and abetted by the Jewish Agency. This colonial strategy may have reached its peak of perfection in Palestine after hundreds of years of maturation in Ireland, India, and Egypt. BEYOND DEMOGRAPHIC AND other shifts, World War I and its aftermath accelerated the change in Palestinian national sentiment from a love of country and loyalties to family and locale to a thoroughly modern form of nationalism.30 In a world where nationalism had been gaining ground for many decades, the Great War provided a global boost to the idea. The tendency was compounded toward the end of the war by Woodrow Wilson in the United States and Vladimir Lenin in Soviet Russia, who both espoused the principle of national self-determination, albeit in different ways and with different aims.

The much more rapid pace of transformation in the advanced countries of Western Europe and North America compared to the rest of the world during the modern industrial era led many outside observers, including some eminent scholars, to mistakenly claim that Middle Eastern societies, including Palestine, were stagnant and unchanging, or even “in decline.”7 We now know from many indices that this was by no means the case: a growing body of solidly grounded historical work based on Ottoman, Palestinian, Israeli, and Western sources completely refutes these false notions.8 However, recent scholarship on Palestine in the years before 1948 goes much further than just dealing with the misconceptions and distortions at the heart of such thinking. Whatever it may have looked like to uninformed outsiders, it is clear that by the first part of the twentieth century there existed in Palestine under Ottoman rule a vibrant Arab society undergoing a series of rapid and accelerating transitions, much like several other Middle Eastern societies around it.9 In his book, Khalidi breaks the hundred years of war on Palestine into six periods. He describes the Balfour declaration and all the British bias in favor of Jewish Zionists that followed, especially between 1917 and 1939, as the first declaration of war on Palestine. He shows with skill and documentation the simple fact that the great colonial power at the time, Great Britain, not only acquiesced with Jewish Zionists but also went overboard in denying the existence of the Palestinian people and Palestinian nationalism. Khalidi argues that while settler colonialism was ending in the middle of the 20 th century, in Palestine it was just beginning. They were among the thousands of men still absent from their homes at war’s end. Some had emigrated to the Americas to escape conscription while many, the writer ‘Aref Shehadeh (later known as ‘Arif al-‘Arif) among them, were being held in Allied prisoner of war camps.19 Others were in the hills, dodging the draft, like Najib Nassar, editor of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Haifa newspaper al-Karmil.20 Meanwhile, there were Arab soldiers who had deserted the Ottoman army and crossed the lines, or who were serving in the forces of the Arab Revolt led by Sharif Husayn and allied with Britain. Still others—such as ‘Isa al-‘Isa, the editor of Filastin, who had been exiled by the Ottoman authorities for his fierce independence with its strong echoes of Arab nationalism—were forced from the relatively cosmopolitan confines of Jaffa to various small towns in the heart of rural Anatolia.21 After attending the ceremonial opening of a new rail line in 1929 that connected Tel Aviv to the Jewish settlements and Arab villages to the south, ‘Isa al-‘Isa wrote an ominous editorial in Filastin. All along the route, he wrote, Jewish settlers took advantage of the presence of British officials to make new demands of them, while Palestinians were nowhere to be seen. “There was only one tarbush,” he said, “among so many hats.” The message was clear: the wataniyin, “the people of the country,” were poorly organized, while al-qawm, “this nation,” exploited every opportunity offered them. The title of the editorial summed up the gravity of al-‘Isa’s warning: “Strangers in Our Own Land: Our Drowsiness and Their Alertness.”33 Another such window is provided by the growing number of published memoirs by Palestinians. Most of them are in Arabic and reflect the concerns of their upper-class and middle-class authors.34 To find the views of the less well-to-do segments of Palestinian society is more difficult. There is little oral history available from the early decades of British rule.35The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017. By Rashid Khalidi. (Macmillan) New York, 2020. 336 pp. Article 2 of the Mandate provided for self-governing institutions; however, the context makes clear that this applied only to the yishuv, as the Jewish population of Palestine was called, while the Palestinian majority was consistently denied access to such institutions. (Any later concessions offered on matters of representation, such as a British proposal for an Arab Agency, were conditional on equal representation for the tiny minority and the large majority, and on Palestinian acceptance of the terms of the Mandate, which explicitly nullified their existence—only the first Catch-22 in which the Palestinians would find themselves trapped.) Representative institutions for the entire country on a democratic basis and with real power were never on offer (in keeping with Lloyd George’s private assurance to Weizmann), for the Palestinian majority would naturally have voted to end the privileged position of the Zionist movement in their country. American political scientist Lisa Anderson described the book in Foreign Affairs as presenting "the most cogent, comprehensive, and compelling account yet of this struggle from the Palestinian vantage point." [1]