Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 is a history that nicely complements Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. While Pappe’s research shows exactly how Israel created both the conditions and tools to ethnically cleanse Palestine, Khalidi’s shows how the cleansing would never have been possible without Western colonial assistance, complicity and connivance.
Khalidi enumerates six “Declarations of War” by Western colonialists on Palestine, the last four of which he lays at the feet of the United States. The six include the time periods (1) 1917-1939; (2) 1947-1948; (3) 1967; (4) 1982; (5) 1987-1995; and (6) 2000-2014. From the Balfour Declaration to the League of Nations mandate system, to the carving up of Palestine in the most egregiously racist fashion, to colonial complicity in militarizing Israel, defending it in the UN, and pretending to be simultaneous ally and unbiased arbiter in so-called “peace” talks, the deck has been stacked since the beginning against Palestinians in favor of a European-flavored colonial outpost in the Middle East.
Khalidi’s accounts are invaluable, particularly since he personally was involved in some of the so-called “peace” negotiations and his family has a long intimate connection to Jerusalem and Palestine. But I’m going to skip over a discussion because, for me, Khalidi’s concluding chapter is the most important and thought-provoking. For the review you may have expected, Kaleem Hawa’s piece in the Nation is one of the best. And Khalidi himself spoke about the book at a gathering at Politics & Prose.
While the Goliath that is now Israel seems almost invincible, and justice for Palestinians so elusive, Israel nevertheless has a fatal vulnerability. The first is that Zionism, the ideology underlying everything the state does, has a bitter aftertaste in the 21st Century. Much of the world today regards Israel as an international pariah, a rogue state. As the historian Tony Judt observed, Zionism “arrived too late,” and it “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.” It is not lost on the Global South that represents the majority of the world’s nations that Israel’s only supporters are past and present colonial powers.
Israel’s second vulnerability is that, no matter how much hasbara (spin, propaganda) it generates, or how many Western Zionist lobby organizations are enlisted to do Israel’s bidding, Zionism itself can not withstand much scrutiny. There are simply too many founding documents, too many incriminating statements by politicians, too many political and military actions taken, too much history, too many racist, separatist, supremacist, discriminatory laws built into the state to deny or repudiate Israel’s malign ideology. Zionism, at its root, is scarcely different from the racist, undemocratic, repressive Christian nationalism that is Zionism’s greatest advocate in the United States.
Khalidi explains some of Zionism’s more blatant internal contradictions:
Of course, the five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all, while the half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights. This systemic ethnic discrimination was always a central facet of Zionism, which by definition aimed to create a Jewish society and polity with exclusive national rights in a land with an Arab majority. Even as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence proclaimed “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” dozens of crucial laws based on inequality of rights were implemented in the ensuing years. These severely restricted or totally banned Arab access to land and to residency in all-Jewish communities, formalized the seizure of the private and collective (Waqf) property of non-Jews, prevented most indigenous Palestinians who were made into refugees from returning to their homes while giving citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants, and limited access to many other benefits.
The problem of Zionism is a central moral question — one that a younger generation of American Jews certainly recognizes:
This core problem is even more stark today, with a total Arab population in Palestine and Israel from the Jordan River to the sea that is equal to or perhaps slightly larger than the Jewish population. That inequality is the central moral question posed by Zionism, and that it goes to the root of the legitimacy of the entire enterprise is a view that is shared by some distinguished Israelis. Imagining scholars looking back one hundred years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked, “When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty towards the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?”
Finally, the illusion of “liberal Zionism” has finally been shattered, as a slew of recent books by Jewish writers now acknowledges. Israel can either be a Jewish state that discriminates against and dominates non-Jews, or it can be democratic. But not both. Khalidi writes:
For decades Zionists insisted, often referring to the state’s declaration of independence, that Israel could be and was both “Jewish and democratic. As the contradictions inherent in this formulation grew ever more apparent, some Israeli leaders admitted (indeed, even declared it with pride) that if they were forced to choose, the Jewish aspect would take precedence. In July 2018, the Knesset codified that choice in constitutional law, adopting the”Basic Law on the Jewish Nation-State, which institutionalized statutory inequality among Israeli citizens by arrogating the right of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people…
It is clear, once you begin turning over rocks, that Zionism is based on a zero-sum calculation that only one people can exist in Palestine, that one ethnicity must dominate. Thus Zionism’s survival ultimately depends upon “completing the job” of ethnically cleansing Palestine begun in 1947. Israelis constantly talk about “transfer” of Palestinians and “death to the Arabs.” Even within “1948” (Israel proper) North American Jews unwittingly support Judaization programs in the Galilee and elsewhere, with the intent to create Jewish majorities in traditionally Arab cities. This is the Trail of Tears alternative to sharing land stolen from Palestinians: displacement, ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.
While early “drafts” of Zionism contemplated nation-sharing schemes, ever since the 1942 Biltmore declaration Zionism has meant only domination and expulsion for Palestinians. To speak of any other type would not refer to the Zionism that eventually prevailed but to some other species of Western liberalism generally reviled in Israel. To speak of a non-Zionist Israel for all people “from the river to the sea” provokes only shrill denunciations and accusations of antisemitism. This is because Israel under Zionism cannot survive multiculturalism, democracy, and equality any more than the Confederate States of America could have.
Khalidi’s last chapter considers what the future might hold. He writes:
Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.
We can effectively rule out compromise and reconciliation, not because of Arabs “who never miss a chance to miss a chance” but because supremacy and domination is built into the state and its polity. Poll after poll show that Israelis don’t want Palestinian neighbors, either internally or even as a neighboring state: 65% of Israeli Jews oppose the existence of a Palestinian state; 70% of Israeli Jews oppose Israel agreeing to the establishment of an independent and demilitarized Palestinian state; and 71.5 % of Israeli Jews believe that if there were a Palestinian state, Palestinian terrorism would be stronger or least stay the same.
That said, either two (real, not rump) states or a single confederated state are the best alternatives to Zionist domination of Palestinians from the river to the sea.
We can rule out the Algerian or Haitian scenario, where colonizers were expelled or overthrown. Israel is the only nuclear country in the Middle East thanks to France and the United States. It has one of the most powerful militaries in the world, again thanks to Western colonial powers. If Israel were to cease operating as a Jewish supremacist fantasyland for hilltop settlers, no doubt some Israelis would return to the US or Europe (before October 7th as many as 15% were contemplating leaving). Israelis who remained (most with nowhere else to go) would have to reconcile with a new reality, as white South Africans discovered upon the collapse of the old Apartheid system.
This leaves the third option – “finishing the job,” as American after American after American after American – and Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli and 500 more examples – have described their violent fantasies of a “Final Solution” for Palestinians. Following October 7th Israel seems to have doubled down on genocidal talk. As Khalidi predicted (the book was published in 2020), international attention would be drawn to any Israeli attempts at ethnic cleansing on a grand scale:
There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighboring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2017 that a record sixty-eight million persons and refugees were displaced the world over. Against this horrific regional and global background, which elicits scarce concern internationally, there might seem to be little to restrain Israel from such an action. But the ferocious fight that Palestinians would wage against their removal, the intense international attention to the conflict, and the growing currency of the Palestinian narrative all mitigate against such a prospect.
Given the attention, it would necessarily damage the “ironclad” relationship between Israel and its Western sponsors:
Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past. Even if undertaken under cover of a major regional war, such a move would have the potential to cause fatal damage to the West’s support for Israel, on which it relies.
Nonetheless, there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than a any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israeli taking such a step.
Given Israel’s attempts to herd Gazans into the Sinai and opening up West Bank areas barred since 2005 to settlements, Khalidi’s 2020 crystal ball might have been a bit off. Nevertheless, Gaza 2023 did focus world attention on Palestine and Zionism, and a growing number of people now see much more clearly what has been going on for the last 75 years — including many in the Jewish community.
If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many).
The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.” This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.
From the West’s perspective, the Abraham Accords, begun by Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden, offer a shortcut to solving of the Palestinian problem once and for all. As usual, these schemes rely on the collaboration of autocratic regimes instead of stable democracies. But Khalidi warns against such a short-sighted approach:
GIVEN AN ARAB world that is in a state of disarray greater than at any time since the end of World War I and a Palestinian national movement that appears to be without a compass, it might seem that this is an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians, and declare victory. It is not likely to be quite so simple. There is the not inconsiderable matter of the Arab public, which can be fooled some of the time but not all of the time, and that emerges with Palestinian flags flying whenever democratic currents rise against autocracy, as in Cairo in 2011 and in Algiers in the spring of 2019. Israel’s regional hegemony depends in very large measure on the maintenance in power of undemocratic Arab regimes that will suppress such sentiment. However distant it may seem today, real democracy in the Arab world would be a grave threat to Israel’s regional dominance and freedom of action.
Just as important, there is also the popular resistance that the Palestinians can be expected to continue to mount, whatever the shabby deal to which their discredited leaders may mistakenly assent. Though Israel is the nuclear regional hegemon, its domination is not uncontested in the Middle East, nor is the legitimacy of the undemocratic Arab regimes which are increasingly becoming its clients. Finally, the United States, for all its power, has played a secondary role — sometimes no role at all — in the crises in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the region. It will not necessarily maintain the near monopoly over the Palestine question, and indeed over the entire Middle East, that it has enjoyed for so long.
Configurations of global power have been changing: based on their growing energy needs, China and India will have more to say about the Middle East in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous one. Being closer to the Middle East, Europe and Russia have been more affected than the United States by the instability there and can be expected to play larger roles. The United States will most likely not continue to have the free hand that Britain once did. Perhaps such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.
Finally, the war in Gaza has unleashed a struggle in the United States. Besides widespread protests against US complicity in Gaza, collusion with Israeli and autocratic Arab regimes, the Democratic president’s “ironclad” support for Zionism, and the massive military expenditures “we” are so willing to spring for instead of relief for our own citizens, it has become obvious to many that America is not a gleaming city on the hill — but instead an ugly empire with an insatiable appetite for war and the subjugation of weaker nations.
As Khalidi points out, controlling the narrative is essential to the survival of Zionism and the imperial aspirations of the Western colonial powers that support it. It takes considerable political repression, large doses of propaganda, and the abolition of civil liberties to keep a system like this running for the benefit of war profiteers and other stakeholders in Empire.
The bipartisan preoccupation with ensuring Zionism’s survival threatens to destroy the last shreds of our democracy. We Americans seem to be slow learners, so it may take several more decades of foreign adventures and supporting repressive regimes and toxic ideologies before we finally awake to the damage we’re doing to our own democracy.
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