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

by Rashid Khalidi

We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.9

As this book will argue, the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.

A late-nineteenth-century colonial-national movement thus adorned itself with a biblical coat that was powerfully attractive to Bible-reading Protestants in Great Britain and the United States, blinding them to the modernity of Zionism and to its colonial nature: for how could Jews be “colonizing” the land where their religion began?

Of the British Raj, Lord Curzon said: “To feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty, where it did not before exist—that is enough, that is the Englishman’s justification in India.”

RATHER THAN WRITE a comprehensive survey of Palestinian history, I have chosen to focus on six turning points in the struggle over Palestine. These six events, from the 1917 issuance of the Balfour Declaration, which decided the fate of Palestine, to Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and its intermittent wars on Gaza’s population in the early 2000s, highlight the colonial nature of the hundred years’ war on Palestine, and also the indispensable role of external powers in waging it.

This overwhelming majority of the population was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By way of contrast, Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a tiny minority—6 percent—of the country’s inhabitants.

Before securing British backing, the Zionist movement had been a colonizing project in search of a great-power patron.

Indeed, the British authorities did not allow newspapers to reappear in Palestine for nearly two years. When reports of the Balfour Declaration finally reached Palestine, they trickled in slowly via word of mouth and then through copies of Egyptian newspapers that travelers brought from Cairo.

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 third paragraph of the Mandate’s preamble, the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are described as having a historic connection to Palestine. In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups.

Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now desired to return to their homeland.42 Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs who happened to be abroad when the British took over were denied it.

Finally, other articles allowed the Jewish Agency to take over or establish public works, allowed each community to maintain schools in its own language—which meant Jewish Agency control over much of the yishuv’s school system—and made Hebrew an official language of the country.

Hitler’s ascendancy proved to be one of the most important events in the modern histories of both Palestine and Zionism. In 1935 alone, more than sixty thousand Jewish immigrants came to Palestine, a number greater than the entire Jewish population of the country in 1917.

Demolitions of the homes of imprisoned or executed rebels, or of presumed rebels or their relatives, was routine, another tactic borrowed from the British playbook developed in Ireland.

Told by representatives of the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” in the course of turning Palestine into a Jewish state, the commissioners reported that none of the military experts they consulted “believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms,” and all considered that a force of “not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required” to execute this program. In the end, it took the British more than double that number of troops to prevail over the Palestinians in 1936 through 1939.

The comparison with the Irish, the only people to succeed in (partially) freeing themselves of colonial rule between World Wars I and II, is striking.

The postwar realignment of international power was apparent in the workings of UNSCOP and in its majority report in favor of partitioning the country in a manner that was exceedingly favorable to the Jewish minority, giving them over 56 percent of Palestine, against the much smaller 17 percent for the Jewish state envisioned by the 1937 Peel partition plan.

The resolution was another declaration of war, providing the international birth certificate for a Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land, a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter.

In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers.

Between 1880 and 1920, the American Jewish population grew from a quarter of a million to four million, with the majority of new immigrants coming from Eastern Europe.

Even those still inside Palestine, whether refugees or not, were subject to three different political regimes: Israel, Egypt (for those in the Gaza Strip), and Jordan (for those on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem).

Deuxième Bureau,

Old-school imperialists in office in Britain and France were enraged by Egypt’s nationalization of the Franco-British Suez Canal Company, which was carried out in retaliation for the cancellation by the US secretary of state of a planned World Bank loan to build the Aswan Dam.

In addition, France sought to end Egypt’s support for Algerian rebels, who had been offered military training and a diplomatic and broadcasting platform in Cairo.77 Meanwhile, the Conservative government of Anthony Eden in London chafed at the demand by Egypt’s new regime that Britain end its military presence there (which had lasted seventy-two years). The British were also infuriated by Egypt’s support for nationalist challenges to Britain’s position in Iraq, the Gulf, Aden, and other parts of the Arab world. These challenges drove both countries to join Israel in its full-scale invasion of Egypt in October 1956.78

The war involved a further reversal of alliances: Israel’s patrons in 1947–48, the United States and Soviet Union, ultimately sided with Egypt.

As in 1947, a new international legal formula harmful to the Palestinians came via the medium of a UN resolution, and as with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the key document contains not a single mention of Palestine or the Palestinians. Security Council Resolution 242 treated the entire issue as a state-to-state matter between the Arab countries and Israel, eliminating the presence of Palestinians. The text does not refer to the Palestinians or to most elements of the original Palestine question; instead it contains a bland reference to “a just solution of the refugee problem.” If the Palestinians were not mentioned and were not a recognized party to the conflict, they could be treated as no more than a nuisance, or at best as a humanitarian issue.

in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist,” and that they never had existed.24 She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.

For them, Palestine had long been an Arab land with an Arab majority. Its people had been unjustly dispossessed of their homes, their property, their homeland, and their right of self-determination. These groups’ main purpose was to return the Palestinian people to their homeland, restore their rights, and oust those whom they saw as usurpers. The term “return” was central, as it has been for Palestinians ever since. Most felt no sense that there were now two peoples in Palestine, each with national rights; to them Israelis were no more than settlers, foreign immigrants to their country.

With the takeover of the PLO by Fatah and the other resistance groups in 1968, the national movement formulated a new objective, advocating the idea of Palestine as a single democratic state for all its citizens, both Jews and Arabs (some iterations referred to a secular democratic state).

However, the single democratic state proposal did not recognize the Israelis as a people with national rights, nor did it accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel or of Zionism.

Leaders of other anti-colonial movements were invariably vilified by their colonial masters in similar terms—terrorists, bandits, and murderers—whether they were Irish, Indian, Kenyan, or Algerian. Similarly, Israel’s demonization of the PLO as “terrorist” served as a justification for its eradication.

The justification of assassinations as necessary protection against terrorists, who would kill if not killed first, also rings hollow when many of those killed—Ghassan Kanafani and Kamal Nasser, for example, or PLO representatives abroad such as Mahmoud Hamshari and Wael Zu‘aytir—were intellectuals and advocates for the Palestine cause, rather than military personnel. Their artistic ventures were supplementary and linked to their political activities: Kanafani was a gifted novelist and painter, Nasser a poet, Zu‘aytir a writer and budding translator. These were not “terrorists,” but the most prominent voices of a national movement, voices Israel was determined to stifle.

In both cases, Kissinger colluded with America’s local allies to crush the Palestinian movement. Standing behind all of them, in the shadows, often indirectly responsible, was the United States.

President Jimmy Carter’s administration, working to hold a multilateral Middle East peace conference in Geneva, issued a joint communiqué with the USSR in October 1977. The communiqué broke ground, referring to participation of all parties to the conflict, including “those of the Palestinian people.” A statement made by Carter some months earlier, calling for a homeland for the Palestinians, signaled a different tone in Washington.

You are afraid to tell our readers and those who might complain to you that the Israelis are capable of indiscriminately shelling an entire city. —New York Times Beirut Bureau Chief Thomas Friedman to his editors2

allies. During the ten weeks of fighting from early June through mid-August, 1982, according to Lebanese official statistics, more than nineteen thousand Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed, and more than thirty thousand wounded.

Israeli forces periodically cut off water, electricity, food, and fuel to the besieged Western part of the Lebanese capital as they intermittently, but at times very intensively, bombarded it from air, land, and sea.

Meanwhile, the United States also provided indispensable material support to its ally, to the tune of $1.4 billion in military aid annually in both 1981 and 1982.

The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”

Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to “mop up”—as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.

A commission of inquiry set up after the events, chaired by Israeli Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, established the direct and indirect responsibility of Begin, Sharon, and senior Israeli military commanders for the massacres.45 Most of those named lost their posts as a result of both the inquiry and the general revulsion in Israel over the massacres.

As with the war itself, these deaths were also the direct responsibility of the US government.

In planning for the invasion of Lebanon, Israel’s leaders had been wary of repeating the fiasco of 1956, when their country had attacked Egypt without US approval and been forced to back down. Having learned from this bitter experience, Israel only went to war in 1967 after receiving the backing of its American ally. Now, in 1982, launching this “war of choice,” as many Israeli commentators called it, was entirely dependent on the green light given by Alexander Haig, a point confirmed by well-informed Israeli journalists soon after the war.55 The new and fuller details revealed in previously unavailable documents make the case clearly: Sharon told Haig exactly what he was about to do in great detail, and Haig gave his endorsement, amounting to another US declaration of war on the Palestinians.

However, the British were the leading party in the 1930s, while in 1982 it was Israel that called the tune, deployed its might, and did the killing, while the United States played an indispensable but supporting role.

THE POLITICAL IMPACT of the 1982 war was enormous. It brought about major regional changes that affect the Middle East to this day. Among its most significant lasting results were the rise of Hizballah in Lebanon

He argued that given the course of Jewish history, especially in the twentieth century, the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors.25

While Rabin had done something no other Israeli leader had ever done by formally conceding that there was a Palestinian people, accepting the PLO as their representative, and opening negotiations with it, obtaining in return its recognition of the state of Israel, this exchange was neither symmetrical nor reciprocal.

Hamas was begun in Gaza by militants who felt that the Brotherhood had been too accommodating toward the Israeli occupier in return for lenient treatment.

In the wake of the PLO’s shift away from armed struggle and toward a diplomatic path meant to lead to a Palestinian state that failed to achieve results, many Palestinians felt that the organization had lost its way—and Hamas grew in consequence, despite its extremely conservative social positions and the sketchy outline of the future it proposed.

While the rivalry between Hamas and the PLO played a role in this escalation, the Israeli forces’ massive use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators from the outset (they fired 1.3 million bullets in “the first few days” of the uprising15) was a crucial factor, causing a shocking number of casualties.