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

by Rashid Khalidi

revealing the failure of both the PLO’s diplomatic course and the armed violence of Hamas and others. These events showed that Oslo had failed, that the use of guns and suicide bombings had failed, and that for all the casualties inflicted on Israeli civilians, the biggest losers in every way were the Palestinians.

Another consequence was that the terrible violence of the Second Intifada erased the positive image of Palestinians that had evolved since 1982 and through the First Intifada and the peace negotiations.

The regard for prisoners in Palestinian society is very high, and over 400,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated by Israel since the occupation began.

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.

In 2014, the 4,000 rockets that Israel claimed were fired from the Gaza Strip killed five Israeli civilians, one of them a Bedouin in the Naqab (Negev) region, and a Thai agricultural worker, for a total of six civilian deaths.

The coverage succeeded in obscuring the extreme disproportionality of this one-sided war: one of the most powerful armies on the planet used its full might against a besieged area of one hundred and forty square miles, which is among the world’s most heavily populated enclaves and whose people had no way to escape the rain of fire and steel.

in the 2014 assault, over 16,000 buildings were rendered uninhabitable, including entire neighborhoods. A total of 277 UN and government schools, seventeen hospitals and clinics, and all six of Gaza’s universities were damaged, as were over 40,000 other buildings. Perhaps 450,000 Gazans, about a quarter of the population, were forced to leave their homes, and many of them no longer had homes to go back to afterward.

A poll released by the Brookings Institution in December 2016 showed that 60 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of all Americans supported sanctions against Israel over its construction of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Most Democrats (55 percent) believed Israel has too much influence on US politics and policies and is a strategic burden.

US presidents, from Truman to Donald Trump, have been reluctant to walk into this buzz saw of antagonism, and have thus by and large allowed Israel to dictate the pace of events and even to determine US positions on issues relating to Palestine and the Palestinians.

At no point did Obama decisively confront Israel over its siege of the Gaza Strip.

in the end he changed nothing in Palestine.

In spite of fruitless efforts to resolve the conflict by Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, the sole mark his administration left was Security Council Resolution 2334, passed 14–1 with a US abstention, that called Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem a “flagrant violation” of international law with “no legal validity.” Adopted in December 2016 when Obama was already a lame duck, the resolution provided for no sanctions and no coercive measures against Israel.

Obama was particularly unlucky in that just months after his inauguration, Netanyahu, with whom his relations went from frigid to awful, took office for the second time, and continued to develop his close ties with the Republican opposition to the president. For these and many other reasons, Obama left the White House in 2017 with the colonial status quo in Palestine of military occupation and expanding Jewish settlement intact, and the conditions for Palestinians even worse than when he took office eight years earlier.

As the centenary of the war on Palestine came and went, the American metropole, the irreplaceable base for Israel’s freedom of action, was as committed to the Zionist colonial project as had been Lord Balfour one hundred years earlier.

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.

The experience of the past few decades shows that three approaches have been effective in expanding the way in which the reality in Palestine is understood. The first rests on the fertile comparison of the case of Palestine to other colonial-settler experiences, whether that of Native Americans or South Africans or the Irish. The second, related to the first, involves focusing on the gross imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians, a characteristic of all colonial encounters. The third and perhaps most important is to foreground the issue of inequality.

Challenging this epic myth is especially difficult in the United States, which is steeped in an evangelical Protestantism that makes it particularly susceptible to such an evocative Bible-based appeal and which also prides itself on its colonial past. The word “colonial” has a valence in the United States that is deeply different from its associations in the former European imperial metropoles and the countries that were once part of their empires.

Likud Knesset member Miki Zohar. The Palestinian, he said, “does not have the right of self-determination because he is not the proprietor of the land. I want him as a resident because of my honesty, as he was born here, he lives here, and I would never tell him to leave. I regret to say it, but they suffer from one major defect: they were not born Jews.”11 This connection between an exclusive right to land and peoplehood is central to a specific type of “blood and soil” Central European nationalism, which is the ground from which Zionism sprang.