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

by Rashid Khalidi

With his assurance in response to al-Khalidi’s unasked question, Herzl alludes to the desire recorded in his diary to “spirit” the country’s poor population “discreetly” across the borders.13 It is clear from this chilling quotation that Herzl grasped the importance of “disappearing” the native population of Palestine in order for Zionism to succeed.

This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day.

This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The expulsion then of over half the Arab population of the country, first by Zionist militias and then by the Israeli army, completed the military and political triumph of Zionism.

Such radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements. In Palestine, it was a necessary precondition for transforming most of an overwhelmingly Arab country into a predominantly Jewish state. 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?

Characteristically, European colonizers seeking to supplant or dominate indigenous peoples, whether in the Americas, Africa, Asia, or Australasia (or in Ireland), have always described them in pejorative terms. They also always claim that they will leave the native population better off as a result of their rule; the “civilizing” and “progressive” nature of their colonial projects serves to justify whatever enormities are perpetrated against the indigenous people to fulfill their objectives.

The condescending rhetoric of Theodor Herzl and other Zionist leaders was no different from that of their European peers. The Jewish state, Herzl wrote, would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”20 This was similar to the language used in the conquest of the North American frontier, which ended in the nineteenth century with the eradication or subjugation of the continent’s entire native population.

Historical Palestine has been the subject of innumerable disparaging tropes in Western popular culture, as well as academically worthless writing that purports to be scientific and scholarly, but that is riddled with historical errors, misrepresentations, and sometimes outright bigotry.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued by a British cabinet and committing Britain to the creation of a national Jewish homeland, never mentioned the Palestinians, the great majority of the country’s population at the time, even as it set the course for Palestine for the subsequent century.

The most important of these institutions was the Jewish Colonization Association (in 1924 renamed the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association). This body was originally established by the German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch and later combined with a similar organization founded by the British peer and financier Lord Edmond de Rothschild. The JCA provided the massive financial support that made possible extensive land purchases and the subsidies that enabled most of the early Zionist colonies in Palestine to survive and thrive before and during the Mandate period.

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

Significantly, the overwhelming Arab majority of the population (around 94 percent at that time) went unmentioned by Balfour, except in a backhanded way as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” They were described in terms of what they were not, and certainly not as a nation or a people—the words “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not appear in the sixty-seven words of the declaration.

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.

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.

More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement—sovereignty and complete control of Palestine.

At a dinner at Balfour’s home in 1922, three of the most prominent British statesmen of the era—Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill—assured Weizmann that by the term “Jewish national home” they “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine. Nor did it.25

In Palestine, however, local newspapers had been shuttered since the beginning of the war by both government censorship and a lack of newsprint, the result of a tight Allied naval blockade of Ottoman ports. After British troops occupied Jerusalem in December 1917, the military regime banned publication of news of the declaration.

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.

Just like Zionism, Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, a product of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century circumstances, not eternal and immutable. The denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity is of a piece with Herzl’s colonialist views on the alleged benefits of Zionism to the indigenous population, and constitutes a crucial element in the erasure of their national rights and peoplehood by the Balfour Declaration and its sequels.

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

Within a little more than a decade after World War I, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.

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 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. There were people there, certainly, but they had no history or collective existence, and could therefore be ignored.

The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.

Nowhere in the subsequent twenty-eight articles of the Mandate is there any reference to the Palestinians as a people with national or political rights.

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.

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.

With discriminatory immigration laws in place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, many German Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine.

Nevertheless, in response to growing Palestinian agitation, and especially following the outbreaks of violent unrest, different British governments were obliged to reexamine their policies in Palestine. The result was a variety of commissions of inquiry and white papers. These included the Hayward Commission in 1920, the Churchill White Paper in 1922, the Shaw Commission in 1929, the Hope-Simpson Report in 1930, the Passfield White Paper in 1930, the Peel Commission in 1937, and the Woodhead Commission in 1938. However, these policy papers recommended only limited measures to placate the Palestinians (most of which were countermanded by the government in London under pressure from the Zionists) or proposed a course of action that only compounded their deep sense of injustice. The eventual result was an unprecedented, country-wide violent explosion in Palestine starting in 1936.

The refinements of callousness and cruelty employed went well beyond summary executions. For possession of a single bullet, Shaykh Farhan al-Sa‘di, an eighty-one-year-old rebel leader, was put to death in 1937. Under the martial law in force at the time, that single bullet was sufficient to merit capital punishment, particularly for an accomplished guerrilla fighter like al-Sa‘di.57 Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops.

Two other imperial practices employed extensively in repressing the Palestinians were the detention of thousands without trial and the exile of troublesome leaders.

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.

If it appeared that Palestinian pressure might force Britain to violate the letter or the spirit of the Mandate, there was intensive lobbying in the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva to remind it of its overarching obligations to the Zionists.

WHAT HAPPENED IS, of course, now well known. By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population.

Unlike the Jewish Agency, which had been granted vital arms of governance by the League of Nations Mandate, the Palestinians had no foreign ministry, no diplomats—as my father’s story attests—nor any other government department, let alone a centrally organized military force.

By the mid-1930s, the JNF was annually collecting $3.5 million for the colonization of Palestine in the United States alone, part of much larger sums it regularly channeled from all over the world to support the Zionist project.21

The November 29, 1947, passage in the UN General Assembly of Resolution 181, which called for dividing Palestine into a large Jewish state and a smaller Arab one, with an international corpus separatum encompassing Jerusalem, reflected the new global balance of power. The United States and USSR, which both voted in favor of the resolution, now clearly played the decisive role in sacrificing the Palestinians for a Jewish state to take their place and control over most of their country.

Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.

Although Jaffa was meant to be part of the stillborn Arab state designated by the 1947 Partition Plan, no international actor attempted to stop this major violation of the UN resolution.

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.

In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel).

For these many reasons, in the bleak new reality after the Nakba, more than a million Palestinians faced a world turned utterly upside down. Wherever they were, whether inside Palestine or not, they experienced profound social disruption. For the majority, this meant destitution—the loss of homes, jobs, and deeply rooted communities. Villagers lost their land and livelihoods and urbanites their properties and capital, while the Nakba shattered the power of the country’s notables together with their economic base.

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). This condition of dispersal, shitat in Arabic, has afflicted the Palestinian people ever since.

Given the precedent of 1948 and the civilian massacres at Dayr Yasin and at least twenty other locations,82 as well as the high civilian casualties in the raids of the early 1950s, such as that at Qibya, the gruesome events in the Gaza Strip were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern of behavior by the Israeli military. News of the massacres was suppressed in Israel and veiled by a complaisant American media.

The French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu chronicles a total of twelve major Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, going back to 1948, some being full-fledged occupations and some constituting all-out warfare.83

Yet the myth prevails: in 1967, a tiny, vulnerable country faced constant, existential peril, and it continues to do so.6 This fiction has served to justify blanket support of Israeli policies, no matter how extreme, and despite its repeated rebuttal even by authoritative Israeli voices.7

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “The Americans are giving the Israelis a little more time.”

What we had witnessed that day was evidence of a new Middle Eastern axis in action—the armored spearheads on the ground were Israeli, while the diplomatic cover was American.

In the half century since, with American help, Israel has driven a coach and horses through this linguistic gap, which has permitted it to colonize the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, some of which—East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights—it has formally annexed, and to maintain its unending military control over them.

the rise of new political movements and armed groups. After 1948, Palestine had ceased to exist on the map, with most of the country absorbed into Israel and the rest under the control of Jordan and Egypt.