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

by Rashid Khalidi

While in the West, Israel still retained its image as a beleaguered victim of Arab hostility, this was far from how it was seen in the Arab world, which instead viewed its decisive military victories and potential possession of nuclear weapons as evidence of towering strength.

The United States supported Israel’s goals in Lebanon under Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, and later under Carter, Vance, and Brzezinski, as well as during the Reagan administration.

However, an account based on interviews with Israeli intelligence officers involved in the operation states that “the Mossad eventually reached the conclusion that ‘cutting this channel was important … to give the Americans a hint that this was no way to behave towards friends.’”

In spite of this firestorm, and even with Israel’s extensive aerial surveillance capabilities and its many hundreds of agents and spies planted in Lebanon16 (the war took place before the age of the reconnaissance drone), not one of the PLO’s several functioning underground command and control posts or its multiple communications centers, was ever hit. Nor was a single PLO leader killed in the attacks, although many civilians died when the Israeli air force missed its targets. This is surprising, given just how extensive were Israel’s efforts to liquidate them.17 Israel’s leaders were clearly unconcerned about killing civilians trying to do so: after an air attack in July 1981 destroyed a building in Beirut with heavy civilian casualties, Begin’s office had stated that “Israel was no longer refraining from attacking guerrilla targets in civilian areas.”

I had stopped to drop off a friend at his parked car not far from the building. I had almost reached home as planes swooped down, and I heard a huge explosion behind me. Later I saw that the entire building was flattened, pancaked into a single mound of smoking rubble. The structure, which had been full of Palestinian refugees from Sabra and Shatila, had reportedly just been visited by ‘Arafat. At least one hundred people, probably more, were killed—most of them women and children.

Days later, my friend told me that immediately after the air attack, just as he got into his car, shaken but unhurt, a car bomb exploded nearby, presumably having been set to kill the rescuers who were helping families trying to find their loved ones in the rubble.

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. This paid for the myriad of US weapons systems and munitions deployed in Lebanon by Israel, from F-16 fighter-bombers to M-113 armored personnel carriers, 155mm and 175mm artillery, air-to-ground missiles, and cluster munitions.

It was understood by all that Israel was intentionally punishing civilians to alienate them from the Palestinians, but there was nevertheless much bitterness against the PLO as a result.

The consequences were not just the result of decisions by Sharon, Begin, and other Israeli leaders, or of the actions of Lebanese militias who were Israel’s allies. They were also the direct responsibility of the Reagan administration, which, under pressure from Israel, stubbornly refused to accept the need for any formal safeguards for civilians, rejected the provision of international guarantees, and blocked the long-term deployment of international forces that might have protected noncombatants.

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.42

Even after a public outcry over the deaths of so many Lebanese and Palestinians civilians, after the televised images of the bombardment of Beirut, after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, American support continued undiminished.

the United States supplied the lethal weapons-systems that killed thousands of civilians and that were manifestly not used in keeping with the exclusively defensive purposes mandated by American law.

The United States thereby stepped into a position similar to that played by Britain in the 1930s, helping to repress the Palestinians by force in the service of Zionist ends. 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.

They make a desert and call it peace. —Tacitus1

After a month of escalating unrest, in January 1988, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the security forces to use “force, might, and beatings.”3 His “iron fist” policy was carried out through the explicit practice of breaking the demonstrators’ arms and legs and cracking their skulls, as well as beating others who aroused the soldiers’ ire.

By 1976, however, alienation had intensified. Any expression of nationalism—flying the Palestinian flag, displaying the Palestinian colors, organizing trade unions, voicing support for the PLO or any other resistance organization—was severely suppressed, with fines, beatings, and jail. Detentions and imprisonment usually featured torture of detainees. Protesting the occupation publicly or in print could lead to the same result or even to deportation. More active resistance, especially that involving violence, invited collective punishment, house demolitions, imprisonment without trial under the rubric of “administrative detention” that could last for years, and even extrajudicial murder.

That year, mayoral candidates backed by the PLO won municipal elections in Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, and al-Bireh, as well as in other towns. A number of the mayors were deported in 1980, accused of incitement, and others were removed from office by the military occupation authorities in the spring of 1982, provoking widespread unrest.

The systematic brutality of the soldiers, most of them young draftees, toward the population they were charged with controlling was not only the result of frustration or even fear. Rabin’s orders to “break bones” set the tone, but the excessive violence was also rooted in constant societal anti-Palestinian indoctrination, grounded in the dogmatic idea that Israel would be overwhelmed by the Arabs if its security forces did not deter them by force, since their supposedly irrational hostility to Jews was otherwise uncontrollable.9

From the beginning of the First Intifada to the end of 1996—nine years, including six when the intifada was ongoing—Israeli troops and armed settlers killed 1,422 Palestinians, almost one every other day. Of them, 294, or over 20 percent, were minors sixteen and under. One hundred and seventy-five Israelis, 86 of them security personnel, were killed by Palestinians during the same period.11 That eight-to-one casualty ratio was typical, something one would not have known from much of the American media coverage.

Notably, Hamas, founded in 1987 (and initially discreetly supported by Israel with the objective of weakening the PLO19),

that there would be no independent Palestinian representation at a conference that aimed to determine the fate of Palestine.

entered on my first visit there after the Oslo Accords. With the new checkpoints and walls and the need for hard-to-obtain Israeli permits to pass through them, with Israel blocking free movement among the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and with the introduction of roads forbidden to Palestinian travel, the progressive constriction of Palestinian life, especially for Gazans, was underway.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes.

Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel.

The system created in Oslo and Washington was not just Israel’s venture. As in 1967 and 1982, Israel was joined by its indispensable sponsor, the United States. The Oslo straitjacket could not have been imposed on the Palestinians without American connivance. From Camp David back in 1978 on, the architecture of the negotiations, with its devious and infinitely flexible interim stage and deferral of Palestinian statehood, was not enforced primarily by Israel, even if the framework was dreamed up by Begin and carried forward by his heirs in both Israeli political blocs, Likud and Labor. It was the United States that provided the muscle behind the insistence that for the Palestinians this was the only possible negotiating path, leading to only one possible outcome. The United States was not just an accessory: it was Israel’s partner.

This partnership involved far more than simply acquiescence or consent on the part of every US administration from Carter until today. It has relied on American support on the political, diplomatic, military, and legal levels—the bountiful sums of money in aid, loans, and tax-free charitable donations given to support the settlements and the creeping absorption of Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem; and the copious flow of the world’s most advanced arms—to advance Israel’s colonization of the entirety of Palestine.

This post-Oslo confinement was most constricting in the Gaza Strip. In the decades following 1993, the strip was cut off from the rest of the world in stages, encircled by troops on land and the Israeli navy by sea.3 Entering and leaving required rarely issued permits and became possible only through massive fortified checkpoints resembling human cattle pens, while arbitrary Israeli closures frequently interrupted the shipment of goods in and out of the strip. The economic results of what was in effect a siege of the Gaza Strip were particularly damaging. Most Gazans depended on work in Israel or on exporting goods. With stringent restrictions on doing both, economic life underwent a slow strangulation.4

The ongoing war on Gaza, which included major Israeli ground offensives in 2008–9, 2012, and 2014, was combined with regular Israeli military incursions into Palestinian areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These involved arrests and assassinations, the demolition of homes, and the suppression of the population, all of which took place with the quiet collusion of the Fatah-run PA in Ramallah. These events confirmed that the PA was a body with no sovereignty and no real authority except that allowed it by Israel, as it collaborated in quashing protests in the West Bank while Israel pounded Gaza.

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

Yet even with the suicide bombings, with targeting civilians in violation of international law, and with the crude anti-Semitism of its charter, Hamas’s record paled next to the massive toll of Palestinian civilian casualties inflicted by Israel and its elaborate structures of legal discrimination and military rule. But it was Hamas that was stuck with the terrorist label, and the weight of the US law was applied to the Palestinian side of the conflict alone.

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.

The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.27

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.28 This does not mitigate Hamas’s violation of the rules of war by using these imprecise weapons for indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas. But the casualty toll tells a different story than the one that emerged from the near-total media focus on Hamas rocket fire. 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.

A retired American general described the Israeli bombardment—used to pound one Gaza neighborhood for over twenty-four hours, along with tank fire and attacks from the air—as “absolutely disproportionate.”

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.

These were not random occurrences, nor was this the regrettable collateral damage often lamented during a war. The weapons chosen were lethal, meant for employment on an open battlefield, not in a heavily populated urban environment. Moreover, the scale of the onslaught was entirely in keeping with Israeli military doctrine. The killing and mangling in 2014 of some 13,000 people, most of them civilians, and the destruction of the homes and property of hundreds of thousands, was intentional, the fruit of an explicit strategy adopted by the Israeli military at least since 2006, when it used such tactics in Lebanon.

Several years after the last of these wars on Gaza, it is clear that those responsible, protected by their American patrons, are likely to enjoy impunity for their actions.

Additionally, the Islamophobia, xenophobia, and aggressive view of America’s role in the world of much of the Republican base and party leadership matched the ethos of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government.

Indeed, this was on ample display in the rapturous reception Netanyahu received when he spoke before two different joint sessions of a Republican-dominated Congress, in 2011 and 2015. Only Winston Churchill, who addressed Congress in 1941, 1943, and 1952, had the honor of giving more than one such speech.

President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying, “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I don’t know that it will ever take place.”2 The center of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.

Regardless of its wavering, the United States, the great imperial power of the age, together with Great Britain before it, extended full backing to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel.

There is still a long way to go to change Americans’ consciousness of their nation’s history, let alone that of Palestine and Israel, in which the United States has played such a supportive role.

In reality, the Zionist movement and then the state of Israel always had the big battalions on their side, whether this was the British army before 1939, US and Soviet support in 1947–48, France and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, or the situation from the 1970s until today, where besides receiving unlimited US support, Israel’s armed might dwarfs that of the Palestinians, and indeed that of all the Arabs put together.

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.

For the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Germany, which cherish these values, even if they are often honored only in the breach, and are currently threatened by potent illiberal populist and authoritarian right-wing trends, this should be a serious matter, especially given that Israel is still dependent on the support of these Western countries.

The Trump administration exacerbated this economic stranglehold by cutting off US aid to the PA and to UNRWA. The US also continued to support Israel’s blockade of Gaza, aided by Egypt, with its disastrous effects on 1.8 million people.

Integrally linked to such an approach was Trump’s December 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the subsequent relocation of the US Embassy there. This move marked a revolutionary departure from over seventy years of US policy, going back to UNGA 181, whereby the status of the holy city was to remain undetermined pending a final resolution of the Palestine question to be mutually agreed by both sides.

As well as reversing decades of American policy, the Trump ensemble spurned an entire body of international law and consensus, UN Security Council decisions, world opinion, and of course Palestinian rights.

Indeed, what was most striking about this White House’s Middle East policy was that it had been effectively outsourced to Netanyahu and his allies in Israel and the United States.

But Trump’s people abandoned even the shabby old pretense at impartiality. With this plan, the United States ceased to be “Israel’s lawyer,” becoming instead the mouthpiece of the most extreme government in Israel’s history,