The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance

by Rashid I. Khalidi

This conflict increasingly ran parallel to the larger global Cold War, but it had its own regional specificities. These included an ideological struggle not between communism and capitalism, but rather between the authoritarian Arab nationalism promoted by Egypt and the political Islam, centered on Wahhabism and absolute monarchy, that was purveyed by Saudi Arabia under King Faysal.

Thereafter, the PLO was trapped in a dilemma: how could it achieve Palestinian national aspirations through participation in a Middle East peace settlement when the internationally recognized terms for such a settlement, SC 242, negated these aspirations? It was a dilemma remarkably similar to that posed by the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate: in order to be recognized, the Palestinians were required to accept an international formula designed to negate their existence.

These objectives would change rapidly with shifting circumstances and the transformations of Palestinian politics after 1964. 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). This was meant to supersede the aims laid down in the National Charter, recognizing that Israeli Jews had acquired the right to live in Palestine and could not be made to leave. The change was also meant to refashion the PLO’s image and appeal to Israelis, who were treated by the 1964 National Charter as if they did not exist. The statement that Jews and Arabs living in Palestine were entitled to be equal citizens of the country represented a major evolution of the movement’s thinking. 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. Over time, this new objective came to be broadly accepted among Palestinians and was embodied in successive authoritative pronouncements of PLO policy via resolutions of the PNC. In the end, it superseded the charter and rendered it obsolete, yet these fundamental changes were resolutely ignored by the PLO’s opponents, who continued to harp on the charter’s original provisions for decades to come. The ch...

a heavily armed Israeli patrol, the soldiers in the jeep holding their weapons at the ready. They were fidgety and nervous, and in their faces I saw a quality I had noticed in the Israeli troops in occupied Beirut in 1982: they were afraid. Their vehicles moved at a snail’s pace through heavily populated built-up areas where the entire community loathed the occupation that the soldiers embodied and enforced. Soldiers of a regular army, no matter how heavily armed, will never feel secure in such circumstances. Rabin and others recognized the inherent problems that I saw on the streets of Nablus and Gaza. According to Itamar Rabinovich, Rabin’s biographer, close collaborator, and tennis partner, the First Intifada brought the veteran general to the realization that a political solution was necessary.12 Nonetheless, he held fast to the deterrent effect of brutality. “The use of force,” Rabin said, “including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces.”13 Maybe so, but this brutality did not put an end to the uprising.

(a fifth of the Palestinian population under occupation

The key point was always security for Israel, for its occupation and settlers, while offloading the cost and liability of subjugating the Palestinian population. More bluntly, as Rabin’s collaborator, Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, put it publicly in 1994, “Yasser ‘Arafat has a choice. He can be a Lahd or a super-Lahd.”59 Gazit’s reference was to Antoine Lahd, the Lebanese commander of the Israeli-armed, Israeli-paid, and Israeli-controlled South Lebanese Army, tasked with helping to maintain Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon from 1978 to 2000. With this revealing remark, Gazit confirmed the real objective of what he and his boss, Rabin, had put in place with Oslo.

This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass. —Edward Said1

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. With horrifying scenes of recurrent suicide bombings transmitting globally (and with this coverage eclipsing that of the much greater violence perpetrated against the Palestinians), Israelis ceased to be seen as oppressors, reverting to the more familiar role of victims of irrational, fanatical tormentors. The potent negative impact of the Second Intifada for the Palestinians and the effect of suicide bombings on Israeli opinion and politics certainly bear out the trenchant critique of the Palestinians’ employment of violence expressed by Eqbal Ahmad back in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, under the USA Patriot Act of 2001, “material support for terrorism” was so broadly defined in the Palestinian case that almost any contact with an organization associated with a group that was placed on the blacklist, as Hamas and the PFLP were, could be considered a serious criminal act involving heavy penalties. The demonization of the PLO over the decades since the 1960s was now repeated with Hamas.

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.

The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. 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 Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, July 2014. A retired American general described the Israeli bombardment as “absolutely disproportionate.” One might not have known this, however, from much of the mainstream US media coverage, which focused heavily on Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket fire at Israeli civilian targets. Certainly, the use of these weapons obliged the Israeli population in the south of the country to spend long periods of time in bomb shelters. However, thanks to Israel’s excellent early warning system, its state-of-the-art American-supplied anti-missile capabilities, and its network of shelters, the rockets were very rarely lethal. 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 t...

On July 19–20, 2014, elements of the elite Golani, Givati, and paratrooper brigades launched an assault along three axes into the Shuja‘iyya district of Gaza City. The Golani brigade in particular met fierce and unexpected resistance that resulted in the death of thirteen Israeli soldiers and perhaps one hundred wounded. According to American military sources, eleven Israeli artillery battalions, employing at least 258 of these 155mm and 175mm guns, fired over 7,000 shells into this single neighborhood over a period of twenty-four hours. This included 4,800 shells during one seven-hour period. A senior Pentagon officer “with access to the daily briefings” called the scale of firepower “massive” and “deadly,” noting that the US army would normally use so “huge” an amount of shellfire in support of two entire divisions comprising 40,000 troops (perhaps ten times the size of the Israeli force engaged in Shuja‘iyya). Another, a former American artillery commander, estimated that the US military would employ that number of guns only in support of an army corps of several divisions. 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.”32 The artillery pieces that were used in this assault are designed for lethal area fire over a wide radius against fortifications, armored vehicles, and dug-in troops protected by body armor and hel...

The Dahiya doctrine, as it is called, is named for the southern suburb of Beirut—al-Dahiya—which was destroyed by Israel’s air force using 2,000-pound bombs and other ordnance. This strategy was explained in 2008 by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, then head of Northern Command (and thereafter Israeli chief of staff): What happened in the Dahiya quarter . . . will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. . . . We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. . . . This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.34 This was precisely the thinking in 2014 behind Israel’s third attack on Gaza in a period of six years, according to Israeli military correspondents and security analysts.35 Yet there was little mention of the Dahiya doctrine in statements by US politicians or in the reporting on the war by most of the mainstream American media, even though it is in fact less of a strategic approach than a blueprint for collective punishment, which entails probable war crimes. There are a number of reasons for the silence of Washington and the media. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 specifies that American-supplied weapons must be used “for legitimate self-defense.”36 Given this provision, the line offered by US officials from the president down—describing Israel’s operations in Gaza as self-defense—may be the product of legal advic...

With the incessant fundraising that is the central concern of American politicians, and the rightward turn of the Democrats in the late 1980s, the party became more favorable and attractive to moneyed interests. As a result, the views of donors have been more important to the party’s leaders and elected officials than those of the party’s base or of its voters.

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.

Establishing the colonial nature of the conflict has proven exceedingly hard given the biblical dimension of Zionism, which casts the new arrivals as indigenous and as the historic proprietors of the land they colonized. In this light, the original population of Palestine appears extraneous to the post-Holocaust resurgence of a Jewish nation-state with its roots in the kingdom of David and Solomon: they are no more than undesirable interlopers in this uplifting scenario. 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. Similarly, the terms “settler” and “pioneer” have positive connotations in American history, arising from the heroic tale of the conquest of the West at the expense of its indigenous population as projected in movies, literature, and television. Indeed, there are striking parallels between these portrayals of the resistance of Native Americans to their dispossession and that of the Palestinians. Both groups are cast as backward and uncivilized, a violent, murderous, and irrational obstacle to progress and modernity. While many Americans have begun to contest thi...

Within Israel, certain important rights are reserved exclusively for Jewish citizens and denied to the 20 percent of citizens who are Palestinian. 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,”7 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.

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, downgrading the status of Arabic, and declaring Jewish settlement a “national value” with precedence over other needs.

By embracing its illiberal and discriminatory essence, modern Zionism is increasingly in contradiction with the ideals, particularly that of equality, on which Western democracies are based. 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.

Finally, uprooting the systemic inequality inherent in Zionism is crucial to creating a better future for both peoples, Palestinians and Israelis. Any formula advanced as a resolution of the conflict will necessarily and inevitably fail if it is not squarely based on the principle of equality. Absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights must be enshrined in whatever future scheme is ultimately accepted by the two societies. This is a high-sounding recommendation, but nothing else will address the core of the problem, nor will it be sustainable and lasting. This leaves the thorny issue of how to wean Israelis from their attachment to inequality, which is often coded as and justified by a need for security.

This perceived need is to a large extent rooted in a real history of insecurity and persecution, but in response to this past trauma, generations have now been brought up on a reflexive dogma of aggressive...

Palestinians, too, need weaning from a pernicious delusion—rooted in the colonial nature of their encounter with Zionism and in its denial of Palestinian peoplehood—that Jewish Israelis are not a “real” people and that they do not have national rights. While it is true that Zionism has transmuted the Jewish religion and the historic peoplehood of the Jews into something quite different—a modern nationalism—this does not erase the fact that Israeli Jews today consider themselves a people with a sense of national belonging in Palestine, what they think of as the Land of Israel, no matter how this transmutation came about.

their national goals are defined as an end to occupation and reversing the colonization of Palestinian land; establishing a Palestinian state in the remaining 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital; the return to their ancestral homeland of that half of the Palestinian people who are currently living in exile; or creating a democratic, sovereign binational state in all of Palestine with equal rights for all, or some combination or permutation of these options.