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

by Rashid I. Khalidi

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.