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

by Rashid I. Khalidi

We are a nation threatened by disappearance. —‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa, Filastin, May 7, 1914

he concluded with a heartfelt plea, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

Herzl’s thinking and his reply to Yusuf Diya appear to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine. 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.

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 idea that the Palestinians simply do not exist, or even worse, are the malicious invention of those who wish Israel ill, is supported by such fraudulent books as Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, now universally considered by scholars to be completely without merit. (On publication in 1984, however, it received a rapturous reception and it is still in print and selling discouragingly well.)22 Such literature, both pseudo-scholarly and popular, is largely based on European travelers’ accounts, on those of new Zionist immigrants, or on British Mandatory sources. It is often produced by people who know nothing about the indigenous society and its history and have disdain for it, or who worse yet have an agenda that depends on its invisibility or disappearance. Rarely utilizing sources produced from within Palestinian society, these representations essentially repeat the perspective, the ignorance, and the biases, tinged by European arrogance, of outsiders.

There was no escaping the fact that Zionism initially had clung tightly to the British Empire for support, and had only successfully implanted itself in Palestine thanks to the unceasing efforts of British imperialism.

The implicit meaning of the message was that were the Palestinians to succeed in escaping the British yoke, they did not want to come under that of Jordan (which, given pervasive British influence in Amman, meant much the same thing). They aspired to control their own fate.

It happened that my father’s meeting with the king had coincided with the assembly’s historic vote on November 29, 1947, on Resolution 181, which provided for partition. Before stalking out of the room, the king turned to my father and said coldly, “You Palestinians have refused my offer. You deserve what happens to you.” 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.

The end of the world war brought a new phase of the colonial assault on Palestine, launched by the arrival in the Middle East of two great powers that had previously played small regional roles: the United States and the USSR. An empire that had never fully acknowledged its colonial nature and whose domain had been restricted to the Americas and the Pacific, after Pearl Harbor the United States suddenly became not just a global power but the preeminent one. Starting in 1942, American ships, troops, and bases arrived in North Africa, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They have not left the Middle East since.

For the first time, the Zionist movement openly called for turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state: the exact demand was that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth.” As with the “national home,” this was another circumlocution for full Jewish control over the entirety of Palestine, a country with a two-thirds Arab majority.10

Albert Hourani (later to become perhaps the greatest historian of the modern Middle East),

When Palestinian envoys had managed to meet with foreign officials, whether in London or Geneva, they were condescendingly told that they had no official standing, and that their meetings were therefore private rather than official.18 The comparison with the Irish, the only people to succeed in (partially) freeing themselves of colonial rule between World Wars I and II, is striking. In spite of divisions in their ranks, their clandestine parliament, the Dail Eirann, their nascent branches of government, and their centralized military forces ultimately out-administered and outfought the British.19

The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or dwellings which are undefended is prohibited. —Article 25, Annex to the Hague Convention, July 29, 18991 You are afraid to tell our readers and those who might complain to you that the Israelis are capable of indiscriminately shelling an entire city. —New York Times Beirut Bureau Chief Thomas Friedman to his editors

By 1982, Beirutis had lived through many years of war. They were used to the sound of explosions and had learned from experience to distinguish among them.

On that Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed and flattened dozens of buildings, including a sports stadium near the Fakhani neighborhood, on the pretext that they housed PLO offices and facilities. The intense bombardment of targets in Beirut and the south of Lebanon that continued into the next day were the prelude to a massive ground assault starting on June 6, which ultimately led to Israel’s occupation of much of

Nearly fifty thousand people were killed or wounded in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon, while the siege constituted the most serious attack by a regular army on an Arab capital since World War II. It was not to be equaled until the US occupation of Baghdad in 2003.

The invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent lengthy occupation of the southern part of the country—which ended only in 2000—involved Israel’s third-highest military casualty toll among the six major wars in its seventy-plus-year history.7

Warnings of Israeli war preparations had reached Lebanese and Palestinian leaders, the media, and others. One of these warnings was delivered in a spring 1982 briefing for researchers that I attended at the Institute for Palestine Studies. It was delivered by Dr. Yevgeny Primakov, who was director of the Soviet Oriental Institute and reputed to be a senior officer of the KGB. Primakov was blunt: Israel would soon attack Lebanon, the United States would support it fully, and the USSR did not have the capability to prevent the attack or to protect its Lebanese and Palestinian allies. Moscow, he said, would be hard pressed to prevent the war from extending to Syria or to preserve its main regional ally, the Syrian regime. We were told that he had said much the same things to the PLO leadership.11 So none of us should have been surprised when the war started with the bombing of Beirut on June 4, 1982, although the scope and scale of what followed was much greater than I and others expected.

Although his editors at the New York Times removed the offending word from his article, reporter Thomas Friedman at one point described the Israeli bombardment as “indiscriminate.”14 He was referring specifically to the sporadic shelling of neighborhoods like the area around the Commodore Hotel, where he and most journalists were staying, and which certainly contained nothing whatsoever of military interest.15 The only possible objective of such blanket bombardment was to terrorize the population of Beirut and turn it against the PLO.

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.24 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. Such car bombs—a weapon of choice for the Israeli forces besieging Beirut, and one of their most terrifying instruments of death

and destruction—were described by one Mossad officer as “killing for killing’s sake.”

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.

Beyond the intertwined roles of Israel and the United States, one of the shabbiest and most shameful subsidiary aspects of the war was the capitulation of the leading Arab regimes to American pressure. Their governments loudly proclaimed their support for the Palestinian cause, but did nothing to back the PLO as it stood alone, but for its Lebanese allies, against Israel’s military onslaught, and as an Arab capital was besieged, bombarded, and occupied.

This was notably true of Syria and Saudi Arabia, which had been chosen by the Arab League to represent the Arab position on a mission to Washington during the summer of 1982. Such Arab governmental opposition as there was to the war was cheaply bought off with flimsy American promises to issue a brand-new US–Middle East diplomatic initiative, eventually unveiled on September 1 and later dubbed the Reagan Plan. The initiative would have placed a limit on Israeli settlements and created an autonomous Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but it ruled out a sovereign Palestinian state in these territories. The Reagan Plan, which the United States never forcefully promoted and which was effortlessly torpedoed by the Begin government, ultimately went nowhere.

was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”