Rashid Khalidi is the Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. His family is from Palestine and he has written many books on the subject of Arab-Israeli relations.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine covers some very thorny issues, so I'm a bit unsure of how to synopsize it properly. I'm also not that well-versed in the present and historical contexts involved, and I have to say that I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to modern Arab history. I'm fairly solid up to the establishment of the first Caliphate, but after that my knowledge of the time periods discussed veers away from the Middle East. I've read the Quran in English translation, and like anybody else I've watched the news, but I had to take many of the finer points discussed in this book on faith.
To make a decades-long story short, around the end of World War 1 Britain collaborated with members of the Jewish diaspora to create what would eventually become the state of Israel. This new state was at the outset a colonial venture, in that most of the Jews settling in the new state had only a tenuous, religious and/or historical connection to the land to which they were relocating, and their settlement in what was then Palestine took place with little consideration for the Arab population that was already living there.
As years passed attitudes hardened. The new Israeli government took an increasingly hard line with their Palestinian neighbors, and an ever larger number of these Palestinians were displaced to settlement camps in the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere. The Israelis, possessing one of the the world's largest military forces, pursued military methods in their treatment of the Palestinians, with the result that uprisings and acts of terrorism became the Palestinian's only recourse with regard to voicing grievances against the expansive, ethnic nationalist policy put into action on the Israeli side.
Fast forward to 2025, and now Israel is contending with Hamas, a spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt. Radicalized Palestinians, stripped of their land through a multitude of illegal maneuvers, have less and less to lose as the nation of Israel attempts to grind them into nonexistence, and the Israelis, for their part, have less and less reason to engage in negotiations with a hostile group on the other side of their borders.
Both sides, in other words, have backed or been backed into corners, and opening dialogues between them has been a problem for Israel, Palestine and the rest of the world for as long as most living can remember.
All of the above, I should state, accords with the author's point of view. There may well be an Israeli side to this argument, but I haven't read it yet. I will say that Rashid Khalidi's account is extremely well-researched and extremely well-informed, and I could find no fault with it in terms of my own understanding of the region. It was a little too anecdotal for my taste, but I can't fault the author's scholarship and his grasp of large, complicated issues.
I suppose I have some further reading to do. Perhaps I can grab a book on this topic from an Israeli source next time.
I'll tell you one thing though, the photographs in this book will make you grateful for whatever you have and however long you've had it. Gazing at pictures of what the Israeli army has done to the West Bank will really put things in perspective. Got a flat tire today? Spilled some coffee on your new pants? Don't worry about it -- at least you didn't have to climb over rubble to get to work this morning.
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