“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.”
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p. 241
I just finished reading Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and I want to share a few thoughts about the book.
Rashid Khalidi, 1999. Photograph by Bruce Powell. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-10227, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Original photograph.
Understanding the conflict through settler colonialism
What I particularly like is the main perspective from which Khalidi analyses the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. His central argument is that the conflict should be understood as one of settler colonialism, with the Zionist movement, and later Israel, as the colonising power and the Palestinians as the colonised people. Having read this book and others, and listened to numerous debates on the subject, I find it increasingly difficult to argue against this perspective.
One common counterargument from the pro-Israel camp is that the land fundamentally belongs to the Jews because it is their ancestral homeland or because it was promised to them by God. The religious justification is, in my view, completely absurd in the context of modern international law. The ancestral argument is also problematic. I don’t dispute the historical Jewish connection to the land, but how far back in history must we go to determine who has a legitimate claim to a particular territory? Such arguments seem rather arbitrary to me. What is not arbitrary is that when the Zionist movement began encouraging large-scale Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, particularly after World War I, there was already an indigenous population living there, predominantly Palestinian Arabs. Whatever historical connections another people might have to that territory, these cannot simply override the rights of those already living there.
Another common argument is that there was no Palestinian state, no Palestinian nation, or sometimes even that the Palestinian people did not exist as a distinct people. I find this argument equally unconvincing. There was clearly an indigenous population in Palestine, with its own communities, traditions and social institutions, as well as an emerging Palestinian national identity alongside a broader Arab identity. And even if Palestinian national identity developed relatively recently, so what? Modern national identities and nation-states are historical and political constructions. Israel itself is a modern state. The fact that a particular national identity did not exist in its present form centuries ago does not make it illegitimate.
Consider European colonisation of North America. Indigenous peoples did not necessarily organise themselves into nation-states in the modern European sense, but that hardly gave European settlers the right to take their land, displace them or dominate them. The same principle applies to Palestine. The absence of an independent Palestinian nation-state before the arrival of the Zionist movement does not somehow invalidate the rights of the people who lived there.
Another crucial point supporting the colonial perspective is that several leading Zionists openly contemplated the exclusion, displacement or domination of the indigenous Palestinian population to make a Jewish state possible. Khalidi documents this extensively. Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of political Zionism, wrote in his diary in 1895 about the need to discreetly expropriate property and move the poorer population across the border. Similarly, Chaim Weizmann, who would later become Israel’s first president, described in 1914 how early Zionists had conceived of Palestine as “a country without a people”. Although this was not necessarily intended as a literal demographic description, it illustrates how easily the existing population could be disregarded in Zionist thinking.
Of course, Zionism was never a completely uniform movement, and there were disagreements among Zionists about how to approach the Arab population and what kind of political arrangement should emerge. But the fact remains that influential figures within the movement advocated policies that would exclude or subordinate the indigenous population. In the decades leading up to 1948, Jewish settlement and land acquisition, accompanied by exclusionary policies, contributed to growing tensions, eventually culminating in the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 war. The British Empire played a crucial role in facilitating the Zionist project, particularly through the Balfour Declaration and its subsequent administration of Palestine. This is one of Khalidi’s central arguments: the colonisation of Palestine was not simply the work of the Zionist movement acting alone, but was supported by some of the most powerful states in the world.
What happened before May 1948
Something else I learned from the book, which somewhat surprised me, was the scale of violence and displacement inflicted upon Palestinians just before Israel declared independence in May 1948 and the neighbouring Arab states entered the war. After the UN partition resolution of November 1947, armed conflict broke out between Jewish and Arab communities in Mandatory Palestine, with attacks by armed groups on both sides. In the spring of 1948, Zionist forces launched major offensives and captured numerous Palestinian towns and villages. Khalidi connects these operations to Plan Dalet (Plan D), adopted by the Haganah in March 1948, and describes the resulting campaign as one of conquest and depopulation. Historians disagree about whether Plan Dalet itself constituted a comprehensive plan for expulsion, but the military offensives and large-scale Palestinian displacement are well documented.
Khalidi provides a striking chronology: Tiberias fell on 18 April, Haifa on 23 April, Safad on 10 May, and Beisan (Beit She’an) on 11 May 1948. Arab neighbourhoods of West Jerusalem and many other towns and villages were also depopulated. Jaffa was besieged and heavily bombarded in late April and surrendered on 13 May, after most of its roughly 60,000 Arab residents had fled or been displaced. This is especially significant because the UN partition plan had designated Jaffa as part of the proposed Arab state. The massacre at Deir Yassin on 9 April, carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups, also spread fear among Palestinian communities. According to Khalidi, approximately 300,000 Palestinians had already been displaced by Israel’s declaration of independence on 14 May — before the neighbouring Arab states entered the war.
I find this particularly important because of another familiar narrative, often presented by supporters of Israel: that the United Nations established a Jewish state through General Assembly Resolution 181, that the Arab states refused to accept it, and that they subsequently attacked the newly created Israel. The implication is that Israel was simply an innocent victim defending itself against hostile neighbours. But this is a remarkably selective account of what happened. First of all, Resolution 181 recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state; it did not itself establish Israel. More importantly, this narrative largely ignores the preceding decades of Zionist settlement, the political and territorial transformation of Palestine, and the displacement of Palestinians that was already taking place before the Arab armies intervened. There had indeed been violence on both sides during the civil war that began in late 1947, including attacks by Arab armed groups against Jewish communities. But that does not change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already lost their homes before the interstate war began. The Nakba did not simply begin as a consequence of the invasion by neighbouring Arab states. It was already well under way. Leaving this out gives a deeply misleading impression of the historical sequence of events.
These are, to me, some of the strongest reasons for understanding the conflict through the lens of settler colonialism. It is not about denying Jewish historical connections to the land, nor about denying the persecution of Jews in Europe, which helped give rise to Zionism. It is about recognising that the creation of a Jewish homeland and eventually a Jewish state took place in a territory already inhabited by another people, whose rights, aspirations and political independence were repeatedly disregarded.
This history of displacement before May 1948 also brings to mind a striking passage by Benny Morris, an Israeli historian associated with the “New Historians”, who challenged established accounts of the 1948 war by examining archival evidence. In the conclusion to The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris writes:
“But the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise. The piecemeal eviction of tenant farmers, albeit in relatively small numbers, during the first five decades of Zionist land purchase and settlement naturally stemmed from, and in a sense hinted at, the underlying thrust of the ideology, which was to turn an Arab-populated land into a State with an overwhelming Jewish majority. And the Zionist leaders’ thinking about, and periodic endorsement of, ‘transfer’ during those decades – voluntary and agreed, if possible, but coerced if not – readied hearts and minds for the denouement of 1948 and its immediate aftermath, in which some 700,000 Arabs were displaced from their homes (though the majority remained in Palestine).”
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), Conclusion, p. 588.
What surprises me about this passage is that Morris is an Israeli Jewish historian whom I have watched in contemporary debates defending Israel very strongly—sometimes, in my view, with considerable bias. Yet here he acknowledges something deeply uncomfortable for the conventional pro-Israel narrative: that the displacement of Palestinians was not merely an unforeseen consequence of the 1948 war, but was connected to Zionism’s aim of creating an overwhelmingly Jewish state in a land already populated predominantly by Arabs. This strikes me as a remarkably critical, almost colonial framing of Zionism, especially coming from Morris. Of course, he does not embrace all of Khalidi’s interpretation, and he rejects the idea that there was a single, agreed Zionist plan for mass expulsion before the war. Nevertheless, I find his acknowledgment striking.
Khalidi’s criticism of Palestinian leadership
Another thing I appreciate about Khalidi’s book is that, despite its strong focus on the plight of the Palestinians, which I think is entirely justified, it does not shy away from criticising Palestinian political leadership. Khalidi is critical of the PLO and its many strategic failures, but he also criticises Hamas and other Palestinian groups for their violent tactics, particularly attacks against civilians. Beyond the obvious moral and legal problems with such tactics, Khalidi argues that they have often been strategically counterproductive. Rather than advancing the Palestinian cause, attacks on Israeli civilians have tended to strengthen hard-line political forces within Israel, unite Israeli society against the Palestinians and undermine international sympathy for their struggle. In other words, these tactics have often weakened the very cause they were supposedly intended to advance.
I think this is an important dimension of the book. One can recognise the profound injustices inflicted upon the Palestinians while also being critical of how their political leaders and armed movements have responded to those injustices.
One reservation about the book
One limitation of the book, for me, is that Khalidi gives relatively little space to the experiences of Jewish communities and Israelis, including the violence and attacks against Jewish civilians before, during and after the 1947–48 civil war. I would have liked to hear more of those voices, and to understand more fully the fear and insecurity that such experiences produced. They are an important part of the history, even if they do not, in my view, invalidate Khalidi’s central argument.
At the same time, I understand why Khalidi made this choice. His purpose is precisely to tell the history from a Palestinian perspective, one that has often been marginalised or overshadowed in mainstream Western accounts of the conflict. However, it would be inaccurate to say Palestinians had no voice at all; Palestinian historians, writers and political figures have been telling their stories for decades. But those accounts have often received far less international attention than Israeli narratives. So I appreciate the book’s deliberate focus. Still, I think giving somewhat more attention to the suffering of Jewish civilians, and how it shaped Israeli attitudes, would have made an already valuable book more complete.
Sources
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (2020); Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure”; and UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Conclusion, p. 588. Historical photographs: Matson Collection, Library of Congress, linked in captions above.
