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A review by kylegarvey
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
informative
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Palestine has always been, during my life and well before, a hugely tortuous, heaving, nasty imperial issue. Intractably complicated, many say and many have said; but I've always resisted this. By being dumb and still grasping the right conclusion somehow sure, lol, if you agree with me, but also because complexity can mask a 'oh, might as well' passive acceptance of Israel's huge, psycho, warped, anti-human, anti-democratic injustices.
Stitching Palestine, a little documentary I saw and liked ok, I think shows a big problem in how Palestine's presented to Western naïves like me sometimes: masculine/individual toward Israel and feminine/collective toward Palestine. Great big history then toward Israel too, no? Sympathies kneejerk. Holocaust payment, grave, the import.
And a mid-'90s TV show I recall watching sometimes, Nickelodeon GUTS, had a spin-off its final season, Global GUTS, that accidentally proved quite formative for Israel legitimacy. By the way! The contestants from that country looked familiar to me with stupid blue and white flag, drab bowl cuts, khaki pants, etc.: so Israel's a legitimate country, had natives, a language, a flag? Oh. Legitimacy. A flag.
Khalidi's Hundred Years' War -- while very well researched, tight, that's all too clear -- accidentally falls victim to some of these same problems, I believe. A grave abuse, epic sadistic catastrophe, huge awful theft need not necessarily have 100% convincing presentation, though, one can hope? To be relatively corrected, dues paid, apologies said, whatever; I am just a stupid bystander, I don't know anything.
So explore the century of turmoil, in epic and frustrating detail. I mean frustrating because of the content and not because of the form, obviously; but histories are well-versed in that mistake especially, no?
First, Khalidi's digressions to his own family, rare but enjoyable, are among my favorite parts. Typical, for history-abusing naïf like me. "The shining golden Dome of the Rock was just over three hundred feet away on the Haram al-Sharif. Beyond it lay the smaller silver-gray cupola of the al-Aqsa Mosque, with the Mount of Olives in the background" (8). General history recounting is powerful too: "Britain did not rule Palestine outright; it did so as a mandatory power of the League of Nations. It was therefore bound not just by the Balfour Declaration but also by the international commitment embodied in the 1922 Mandate" (71).
City-by-city specifying is a strength of the book in a similar way. "In the rapidly growing coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa in particular, change was more visible than in the more conservative inland towns such as Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron, as the former witnessed the appearance of a nascent commercial bourgeoisie and an embryonic urban working class" (28). We don't always need to defend against Zionist Israel, except when we do (lol?) which is always?
And -- in modest success way, not that I'd know about that way -- we can catalog some of Arab liberators' mistakes: "Because it was a just cause, he did not build a fighting force in the modern sense.… I think part of it was that he feared a big organization, he felt that he could not control a big organization. He could control an entourage, people to whom he whispered and who’d whisper to him" (88) and furthermore "Much in this acute analysis of the patriarchal nature of the mufti’s approach applied to the entire generation of men of his class born during the late Ottoman era who dominated the Palestinian leadership, and for that matter politics in most of the Arab world" (89).
I appreciate the candor, here and everywhere, I do, and other things as well. Everyone appreciates things.
Political digressions are far more common than the family ones i tend to prefer: "Saudi Arabia never rocked the boat where the close American-Israeli relationship was concerned. Indeed, it was seen by the Saudi royal family as completely compatible with the intimate American-Saudi connection that went back to the first oil exploration and exploitation deal of 1933" (105). But the explanation is much more incisive, powerful, politically welcome?
Soon, for Americans, it looked like Zionism "became a political football exploited at will by opportunistic politicians, as each sought to outbid the other in proclaiming their devotion to it" (114). I am not a politician, that's all too clear [he proclaims again and again and again and again, etc.]
Not a touch of unrealistic optimism we have at the end, then, but shades of interesting hope instead -- "As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it 'won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue'. This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other" (307).
And Khalidi even manages somewhat a hopeful, relatively optimistic note at the end, even in spite of the hundreds of pages of miserable frustration, representing a century of filthy pain, that precedes his history: "Inequality is so crucial not only because it is anathema to the egalitarian, democratic societies that the Zionist project has primarily relied on for its support, but because equality of rights is key to a just, lasting resolution of the entire problem" (310).
And furthermore "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" (312); but wait sir please don't be so quick with that democracy part of 'Western democracies', lmao, as the AIPAC-glutted part of MAGA conservatives want to get America out of that 'choice' now anyway, soon?