A review by heyimberbie
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

challenging dark informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

5.0

The only thing I have to say is Free Palestine. That’s it. Free Palestine immediately. Genocide is evil.

Especially after reading this book and seeing how Palestinians have been treated throughout history, I’m honestly just disgusted in how cruel this world can be.

And even though this was a book about different situations that have occurred over time and the way in which Palestinians have resisted the occupation, it also made me think about a lot of different situations that we see everyday not even relating to war or foreign policy, and I think it’s incredible that a book can describe things in such a way in which it’ll make readers question other things going on in life.

Like this book really made me look at how we consume media, and what we take from media, and how something so important can be so easily manipulated. For instance, representation and how a lack of proper representation can lead to harmful propaganda. The way Palestinians were hardly ever given a platform to speak through their own voices and anytime they were “given that opportunity” it always consisted of someone speaking over them instead and intentionally leaving certain key issues out; that blew my mind. And we see that all the time too, especially as readers. We see authors not doing research and including harmful representation into their books, and then the people being harmed by that bad rep are silenced, or they “can’t allow anyone to just read books for fun” because criticizing someone for perpetuating harm is too negative apparently.

And the way the United States has been complacent in all of this is absurd. Like America absolutely fails when it comes to foreign policy, but the way the government can literally see genocide and ethnic cleansing happening, yet they do nothing. They use our tax dollars to fund it. I’m disgusted. Like do any of these politicians have any kind of morals whatsoever? What happened to empathy and compassion? Were some people just not taught that in school and then they get a seat in office? And also like look at all of the celebrities that are just being complacent and can’t even post a simple “I don’t support genocide” on Instagram because that would mean they’d be using their platform for something that could be seen as “controversial” even though they’d be standing on the right side of history. The performative activism lately has been a tiring thing to experience and I can’t even imagine how Palestinians must feel having to see that.

I can’t even touch on every single thing that I learned from this book, it was honestly amazing. I think everyone should read this book and learn from it. I know a lot of people have said that they were bummed out because they went into this book thinking they were going to hear about what’s going on through a strict Palestinian perspective but instead they got a history lesson. Yes, I do agree that this book is mostly historical events leading up to the past few years and how the Palestinian people have been affected and their resistance to colonialism, but we do also get some of the emotional aspects as well. We get to see the author talking about how his pregnant wife was in danger when going to work, how his children are labeled as “terrorists” just for existing, or even how after moving away from war and destruction, his children were still affected and scared because they could still hear the constant sounds of tanks and military equipment; like we do get his emotional perspective in those areas when talking about people he knew and had relationships with. It’s incredibly sad just knowing that someone has had to go through those experiences and people are still going through that today.

PLEASE take the time to read this book, it’s so good, especially if you like history and want to know how things started.