Will I love The Hundred Years' War on Palestine?

This book provided important historical grounding on the current Israeli war on Gaza. It demonstrated the throughlines in Israeli Settler Colonialism and the heavy price Palestinians have paid. This book shows that the current crisis is part of a longer attack on Palestinians.

This is a political history of the indigenous people of Palestine during the last 100 years, before and after the establishment of Israel. It is related by a member of a prominent and cultured Palestinian family, Rashid Khalidi, who is a distinguished academic, being the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. Khalidi presents the recent history of Palestine from a Palestinian viewpoint. It is painful but illuminating reading.

From the British decision to grant Israel a homeland for the Jewish people to the struggle of Palestinians against colonial occupiers to their failure to evict them or convince the world of their rights to conflict within their ranks to the possible ways forward, the book tells the story of Palestine. While told from a Palestinian point of view, Khalidi does a great job of retaining objectivity and not giving in to the rhetoric. It captures the key events and their impact on the conflict. It's an informative account of a problem the world is not paying adequate attention to.

A powerful personal and political history that is crucial for understanding this political moment. I knew Rashid Khalidi is a key scholar on the history of Palestine, but I had no idea how much his own life and family's history is intertwined with the history of Palestine.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory.

Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.

He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration… show more.

According to one reviewer Rashid Khalidi’s recently published book is "the first true people’s history of the hundred-year struggle of the Palestinian people." The narrative begins with the British Mandate facilitating the deprivation of their land from the original inhabitants of Palestine. Skillful manipulation of the world powers and the UN by Zionists, and woeful disorganization among the Palestine notables and still partly colonized Arab states help to produce the continuing Palestinian tragedy.