I was very moved and learned a huge amount from this history that is grounded deeply in the Palestinian perspective. Khalidi is very open about where I was very moved and learned a huge amount from this history that is grounded deeply in the Palestinian perspective. Khalidi is very open about where he’s coming from; he says in the intro that this would be a personal as well as a historical account, and he includes specific anecdotes of both his own ancestors and his own family and career in various moments of the history of Palestine. I’m sure he gets accused of bias for this; my preference, however, is to understand all writers of history as biased, and to prefer those whose “biases” are out front rather than hiding behind a claim of objectivity. With that understanding, Khalidi struck me as credible. His accounts are backed up with loads of historical documentation, and he had firsthand experience of a lot of the major events in this conflict during the last 4 decades.
Some of the major themes Khalidi highlights that were especially illuminating to me:
- Zionism as an ideology and continuous movement: this is perhaps the most critical claim Khalidi makes; that Zionism, from its inception in the 1880s, has had the explicit goal of colonizing the entirety of Palestine, with the openly held aim of replacing its current inhabitants. It’s hard not to see this as a constant ongoing thread throughout this history. Khalidi points out that not all Israelis (much less all Jewish people) are Zionists; but it has been, fairly consistently, the ideology driving the Israeli government (and their international allies).
- The contrast between Zionist unity, foresight, and connection to powerful patrons among the world’s Great Powers, and Palestinians’ lack of cohesiveness, lack of resources, and reliance on unreliable, self-serving, or ineffective patrons. This is all deeply tied to the legacy of European colonialism, and the practice of drawing lines on maps from conference rooms in Europe that become flashpoints for ethnic and national conflict for generations to come.
- The problems with the hegemonic narrative of Israel as a beleaguered, isolated state, surrounded by aggressive enemies hellbent on its destruction. In fact, Israel has often been the aggressor, its military powers continually overwhelm all others in the region, and it has embraced an ongoing, purposeful tactic of disproportionate violence to maintain its military and political supremacy in the region. I’ve known for years that the death toll in these conflicts is heavily tilted, but I had not realized that this was basically a policy of the Israeli state, or understood the scope of it throughout the last century.
- The fundamental weaknesses in all attempted negotiated solutions. International talks about this land started from a place of not even recognizing Palestinians as a people; even as progress has been made on that front, negotiations brokered by the US have always been on Israel’s terms. So while Palestinians want to discuss the right of return, sovereignty, and equal rights, they are confined to discussing only matters like how to maintain security in the occupied territories. I found Khalidi’s analysis (some of which is based on his personal involvement in the peace talks preceding Oslo) to be convincing. No final negotiated settlement will be possible until actual Palestinian concerns are on the table. However, Israel is heavily incentivized not to have that process play out, so that their long-game of occupying/annexing the entire territory can continue in the unsettled limbo. The longer it’s unsettled, the more Israeli settlements can encroach in the West Bank, and the harder it will be to dislodge the expanding borders of the Israeli state.
I highly recommend this book. However, I’m also very interested to learn more about some things that are outside its scope. I want to find sources that give an inside look at the Zionist perspective to help me understand the internal moral justification of that ideology. I very much want to understand more about the anti-Zionist perspective among Israelis and diasporic Jewish people. And I would love an account that delves into the stories and humanity of Jewish migrants to Palestine in the context of the horrors of the Holocaust, to understand the emotional undercurrents of that era and how they reverberate in the Israeli public today.