The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is Mandatory Reading: A Review of Our Complicity

21st Century Solidarity Assessment

Note: The assessment is intended for those who come from decolonized nations. Descendants of colonizing nations require a passing grade on the 21st Century Moral Guilt Assessment to be eligible to take this exam.

Prompt: You are in a room with two people, A and B. For a reason unbeknownst to you, A attacks B. What should you do? What would you do? 

Sample Response:

This assessment tests our ability to identify the who (we should stand in solidarity with) and the how (we should demonstrate our solidarity). Answering the prompt is not as simple as analyzing three people in a room—A, B, and me are not individuals but social and political systems that nurture individuals’ behaviors—but there are enough moral parallels for this situation to guide our response. Every oppressive system has the oppressors (A), the oppressed (B), and the neither (me/you/us). The oppressors enforce the system, the oppressed resist against the system, and the neithers are “unaffected” by the system or do not actively enforce or resist the system. So, to answer the ultimate 21st Century Solidarity Assessment unfolding on our phone screens, we have to ask ourselves: what should we do about Palestine as neithers? 

We first have to acknowledge there is no such thing as a ‘neither’ because oppression leaves no room for innocent bystanders. Every nation that abstains from voting for Palestinian sovereignty and dignity implicitly condones the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the brutalization of the West Bank. Systemic sociopolitical change requires active participation from every single one of us, so step one is making the conscious decision to resist the oppressing force. 

The next and most important step in this Solidarity assessment is to understand why A is attacking B. If you cry at the footage of parents cradling their murdered children, then you must learn about the 100 years of ethnic cleansing that preceded the Israeli siege on Gaza; if you feel this urge to preserve human life and dignity or the familiar anger when paternalistic white people brutalize already colonized people (there is a ⅘ chance you come from a formerly colonized country); if you want to take effective, infomed action, then The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is mandatory reading. 

In less than 300 pages, Rashid Khalidi intricately weaves the history of a hundred years of war on Palestine. He is intentional in his approach, opting not to write a “comprehensive survey of Palestinian history,” rather focusing on “six turning points in the struggle over Palestine.” Thus, in six dense chapters, he provides readers with the most crucial information to understanding the struggle for Palestinian freedom as it stands today. Each time frame is labeled by the first, second, third… Declaration of War, through which he deconstructs the conflict through the lens of organized resistance, diplomacy, and public policy. 

Khalidi opens with the British-Ottoman conflict during the First World War, taking us through the Palestinian Mandate. The Second, Third, and Fourth Declarations concern the post-World War II Cold War proxy battleground in the Middle East, the 1967 June War, and the 1982 Israeli siege on Lebanon. Most relevant to the ‘diplomatic’ aspect dominating the news is the Fifth Declaration where Khalidi gives a play-by-play of the Olympic-gold-winning diplomatic gymnastics routine of the American and Israeli administrations; from 1987 to 1995, American and Israeli diplomats sidelined Palestinian diplomats and signed a peace accords that notably did not feature the voices of those who needed peace the most. Khalidi wraps up with the Sixth Declaration of war and the most relevant to the humanitarian aspect of Palestine—the Israeli siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip.

One of the most compelling reasons to read this book is because Khalidi writes how he lived—first as the American-born child of Ismail Khalidi, Palestinian senior political affairs officer for the United Nations Department of Political Affairs. Then, as a professor of various designations in Lebanon and the US, he spent his time involved in writing about the politics of Palestine. Through this combination of extensive academia and experience on the front lines of diplomacy, Khalidi pinpoints the precise incentives, individuals, and initiatives in the tug-of-war for Palestinian self-determination. It is a level of specificity that can only be told by someone who lived the peace talks and drafted the very plans—the Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority in 1992—that could have guaranteed effective political independence for Palestine but were systematically dismantled by the Israeli and American administrations. 

Khalidi leverages his proximity to Palestine, not just to condemn the underhanded efforts of generations of Israeli and American governments to stifle and dismantle Palestinian resistance, but to also scathingly criticize the self-interested “allies” and representatives of Palestine. He doesn’t hesitate to call out the King of Jordan’s land-hungry betrayal of Palestine in 1947, nor the self-aggrandizing martyrdom of PLO founder Yasser Arafat that rendered him a dead-in-the-water leader long before he passed away. 

Khalidi’s level-headedness is admirable considering his proximity to Palestine. He doesn’t moralize, but he also doesn’t take the time to reassure the reader that “Israel has the right to exist and defend itself” as so much of American media does. He focuses instead on the failures and almost successes of Palestine by and for Palestinians. 

It is the kind of historical reflection that will make you exclaim “Oh, shit!” in public, and it could not have been achieved without his unfaltering dedication to evidence. He draws on his family’s history, personal testimonials, and a century of familial archival material to underpin his investigation of the Palestinian struggle. The book features scanned pages of historical correspondence from Khalidi’s familial and intellectual forefathers that clarifies beyond a shadow of a doubt that the calls for freedom, self-determination, and dignity a hundred years ago were as clear as they are now. 

Part of this evidence includes photographs from those of his family in Palestine generations ago, to stills of failed diplomatic interventions, to those of the author himself on the front lines of public policy and outreach. We see journalists, scholars, and diplomats in press rooms and in the United Nations Security Council; we see apartment buildings (civilian infrastructure) half demolished by weapons of mass destruction that should exist only in fiction stories; we see living, breathing people that Khalidi points out by name and friendship or collegiality. Through documents and photos, alongside consistent, thorough, and reliable citations, Khalidi tells a historically stifled story that is nearly impossible to disbelieve. 

The implications of this evidence are clear: the Israeli siege on Gaza may be the first live-streamed genocide, but Khalidi’s meticulous work proves that the world did not lack documentation to hold Israel accountable for its crimes before October 7th. Understanding the historical precedent for peace efforts in Palestine is necessary to understand the current siege on Gaza, to inform future efforts to resist the system, and to answer the 21st Century Solidarity Assessment head-on. That should be more than enough motivation for every neither to read this book. 

We have a moral imperative to direct all of our attention to Palestine, not because other conflicts are less important—all human rights violations are equally, infinitely important—but because it, more than any other current conflict captures the hypocrisy and moral failing of the international systems assumed to be the guardians of peace. Palestine has exposed, without a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, Europe and America’s willingness to actively aid crimes against humanity so long as it is in their interest (and so long as the victims are not white). 

We have a moral imperative to fixate and overreact (though I doubt you can overreact to genocide) about Palestine because it forces us to confront the moral desolation of white Western countries and assert a narrative that more accurately captures the truth. We have a moral imperative to act because, as Martin Luther King phrased it, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Our silence, complicity, and ignorance are not meaningless, because if we do not march for Palestine, who do we expect to march for us? 

So that is the answer to the Solidarity Assessment: we owe it to ourselves and each other to read about Palestine, write about Palestine, shout and yell and protest about Palestine. And this book is one of the best places to start.