Book summary “The Hundred Years' War on Palestine”: summary

Introduction

You likely find the enduring conflict in Palestine confusing, often reduced to an ancient, intractable religious hatred by mainstream media. This simplistic framing hides the deliberate political and military dynamics that actually drive the violence. You struggle to see past official narratives to understand how a stateless population has resisted a century of organized displacement.

The history of Palestine is a century-long colonial settler war waged against the indigenous population by the Zionist movement with British and American backing.

Rashid Khalidi cuts through propaganda by examining this history through six distinct declarations of war issued against the Palestinian people by successive global and regional powers. You will trace this trajectory from the imperial ambitions of the Balfour Declaration through the catastrophe of 1948 and the occupation of 1967. The analysis then moves through the Lebanon invasion, the Oslo Accords, and the repeated devastation of Gaza.

• How did a colonial enterprise succeed in securing international backing against an indigenous majority?
• Why did Palestinian leadership repeatedly fail to counter military and diplomatic strategies?
• What does the ongoing resistance reveal about the future of national liberation?

1. The First Declaration of War

The British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, establishing a settler-colonial project that ignored the 94 percent Arab majority and subjected Palestinians to a debilitating triple bind.

Vibrant Late Ottoman Society

Before World War I, Palestine was not stagnant or in decline. You find a vibrant society undergoing rapid economic, social, and cultural transitions.

Thirty-two new newspapers and periodicals were established in Palestine between 1908 and 1914. Identity shifted toward modern nationalism as agricultural commercialization and literacy expanded.

Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi traveled all the way to Malta and Istanbul for an education in the 1860s. By 1914, such education was available across Palestine and neighboring cities.

The Balfour Declaration and Mandate

Arthur James Balfour privately wrote in a 1919 memo that British policy did not propose to consult the wishes of the present inhabitants. Their desires and prejudices remained secondary to Zionism.

The 1922 League of Nations Mandate institutionalized a parallel Zionist administration. Comprising twenty-eight articles, the Mandate devoted seven articles to privileges for the Zionist movement.

Article 4 of the Mandate gave the Jewish Agency wide-ranging powers in economic and social spheres. This attribute was normally reserved for sovereign states.

You can see how Palestinians faced a unique triple bind:

• the imperial metropole in London;
• an independent and heavily resourced colonial-settler movement with international backing;
• an international mandatory framework legally binding Britain to execute the Zionist project.

Financial inflows to the self-segregated Jewish economy reached 41.5 percent larger than net domestic product during the 1920s. The rise of Nazi Germany in 1933 then triggered massive immigration that shifted the demographic balance.

More than sixty thousand Jewish immigrants arrived in 1935 alone. By 1939, the Jewish population comprised more than 30 percent of the total population.

The Arab Revolt and Repression

Frustrated by elite inaction, urban militants and peasants launched a general strike in 1936. Britain responded with overwhelming force and stationed one hundred thousand troops in Palestine by the late 1930s.

Captain Lewis Andrews, the British district commissioner for Galilee, was assassinated in October 1937. This prompted the deportation of the entire nationalist leadership, including Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, to the Seychelles Islands.

Ten percent of the adult male Arab population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled during the revolt. You see that this left the Palestinian population devastated and politically fragmented.

2. The Second Declaration of War

The 1948 Nakba resulted from Zionist military superiority, Palestinian institutional disarray, and regional regime complicity, scattering the indigenous population into permanent exile.

Global Power Shifts and Zionism

The Zionist movement successfully anticipated the postwar shift in the global balance of power. You can see this in their realignment away from declining British patronage and toward emerging American hegemony.

At the Biltmore Conference in New York in 1942, the Zionist movement demanded all of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth. Resolution 181 gave the Jewish state over 56 percent of Palestine. Between 1880 and 1920, the American Jewish population grew from a quarter of a million to four million.

President Harry Truman explicitly justified his pro-Zionist policy by noting he had to answer to hundreds of thousands of anxious constituents while having no Arabs among them.

Palestinian Institutional Failure

Severe organizational disarray and factional infighting crippled Palestinian efforts to present their case internationally. The Palestinian leadership relied on traditional notable networks rather than modern mass organizations.

Bodies like the Arab Higher Committee lacked basic secretariats. The Arab National Fund raised 176,000 Palestine pounds by mid-1947. The Jewish National Fund received single gifts of one million Palestine pounds and collected $3.5 million annually in the US alone by the mid-1930s.

When the Arab Higher Committee needed to document its case for the Anglo-Committee of Inquiry, Jamal Husseini would simply lock the office door at the end of the day and put the key in his pocket.

The Nakba and Its Aftermath

The Nakba was driven by foreign interference and Palestinian political fragmentation. While the yishuv developed a sophisticated para-state, Palestinians lacked unified military forces and modern bureaucratic apparatuses.

Plan Dalet guided Zionist forces in systematically expelling populations and destroying urban and rural centers. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine. 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population. 300,000 Palestinians were expelled in the first phase before May 15, 1948, and 400,000 additional Palestinians were expelled or fled in the second phase.

Ismail al-Khalidi attempted to deliver a message from the Arab Higher Committee to King Abdullah of Transjordan in late 1947 rejecting tutelage, only to have the meeting interrupted by the broadcast of the UN partition vote, prompting the king to remark that the Palestinians deserved their fate.

The Nakba fractured Palestinian society into a permanent condition of dispersal known as shitat under UNRWA. 5.5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants were eventually registered with UNRWA. Four regular Arab armies entered Mandatory Palestine in 1948. 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained inside the new state of Israel.

3. The Third Declaration of War

The 1967 war and UN Resolution 242 erased Palestinian rights, while the occupation catalyzed a powerful cultural renaissance and the rise of independent armed resistance.

The 1967 War and US Intelligence

When Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban told President Johnson on May 26, 1967, that Egypt was about to attack, McNamara and Johnson explicitly dismissed the claim based on unanimous intelligence. Declassified U.S. military, CIA, and Israeli general staff assessments confirmed that Arab dispositions were defensive and that Israel possessed overwhelming military superiority, predicting a swift Israeli victory within days. General Earl Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to President Johnson on May 26, 1967, that the United Arab Republic's dispositions were defensive and that Israel would ultimately prevail.

Security Council Resolution 242

UN Security Council Resolution 242 served as the third declaration of war on the Palestinians by omitting any mention of Palestine or Palestinian rights, effectively framing the conflict as a state-to-state border dispute. Drafted primarily by British diplomat Lord Caradon and backed by the US, SC 242 ignored the core issues of the 1948 Nakba, including 750,000 Palestinian refugees whose property was seized in 1948, refugee return, self-determination, and the legal status of Jerusalem. Abba Eban pointedly insisted to the Security Council on November 22, 1967, the date of the approval of SC 242, that Israel regarded the English text withdrawal from territories occupied as binding rather than the French version, creating a linguistic loophole for colonization.

Cultural Revival and Resistance

The 1967 defeat inadvertently catalyzed a massive cultural and political revival of Palestinian national consciousness, led by writers, poets, and new militant resistance groups. Intellectuals and authors such as Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Fadwa Touqan, and Tawfiq Zayyad used novels, poetry, and journalism to give voice to exile, loss, and steadfastness. Emile Habibi's satirical novella The Pessoptimist portrays the plight of Palestinians through the protagonist Sa'id, combining happiness and calamity into the portmanteau term pessoptimist.

When fifteen thousand Israeli troops crossed the Jordan River in March 1968, the month and year of the battle of Karameh, to eliminate Palestinian bases in Karameh, they met fierce resistance from the Jordanian army and PLO fighters. The PLO reaped most of the glory from the engagement at Karameh, even though Jordanian artillery positioned in the hills undoubtedly inflicted the most physical damage on the Israeli forces, leaving one hundred to two hundred casualties inflicted on Israeli forces.

Despite maintaining a public stance of non-recognition and strict alignment with Israel, US administrations engaged in extensive clandestine diplomatic and intelligence contacts with the PLO throughout the 1970s. When Israeli intelligence discovered US contacts with PLO security chief Abu Hassan Salameh, they assassinated him with a car bomb in January 1979 to send a harsh warning to Washington.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin engineered the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty to freeze out the PLO, ensure unimpeded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, and restrict future negotiations to limited autonomy rather than sovereignty. Begin used the Camp David framework to cement control over the Occupied Territories while ensuring that Egypt's return of the Sinai Peninsula permanently neutralized its military threat to Israel.

4. The Fourth Declaration of War

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon backed by the United States sought to crush the PLO, culminating in the Sabra and Shatila massacres and shifting the struggle back into occupied Palestine.

The Invasion of Lebanon

Israel deployed 120,000 troops in the largest mobilization since the 1973 war. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon architected the invasion to destroy the PLO militarily, limit its leadership influence, and facilitate the annexation of the occupied territories. Former Israeli chief of staff Mordechai Gur told a secret Knesset committee session that the idea was to limit the PLO leadership's influence to provide greater freedom of action in the Occupied Territories.

Over the preceding decade, the armed PLO created an oppressive mini-state that alienated key Lebanese constituencies. The author and his family survived the siege in West Beirut but ultimately had to leave the city permanently after the renewed outbreak of civil war violence and political assassinations like that of AUB President Malcolm Kerr.

Superpower Collusion

The invasion was a joint Israeli-US military endeavor made possible by explicit approval and continuous support. US Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave Sharon a full exposition of his war plan during a Washington meeting on May 25, 1982, conditioning approval only on a recognizable provocation. The attempted assassination of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London by the Abu Nidal group provided the requested provocation for the offensive.

The United States provided $1.4 billion in annual US military aid provided in both 1981 and 1982 to fund systems like F-16s and cluster munitions. During the ten weeks of fighting, 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed and more than 30,000 wounded. Official Israeli military casualties reached 2,700, with 364 soldiers killed and nearly 2,400 wounded.

Sabra and Shatila Massacres

To secure the unconditional evacuation of PLO fighters, US envoy Philip Habib transmitted unformatted memos and written security guarantees via Lebanese intermediaries. American diplomat Morris Draper delivered plain-paper memos from Washington promising safety, which the PLO accepted as binding commitments before agreeing to leave the city. The United States provided the evacuating PLO with solemn, categorical written pledges to protect Palestinian civilians left behind, but these assurances proved entirely worthless.

Following the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, Israeli forces occupied West Beirut and facilitated horrific atrocities. Israeli military commanders sent the Maronite Lebanese Forces into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under the guise of mopping up supposed terrorists, systematically illuminating the area with continuous nighttime flares and providing logistical support while over thirteen hundred unarmed civilians were slaughtered.

Secret appendices from the Kahan Commission inquiry reveal extensive coordination between Israeli leadership and Lebanese Forces commanders regarding the physical elimination or displacement of the Palestinian population. During a meeting on July 8, 1982, Bashir Gemayel asked Ariel Sharon if Israel would object to bulldozing Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, to which Sharon replied that it was not Israel's business. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, 1,300-plus Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children were murdered. Israel supplied $118.5 million in arms to the Phalangist militias, and studies by Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hout established a minimum number of 1,400 killed. Journalists Loren Jenkins and Jonathan Randal, alongside diplomat Ryan Crocker, entered the camps and brought out the first firsthand reports of the mass murder.

Despite achieving its immediate military objectives of expelling the PLO from Beirut, the war backfired strategically. It dealt a severe blow to Israel's international standing, triggered internal Israeli societal revulsion and the growth of the Peace Now movement, and directly catalyzed the rise of Hizballah from the remnants of aggrieved Shi'ite fighters. Most importantly, it relocated the core of Palestinian resistance directly into the occupied territories, culminating in December 1987 marking the outbreak of the First Intifada.

5. The Fifth Declaration of War

The grassroots First Intifada exposed the brutality of the occupation, but remote PLO leadership miscalculations led to the restrictive Oslo Accords and a subcontracted occupation.

The First Intifada

The First Intifada erupted spontaneously in December 1987 as a broad, nonviolent grassroots uprising against two decades of Israeli military occupation.

The uprising was ignited when an Israeli army vehicle struck a truck in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing four Palestinians. Organized locally by a secret Unified National Leadership, the movement relied on strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience. Women played central roles in mobilizing society, proving that the entire population opposed the status quo.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin implemented an iron fist policy of severe brutality that backfired by exposing Israel's harsh occupation to international media. Rabin ordered security forces to use force, might, and beatings, specifically breaking demonstrators' limbs and cracking skulls.

Widely televised images showed heavily armed soldiers brutalizing teenage Palestinian protestors, creating a major media backlash in the United States and elsewhere. From the beginning of the First Intifada to the end of 1996, Israeli troops and armed settlers killed 1,422 Palestinians. Over 20 percent, specifically 294 of the killed Palestinians, were minors sixteen and under. During the same period, Palestinians killed 175 Israelis, with 86 of them being security personnel. This created an eight-to-one casualty ratio between Palestinians and Israelis.

The Gulf War Miscalculation

Stuck in a distant exile in Tunis, the PLO leadership was caught off guard by the grassroots intifada and attempted to manage it remotely without understanding local realities. Most leaders had not been inside Palestine since 1967 and lacked the deep understanding of Israeli society possessed by Palestinians living under occupation.

Israel assassinated Abu Jihad in April 1988, depriving the PLO of its top lieutenant who actually understood the internal dynamics of the Occupied Territories. Hamas was founded in 1987, and Israel initially supported it discreetly to weaken the PLO.

Yasser Arafat made a bizarre decision to back Saddam Hussein during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, isolating the PLO and ruining its financial backing. Driven by antipathy toward the Syrian regime and a heavy dependency on Iraqi patronage, Arafat tried to remain neutral or supported Iraq during the invasion of Kuwait.

Abu Iyad fought fiercely against Arafat's decision to back Iraq, warning of disaster for the prosperous Palestinian community in Kuwait, before being assassinated in Tunis in January 1991. This stance alienated Arab Gulf states, halted financial aid, and resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Kuwait.

Desperate to escape isolation, the PLO accepted participation in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference under severe restrictions dictated by Israel and the United States. Israel imposed a strict veto on independent Palestinian representation, barring anyone connected to the PLO, Jerusalem, or the diaspora.

The author participated as an advisor to the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation in Madrid in October 1991, noting that the deck was heavily stacked against them by secret 1975 US commitments to Israel. Ten rounds of discussions were held over a year and a half at the State Department in Washington.

The Oslo Accords Trap

Through secret parallel talks in Oslo, the PLO signed agreements that accepted a restricted autonomy plan, effectively turning itself into a security subcontractor for the occupation.

Lacking legal and diplomatic expertise, negotiators signed Oslo I and II, which carved the West Bank into fragmented areas under complete Israeli control while granting the Palestinian Authority administrative and policing duties. Instead of achieving statehood, the PLO provided an indigenous shield for ongoing Israeli colonization. The Declaration of Principles was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Yasser Arafat returned to Palestine in July 1994, ecstatic to be back, but brushed off warnings about expanding walls, checkpoints, and land seizures in East Jerusalem. Oslo II was agreed upon in 1995, completing the division of the West Bank and Gaza into Areas A, B, and C.

The territory was divided with specific administrative realities:

• Area A constituted 18 percent, with Palestinian administrative and security control.
• Area B constituted 22 percent, with Palestinian administrative control and Israeli security control.
• Area C encompassed over 60 percent of the territory, placed under complete Israeli control.

6. The Sixth Declaration of War

The post-Oslo confinement, the Second Intifada, the Hamas election victory, and the brutal Gaza wars demonstrated the ongoing failure of diplomatic surrender and disproportionate military force.

Post-Oslo Confinement

The Oslo Accords failed to bring statehood and instead worsened Palestinian conditions through a labyrinthine system of separation, permit restrictions, and economic strangulation. While a privileged few connected to the Palestinian Authority received VIP passes, ordinary Palestinians faced severed territories, checkpoints, and restricted travel. Gaza was placed under an effective siege.

The European Union reported that Arab East Jerusalem's contribution to the Palestinian GDP shrank from 15 percent in 1993 to 7 percent.

The Second Intifada

Ariel Sharon's provocative 2000 visit to the Haram al-Sharif acted as a match that ignited the Second Intifada, characterized by massive casualties, heavy Israeli firepower, and destructive suicide bombings. The failure of the Camp David summit combined with ongoing colonization created an explosive atmosphere. Israel responded to protests with live ammunition and heavy weapons. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and later Fatah deployed suicide bombers against civilian targets inside Israel, which ultimately united the Israeli public behind a hard-line stance.

During the Second Intifada, 6,600 people were killed, including 4,916 Palestinians and about 1,100 Israelis, marking a steep escalation over the First Intifada.

Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections by campaigning on reform and change, leading to international boycotts, a bloody Fatah-Hamas conflict, and the complete blockade of Gaza. By participating in the elections, Hamas shifted its approach to share governance within the Palestinian Authority. Following its surprise victory, Western governments imposed boycotts. A botched Fatah countercoup in Gaza resulted in Hamas taking full control of the strip, leaving the Palestinian territories politically and geographically divided.

Hamas won 74 seats to Fatah's 45 in the 132-member Palestinian Legislative Assembly in January 2006.

The Dahiya Doctrine in Gaza

During the 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014 military operations in Gaza, Israel applied the Dahiya doctrine, using massive, disproportionate firepower against a densely populated urban area. The Israeli military deployed heavy artillery, tank shells, and 2,000-pound bombs on crowded neighborhoods like Shuja'iyya, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths and widespread destruction of infrastructure. This strategy of intentional disproportionality aims to inflict collective punishment rather than achieve standard military objectives.

During the 51-day 2014 assault, Israel launched over 6,000 air attacks and fired about 50,000 artillery and tank shells using 21 kilotons of high explosives.

US executive policy consistently favored Israel and protected it from international accountability, while domestic political structures and lobbying effectively blocked substantive shifts toward Palestinian rights. Despite a slow shift in broader American public opinion—particularly among younger generations and Democrats—bipartisan congressional support and powerful lobby groups ensured that annual military assistance exceeding four billion dollars continued unabated. Executive initiatives like George Mitchell's peace mission were successfully undermined from within.

A December 2016 Brookings Institution poll showed that 60 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of all Americans supported sanctions against Israel over illegal settlements.

10 Key Ideas

1. Before World War I, Palestine was a vibrant society undergoing rapid economic, social, and cultural transitions before the British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to establish a settler-colonial project that ignored the 94 percent Arab majority.
2. The 1948 Nakba resulted from Zionist military superiority, Palestinian institutional disarray, and regional regime complicity, scattering the indigenous population into permanent exile.
3. The 1967 war and UN Resolution 242 erased Palestinian rights by framing the conflict as a state-to-state border dispute, while the occupation catalyzed a powerful cultural renaissance and armed resistance.
4. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon backed by the United States sought to crush the PLO, culminating in the Sabra and Shatila massacres and shifting the struggle back into occupied Palestine.
5. The grassroots First Intifada exposed the brutality of the occupation through an eight-to-one casualty ratio, but remote PLO leadership miscalculations led to the restrictive Oslo Accords.
6. Through secret parallel talks in Oslo, the PLO signed agreements that carved the West Bank into fragmented areas under complete Israeli control, effectively turning itself into a security subcontractor for the occupation.
7. Ariel Sharon's provocative 2000 visit to the Haram al-Sharif ignited the Second Intifada, which featured massive casualties and devastating suicide bombings.
8. Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections by campaigning on reform and change, leading to international boycotts, a bloody Fatah-Hamas conflict, and the complete blockade of Gaza.
9. During military operations in Gaza, Israel applied the Dahiya doctrine by using massive, disproportionate firepower and high explosives against a densely populated urban area to inflict collective punishment.
10. United States executive policy consistently favored Israel and protected it from international accountability with annual military assistance exceeding four billion dollars, while blocking substantive shifts toward Palestinian rights.