Description:

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, "in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone." Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi's great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
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...

Review

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a dispassionate survey. It is an indictment, a memorial, and a strategic memo all at once. The book flips the familiar image of the Israel–Palestine conflict as a tragic bilateral dispute between two peoples with equivalent claims and equivalent agency, replacing it with something starker: a century-long colonial war, prosecuted first by Britain and then by the United States, to impose an exclusivist settler state on an indigenous Arab majority. Khalidi, a historian of the Middle East and a scion of one of Jerusalem’s most prominent families, does not pretend to neutrality. He writes from inside the wound, drawing on family papers, his own experience in Beirut during the 1982 siege, and decades of archival work. The result is a book that is both more personal and more analytically relentless than anything else in the mainstream English-language literature. It is also, by design, a polemic that refuses to test its central framing against rival interpretations — and that refusal is both its greatest strength and its most visible limitation.

Khalidi’s thesis is that the Palestinian experience since 1917 is best understood through the lens of settler colonialism, a specific and especially violent form of domination that, in the words of the Pakistani theorist Eqbal Ahmad, returned Palestinians “to the earliest, most intense form of colonial menace … exclusivist settler colonialism” at the very moment the rest of the colonized world was winning its freedom. The book is structured around six “declarations of war” delivered by great powers against the indigenous population: the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1947 UN partition plan, the 1967 war and UN Security Council Resolution 242, the 1982 Lebanon invasion, the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000 along with the wars that followed. Through each, Khalidi argues, Palestinians were not merely defeated in a national struggle but systematically erased from the documents that decided their fate, their existence dismissed as a nuisance or a fiction by men who never doubted their right to dispose of other people’s land. The weight of the book lies less in its narrative of events — though the narrative is detailed and often devastating — than in its unrelenting demonstration that American brokerage of the “peace process” has been a structural fraud, and that any just resolution must begin by treating the United States not as a mediator but as a party to the war.

Khalidi opens by planting his flag in the soil of his own family archive. The Khalidi Library in Jerusalem, founded in 1899, houses over twelve hundred manuscripts; his great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem and an Ottoman parliamentarian, wrote to the French chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn that same year, intending the letter for Theodor Herzl. Yusuf Diya acknowledged the depth of Jewish ties to Palestine and conceded that Zionism was a movement Jews had every right to pursue, but he warned that a Jewish state carved from an Arab-majority land would produce unending conflict, and he closed with a plea: “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Herzl’s reply, which dismissed the letter’s substance while assuring Yusuf Diya that Zionism posed no threat to Arabs and would bring them prosperity, set the template for a century of diplomatic gaslighting. Khalidi uses this family vignette not as sentimental decoration but as the book’s epistemological anchor: he is writing from a tradition that saw the catastrophe coming, that tried to warn, and that was ignored by a great power eager to use Zionism as a tool of imperial strategy.

The first two declarations of war — Balfour and partition — occupy roughly the first half of the book and form its most thoroughly documented sections. Khalidi treats the 1917 Balfour Declaration as an act of breathtaking colonial arrogance, quoting Lord Balfour’s confidential 1919 cabinet memo in which he breezily acknowledged that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” The Mandate that followed embedded that dismissal in law, granting the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status while designating the Arab majority as “non-Jewish communities,” a phrase so deliberately bloodless that Khalidi returns to it as a recurring exhibit in his case for linguistic erasure as an instrument of dispossession. He documents the early Palestinian response, which was shaped by what he calls, following Albert Hourani, “the politics of the notables” — a narrow, urban elite that petitioned, negotiated, and lost, while the Zionist movement built a para-state with a foreign ministry, a labor federation, and a military force. Even the 1936–39 Arab revolt, the largest anticolonial uprising in the interwar Middle East, was crushed by a hundred thousand British troops at a cost Khalidi estimates at 14 to 17 percent of the adult male population killed, wounded, jailed, or exiled. By the time the UN voted partition in 1947, Palestinians faced a well-armed adversary backed by both emerging superpowers; the result was the Nakba, the expulsion of more than 720,000 people and the loss of 78 percent of Mandate Palestine. Khalidi is careful not to turn 1948 into a simple morality tale — he acknowledges Arab state complicity, particularly his own father’s failed 1947 mission to King Abdullah of Jordan, which revealed the degree to which Arab rulers were pursuing their own territorial ambitions — but the chapter leaves a reader with little doubt about the fundamental imbalance. A people without a state confronted a movement with one already largely assembled under British protection.

The 1967 war, Khalidi’s third declaration of war, produced what he calls “a central paradox … by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.” The Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights was enabled, he argues, by a Johnson administration that gave a quiet green light, and it was codified by UN Security Council Resolution 242, which reduced Palestinians to a “refugee problem” and omitted any mention of their national rights. Yet the very completeness of the Arab military collapse shattered the illusion that Cairo or Amman would liberate Palestine, forcing Palestinians to take their cause into their own hands. Khalidi traces the cultural dimension of this revival with particular care, citing the novels of Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish as acts of re-narration that refused the erasure built into 242. At the same time, the PLO, under Yasser Arafat’s leadership from 1968, transformed itself into a state-in-waiting, though one whose armed strategy Khalidi ultimately judges, through Eqbal Ahmad’s critique, to have been tactically disastrous: unlike the FLN in Algeria, which divided French society, Palestinian armed actions unified Israeli society and reinforced its self-image as victim.

The fourth declaration of war — the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the ten-week siege of Beirut, and the Sabra and Shatila massacres — is the book’s emotional fulcrum. Khalidi lived through that siege, and the chapter bristles with a fury that never tips into incoherence. He lays out the diplomatic record with forensic precision: Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s green light to Ariel Sharon, the Reagan administration’s broken guarantees of protection for Palestinian civilians after the PLO’s evacuation, and the Israeli military’s complicity in the Phalangist slaughter of more than 1,300 people in the camps. The chapter’s most startling piece of evidence comes from Reagan’s own diary, quoted directly: “I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.” Reagan was moved enough to call Menachem Begin and demand an end to the bombardment, but not enough to alter the fundamental US-Israeli alliance or to punish the architects of the invasion. For Khalidi, the episode encapsulates a pattern: American presidents are perfectly capable of overriding Israeli preferences when they perceive a vital strategic interest — Eisenhower at Suez, Kissinger during the 1973–75 disengagements, Obama on the Iran nuclear deal — but on Palestine, where no such interest is recognized, Israel enjoys an effective veto.

The fifth and sixth declarations of war occupy the book’s final third and move the argument from archival history to a dissection of the peace-process industry and its catastrophic logic. Khalidi treats the First Intifada (1987–93) as a largely nonviolent popular victory that was squandered by a PLO leadership that fatally misread the Gulf War’s aftermath and accepted the Oslo Accords. His reading of Oslo has become widely shared over the subsequent decades, but he states it with unusual bluntness: the accords conscripted the PLO as a security subcontractor for an occupation that continued to deepen, carving the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C while leaving Israel in control of roughly 60 percent of the territory, the settlements, the borders, and the water. Khalidi quotes an Israeli general’s observation that Arafat could be made into “a Lahd or a super-Lahd,” the reference being to the Israeli proxy militia in southern Lebanon, and argues that the PLO should have walked away rather than accept a framework that deferred every core issue — Jerusalem, refugees, borders, settlements — into a “final status” negotiation that never arrived.

The sixth declaration of war, covering the Second Intifada and the subsequent Gaza wars, is where Khalidi’s analytical anger reaches its peak, and where his evidence is most unnerving. He details the 2014 assault on Gaza with a military historian’s attention to scale: over six thousand air strikes, approximately fifty thousand artillery and tank shells, roughly twenty-one kilotons of explosives dropped on one of the most densely populated strips of land on earth, including some seven thousand shells fired into the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in a single twenty-four-hour period — a volume of fire that American doctrine reserves for a two-division assault. He then quotes Major General Gadi Eizenkot’s 2008 articulation of the Dahiya doctrine, named for the Beirut suburb leveled in 2006:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter … will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on.… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

That the doctrine was explicitly approved as policy, and that it was applied in a campaign whose civilian death toll drew condemnation from every major human rights organization, is for Khalidi not a blemish on an otherwise justifiable war but its intended design. The American role, as he traces it through the Obama years, was to shield that design diplomatically while occasionally expressing mild public displeasure. The chapter is bookended by two pieces of evidence that sit in unresolved tension: detailed polling data from Brookings and Pew showing a pronounced generational and partisan shift in American public opinion, with nearly half of Americans and 60 percent of Democrats by 2016 favoring sanctions over settlements, and an anatomy of the structural forces — AIPAC, major donors like Sheldon Adelson, a Republican Party in thrall to the Israeli right, and an aging Democratic leadership unwilling to “walk into this buzz saw” — that ensured policy would not follow.

The book’s conclusion does not merely sum up; it prescribes. Khalidi brackets the century between Balfour’s 1917 dismissal of Palestinian wishes and Trump’s 2017 declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and he frames the entire conflict as a settler-colonial project that “arrived too late,” in Tony Judt’s phrase, to fully supplant the indigenous population. He offers a typology of three ways settler-colonial confrontations end: elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is rare; or abandonment of colonial supremacy through reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland. Because Palestinians now roughly equal Jews in the territory between the river and the sea, and because their resistance has proven durable, Khalidi argues that elimination is unlikely, leaving expulsion or reconciliation as the two real possibilities. His prescriptions follow from this analysis: Palestinians should abandon US-mediated diplomacy entirely, treat the United States as an adversarial party seated on Israel’s side of the table, demand international rather than exclusive American sponsorship of any future talks, and refocus their energies on grassroots civil-society work and global alliances — he singles out the BDS movement as having achieved more than either Fatah or Hamas in recent years. The only lasting resolution, he insists, is one grounded in “absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights” for both peoples, a formulation that sweeps away the entire post-Oslo architecture of interim autonomy and deferred statehood.

What is most distinctive about The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is its integration of personal authority with structural analysis. Khalidi is not writing as a disembodied scholar; he is writing as a man whose family library in Jerusalem is both a symbol of Palestinian rootedness and a physical archive of a world that was shattered. When he names the Palestinian institutional weakness that made the Nakba possible — the absence of a central army, a foreign ministry, or anything like the Jewish Agency’s para-state — he is able to cite his own father’s futile diplomatic mission to King Abdullah. When he recounts the siege of Beirut, he writes as someone who was there, watching American-made shells fall on a civilian population while American diplomacy ran cover for the bombardment. This intimacy gives the book a moral weight that a purely academic monograph could not carry, and it is what allows Khalidi to spend the final portion of the conclusion pivoting unexpectedly to the American public as the principal field of future Palestinian struggle. The entire book is, in a sense, an argument aimed at American readers who may be open to a version of events their own media and political class have systematically suppressed. Khalidi is trying to do for a general Anglophone audience what Edward Said did for the academy: to secure what Said called “permission to narrate.”

That ambition is also where the book’s limits become most visible. Khalidi’s settler-colonial framework is deployed as a total explanation, and while he acknowledges that the conflict acquired a genuine national dimension — two peoples now claim the same land, each with authentic if constructed identities — the framework is never seriously interrogated against rival interpretive traditions. A reader unfamiliar with the literature would not learn from this book that there are serious Israeli and other scholars who reject the colonial analogy or who argue that Zionism, while certainly involving colonial practices, was also a national liberation movement of an oppressed people seeking refuge from European genocide. Khalidi does engage Zionist historiography, particularly its 1980s revisionist wing, and he draws on Israeli archival work when it suits his argument, but the book never puts its own central premise under pressure. The result is a work that is extraordinarily persuasive on its own terms but that occasionally flattens complexity: the Arab states’ own agendas, the intra-Palestinian political failures beyond the “politics of the notables,” and the genuine existential anxieties that shaped Israeli decision-making all recede into the background of a narrative that needs a single villain — settler colonialism backed by imperial patrons — to sustain its moral clarity.

The book’s prescriptions, similarly, are more satisfying as an ethical position than as a strategic roadmap. Khalidi is surely right that the Oslo framework is dead and that the United States, having bound itself contractually to Israeli positions through a series of secret memoranda beginning with Kissinger’s 1975 commitments, cannot function as an honest broker. His recommendation that Palestinians treat Washington as an adversary and seek international sponsorship has the virtue of realism about American intentions, but it underestimates the degree to which the international system — the UN Security Council veto, European deference, Arab regime complicity — remains rigged in Israel’s favor. His celebration of BDS and civil-society activism as having achieved more than Fatah or Hamas is factually defensible in terms of shifting Western discourse, but it elides the enormous power of the counter-mobilization — the criminalization of boycotts in dozens of American states, the well-funded smear campaigns, the Trump administration’s total embrace of the settler agenda — and it offers no clear theory of how discursive gains translate into the material leverage needed to compel a nuclear-armed state to abandon a half-century-old occupation backed by the world’s sole superpower. The three-outcome typology is elegant, but the path from the present to the reconciliation he advocates remains almost entirely unspecified.

Yet to criticize a book for not solving the conflict it chronicles may be to demand the wrong thing. Khalidi’s more important contribution is the relentless documentation of how the language of peace has been used to manage and obscure a war of dispossession. He shows that the Zionism of Herzl and Jabotinsky was, by its founders’ own candid admission, a colonial enterprise that required an “iron wall” of force to impose itself on a resisting native population, and that every subsequent American diplomatic initiative — from the Rogers Plan to Oslo to the “deal of the century” — has been structured to avoid confronting that foundational reality. The book situates itself within a tradition that runs from the anti-imperialist historiography of the mid-twentieth century through Said’s postcolonial critique to the settler-colonial studies that have reshaped the academic conversation over the past two decades, and it stands as one of the most accessible syntheses of that tradition for a general readership. Its canonical neighbors on the shelf — works like Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, and the collaborative scholarship of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on the Israel lobby — share its critical edge but lack its personal texture and its century-long narrative arc.

There is a passage near the end of the introduction in which Khalidi quotes his ancestor Yusuf Diya’s warning to Herzl and then observes, with characteristic understatement, that the Zionist movement did not heed it. The phrase captures the book’s tragic sensibility: this was a catastrophe foretold, a war whose shape was visible from the beginning, and whose intractability owes less to the irreconcilability of two national claims than to the decision, made over and over by successive great powers, that Palestinian lives and Palestinian rights counted for less than great-power interests. Khalidi’s book is a monument to that century of dismissal, and it is written in the hope that a readership now exists that is prepared to stop dismissing it. Whether that hope is justified is a question the book itself cannot answer, and its inability to answer it is, perhaps, the most honest thing about it.

Notable Quotes

In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.

Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi's 1899 letter to Theodor Herzl, warning of the consequences of the Zionist program for Palestine's indigenous inhabitants — colonialism, Zionism origins, Palestinian prescience, dispossession

We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country.

Herzl's 1895 diary entry revealing his early thinking about the colonization of Palestine and the removal of its indigenous population — Zionism, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, population transfer

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the 'independent nation' of Palestine than in that of the 'independent nation' of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.

Lord Balfour's confidential 1919 memo to the British cabinet, candidly acknowledging the bad faith underlying Allied policy in Palestine — British imperialism, Balfour Declaration, colonial hypocrisy, self-determination

Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

Balfour's 1919 memo dismissing the Arab population of Palestine, whose 'desires and prejudices' he weighed against Zionist aspirations — colonialism, erasure, inequality, British policy

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky's remarkably candid 1923 essay acknowledging the colonial nature of the Zionist project and the inevitability of Palestinian resistance — colonial honesty, Palestinian resistance, iron wall, settler-colonialism

Zionist colonisation can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population -- behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

Jabotinsky's 'iron wall' doctrine, which argued that only overwhelming force could overcome indigenous resistance to colonization — iron wall, military force, colonialism, Jabotinsky

There are plenty of cases of war being begun before it is declared.

Arthur James Balfour, quoted as the epigraph to Chapter 1, capturing the undeclared nature of the war launched against Palestinians by the 1917 declaration — Balfour Declaration, war, colonial aggression

A land without a people for a people without a land.

The slogan used by Christian supporters of Jewish settlement in Palestine and early Zionists, treating Palestine as terra nullius despite its substantial Arab population — erasure, colonialism, denial of Palestinian existence, Zionist mythology

Strangers in Our Own Land: Our Drowsiness and Their Alertness.

Title of a 1929 editorial by 'Isa al-'Isa in the newspaper Filastin, warning Palestinians that they were being outpaced by Zionist organization and settlement — Palestinian identity, early warning, journalism, dispossession

Don't you understand? The Americans are giving the Israelis a little more time.

The author's father, Ismail al-Khalidi, explaining why Ambassador Goldberg sought an adjournment during the June 1967 UN Security Council debate, as Israel continued its advance into Syria — US-Israel alliance, 1967 war, UN diplomacy, complicity

There were no such thing as Palestinians. They did not exist.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's 1969 declaration, which Khalidi describes as taking 'the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level' — denial of existence, erasure, settler-colonialism, negation

I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.

President Harry Truman's blunt 1945 explanation to American diplomats who warned that pro-Zionist policy would harm US interests in the Arab world — US domestic politics, Zionist influence, realpolitik, Palestinian invisibility

Haig was lying. Sharon was lying.

US envoy Philip Habib's assessment, shared with Khalidi, of the deception by both Israel and the US Secretary of State that underpinned the 1982 invasion of Lebanon — 1982 war, deception, US complicity, Lebanon

So we'll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them.

Defense Minister Ariel Sharon telling US Ambassador Morris Draper about supposed Palestinian 'terrorists' in Beirut, even as LF militias were carrying out the Sabra and Shatila massacre — Sabra and Shatila, Sharon, brutality, US diplomacy failure

The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted -- strengthening the population's fear of the Israel Defense Forces.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin's 'break bones' policy during the First Intifada, acknowledging the deliberate use of brutality to suppress Palestinian resistance — First Intifada, state violence, occupation, Rabin

This is a unique colonialism that we've been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It's not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.

Edward Said's observation on the distinctive character of Palestinian colonization, where the settlers sought not to exploit the natives but to replace them entirely — settler-colonialism, elimination, Edward Said, dispossession

Yasser Arafat has a choice. He can be a Lahd or a super-Lahd.

Major General Shlomo Gazit, Rabin's collaborator, comparing Arafat to Antoine Lahd, the Lebanese commander of Israel's proxy militia, revealing the true purpose of the Oslo security arrangements — Oslo Accords, subcontracting occupation, PA security cooperation, colonialism

An instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.

Edward Said's characterization of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, which Khalidi endorsed after seeing how the PLO's Oslo negotiators had failed to secure adequate terms — Oslo Accords, Palestinian surrender, Edward Said, negotiations failure

What happened in the Dahiya quarter will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Major General Gadi Eizenkot articulating the Dahiya doctrine in 2008, which became the blueprint for Israel's devastating attacks on Gaza — Dahiya doctrine, disproportionate force, war crimes, Gaza

The hope is that they over time can become capable of governing.

Jared Kushner's 2019 remarks about Palestinians, drawing on what Khalidi identifies as the 'classic colonialist lexicon' to cast doubt on Palestinian self-governance — Trump era, colonialism, condescension, deal of the century

He does not have the right of self-determination because he is not the proprietor of the land. I want him as a resident because of my honesty, as he was born here, he lives here, and I would never tell him to leave. I regret to say it, but they suffer from one major defect: they were not born Jews.

Likud Knesset member Miki Zohar connecting land rights exclusively to Jewish peoplehood, embodying what Khalidi identifies as Zionism's 'blood and soil' Central European nationalism — Jewish supremacy, inequality, nation-state law, discrimination

When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty towards the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians' hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?

Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell's question, imagining how future scholars will judge Israel's treatment of Palestinians — moral legitimacy, Israeli self-criticism, occupation, equality

The Palestinian people, whose resistance to colonialism has involved an uphill battle, should not expect quick results. They have shown unusual patience, perseverance, and steadfastness in defending their rights, which is the main reason that their cause is still alive.

Khalidi's conclusion, calling for a long-term reassessment of strategy while acknowledging Palestinian resilience over a century of struggle — resilience, sumud, long-term strategy, Palestinian resistance

A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.

Khalidi quoting a seasoned observer on how Israel's crushing 1967 military victory paradoxically sparked a revival of Palestinian national consciousness and resistance — 1967 war, paradox, Palestinian revival, national consciousness

The Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.

Balfour's summary assessment of British and Allied commitments regarding Palestine, from the same 1919 memo. — imperialism, deception, international-law

Zionist colonisation ... can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

Jabotinsky's articulation of the need for overwhelming external military force to implement the Zionist project against indigenous resistance. — colonialism, military-force, great-power-dependency

Now the Arab Higher Committee realized it didn't have the intellectual skills among its members. Indeed it had no structure at all. When Jamal Husseini left the office in the afternoon, he locked the door and put the key in his pocket. There was no secretariat, absolutely no secretariat.

Yusif Sayigh's account of the Palestinian leadership's organizational destitution when faced with presenting their case to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946. — Palestinian-weakness, institutional-failure, colonialism

You Palestinians have refused my offer. You deserve what happens to you.

King Abdullah of Transjordan's cold words to Khalidi's father Ismail, spoken at the very moment the UN voted for partition in November 1947. — Arab-betrayal, Palestinian-isolation, Nakba

There were no such thing as Palestinians ... they did not exist.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's 1969 proclamation, which Khalidi identifies as taking 'the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level.' — erasure, settler-colonialism, denial

The Intifada caused us a lot more political harm, damage to our image, than everything that the PLO had succeeded in doing throughout its existence.

Nahum Admoni, director of the Mossad, admitting that nonviolent popular resistance was far more threatening to Israel than armed struggle. — nonviolent-resistance, intifada, strategic-lessons

So we'll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them. You are not going to save these groups of the international terrorism.

Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's words to US Ambassador Morris Draper on September 17, 1982, at the very moment LF militias were massacring civilians in Sabra and Shatila. — Sabra-Shatila, Israeli-responsibility, American-complicity

I am not sure you guys know what you are doing.

Israeli Ambassador Moshe Arens dismissing the deputy secretary of state's protests about Israel's occupation of West Beirut, demonstrating the extraordinary tone a small country's diplomat adopted toward a superpower. — US-Israel-relations, diplomatic-subordination, 1982-war

The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population's fear of the Israel Defense Forces.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the First Intifada, defending his 'break their bones' policy even as he recognized the occupation required political modification. — military-occupation, intifada, state-violence

What happened in the Dahiya quarter ... will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Major General Gadi Eizenkot articulating the Dahiya doctrine of intentional disproportionate force against civilian areas, later applied in the Gaza wars. — disproportionate-force, war-crimes, Gaza

When you're serious about peace, call us.

Secretary of State James Baker's public challenge to Israeli Prime Minister Shamir, offering the White House phone number—a rare instance of an American official publicly confronting Israeli obstructionism. — US-Israel-relations, diplomacy, Madrid-conference

I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.

Ronald Reagan's diary entry about his phone call to Begin on August 12, 1982, during the most intense bombardment of Beirut. — 1982-war, US-Israel-relations, civilian-casualties