Filed with Sources, Books & Media (MOC) · Related: 60.1 Israel-Palestine · Key Arguments (MOC)
The War on History - Jewish Review of Books
In Palestinian Identity, he tried to push back in time, somewhat artificially, the emergence of a separate Palestinian Arab identity, distinct from that of the Arabs living in neighboring Syria-Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. Presumably, the older the provenance, the more legitimate and cogent are one’s claims to statehood.
Indeed, during 1991–1993, Khalidi was an official, presumably salaried, advisor to the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, later the (PLO) Palestinian delegation, to the Middle East peace conference in Madrid and during the subsequent Israeli-Palestinian-American negotiations in Washington, DC. Interestingly, this fact nowhere appears in Khalidi’s Wikipedia biography and goes unmentioned in the short biographies of Khalidi featured in his various books.
the book turns out to be yet another somewhat turgid recitation of the traditional Palestinian narrative, its mantras being Western and Zionist guilt for everything that has befallen the Palestinians and a passionate, personal assertion of Palestinian innocence.
Khalidi’s bottom line is that Zionism is a “colonialist” enterprise, a doctrine enunciated in the Palestine National Charter of 1964. From this original sin stem all the evils of Zionism and all Palestinian suffering.
Benny Morris
olonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition. Zionism was a movement of desperate, idealistic Jews from Eastern and Central Europe bent on immigrating to a country that had once been populated and ruled by Jews, not “another” country, and regaining sovereignty over it. The settlers were not the sons of an imperial power, and the settlement enterprise was never designed to politically or strategically serve an imperial mother country or economically exploit it on behalf of any empire. The land was known to lack natural resources. And most Zionists, rather than wanting to exploit the natives, were indifferent to their fate or wanted to simply see them leave (something Khalidi repeatedly acknowledges throughout the book).
sleight of hand, Khalidi turns the Zionists into Britain’s agents
The story of Zionism, and its conflict with the Arabs, actually began in 1882, with the arrival of the first Zionists in Palestine, or the Land of Israel, which Arabs subsequently termed the start of “the Zionist invasion.” Inevitably, hesitantly, and haphazardly, the indigenous inhabitants resisted. In 1886, some 50 to 60 Arabs from the village of Yahudiya attacked the neighboring, new Jewish settlement (in Khalidi’s parlance, a “colony”) of Petach Tikvah because of a dispute over boundaries and trespassing, injuring four settlers and triggering the fatal heart attack of a Jewish woman. In 1908, in Jaffa—the port of entry for most of the early Zionist settlers—a group of Arabs attacked a Jewish couple strolling on a beach. Jews retaliated by attacking Arabs, and a mob of Arabs then stormed the Spector Hotel, a hostel that lodged recent immigrants, where 13 Jews were injured, some of them severely. The Jews called it a pogrom.
Khalidi categorically rejects any humanitarian impulse behind the Balfour Declaration, which I believe is a mistake.