The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Rashid Khalidi's "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine" offers a groundbreaking and deeply personal account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reframing it not as a tragic clash of two equal peoples, but as a century-long colonial war waged against Palestinians. Drawing on extensive archival research and generations of family history—including a prescient 1899 letter from his great-great-uncle, Jerusalem mayor Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, to Theodore Herzl—Khalidi meticulously traces the origins and evolution of the struggle. He highlights pivotal events from the Balfour Declaration and the 1948 Nakba to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the often-futile peace process, emphasizing the consistent backing of great powers like Britain and the United States for the Zionist movement and later Israel. This authoritative work provides an explicitly Palestinian perspective, challenging prevailing narratives without resorting to victimhood or ignoring the complexities and mistakes of all parties involved, thus offering a crucial new lens through which to understand a conflict that profoundly shapes global politics today.