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 best to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with
claims to the same territory. Instead Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the
Palestinians waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel but backed by Britain and
the United States the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial
campaign from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948 from
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original
authoritative and important The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of
victimization nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence
of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the
Palestinians it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
