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 historyIn 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.
