Summary of Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I lived in Jerusalem for several months in the early 1990s, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families. I found a worldly man with a broad education who was deeply interested in comparative religion.
#2 Yusuf Diya was an Ottoman government official who spent much of his career training to be a diplomat. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the Ottoman parliament in 1876, supporting parliamentary prerogatives over executive power.
#3 Yusuf Diya was a well-read man, who had gained knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism from his time in Vienna. He was aware of the anti-Semitism in Europe, and knew that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood with the rights and well-being of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.
#4 The letter from Yusuf Diya was the first response by a founder of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl established what was to become a pattern of dismissing as insignificant the interests, and sometimes the very existence, of the indigenous population.

Sujets

• Religion
• Middle Est
• Histoire
• Israel
• Middle East
• History
• Jérusalem

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822503403
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years War on Palestine
Contents Insights from Chapter 1
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I lived in Jerusalem for several months in the early 1990s, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families. I found a worldly man with a broad education who was deeply interested in comparative religion.

#2

Yusuf Diya was an Ottoman government official who spent much of his career training to be a diplomat. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the Ottoman parliament in 1876, supporting parliamentary prerogatives over executive power.

#3

Yusuf Diya was a well-read man, who had gained knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism from his time in Vienna. He was aware of the anti-Semitism in Europe, and knew that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood with the rights and well-being of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.

#4

The letter from Yusuf Diya was the first response by a founder of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl established what was to become a pattern of dismissing as insignificant the interests, and sometimes the very existence, of the indigenous population.

#5

The letter addressed the issue of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. Herzl understood that the Arabs could not be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement intended for Palestine. He assumed that they could be bought off or moved to another country.

#6

The modern history of Palestine can be best understood as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population by a variety of parties to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.

#7

The conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is often portrayed as a simple national clash between two peoples with rights in the same land. But the reality is much more complex. The Palestinians have been depicted in the same condescending language used by European colonizers to describe their indigenous populations.

#8

The idea that the Palestinians do not exist, or are the invention of those who wish Israel ill, is supported by fraudulent books such as Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial. It is based on European travelers’ accounts, new Zionist immigrants’ stories, and British Mandatory sources.

#9

The message of Zionism is also represented in popular culture in Israel and the United States. Works such as Leon Uris’s novel Exodus and the Academy Award–winning movie that it spawned have had a vast impact on a generation of Americans.

#10

The social and economic institutions established by the early Zionists, which were central to the success of the Zionist project, were unquestioningly understood as colonial. The most important of these was the Jewish Colonization Association, which provided financial support for the Zionist colonies in Palestine.

#11

I have chosen to focus on six turning points in the struggle over Palestine. These events highlight the colonial nature of the war on Palestine, and the role of external powers in waging it.

#12

The Arab population of Palestine was heavily rural with a patriarchal, hierarchical nature until 1948. It was dominated by narrow urban elites drawn from a few families, who clung to their positions and privileges even as they adapted to new conditions.

#13

Between 1908 and 1914, there were 32 new newspapers and periodicals in Palestine, and many more in the 1920s and 1930s. These publications brought new ideas about social organization, including working-class solidarity and the role of women in society.

#14

The Ottoman Empire grew increasingly fragile in the early twentieth century, with major territorial losses in the Balkans, Libya, and elsewhere. The four years of World War I brought severe shortages, penury, starvation, disease, the requisitioning of draft animals, and the conscription of most working-age men.

#15

The Khalidi family was not immune from the turmoil of the period. In 1917, my grandfather Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, and his wife Amina, known to all as Um Hassan, with the other residents of the Jaffa area, received an evacuation order from the Ottoman authorities. They left their home at Tal al-Rish near Jaffa with their four youngest children, my father among them.

#16

The Balfour Declaration, made by Britain in 1917, promised support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was a single sentence that effectively pledged Britain’s support for Theodor Herzl’s aims of Jewish statehood, sovereignty, and control of immigration.

#17

The British government’s intentions and objectives were never altruistic. They supported the Zionist project because it suited their strategic interests, and they extended backing to Zionism that went beyond the carefully phrased text of the Balfour Declaration.

#18

The Balfour Declaration, which declared support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was a shock to the Palestinian population. It launched a full-blown colonial conflict, aimed at fostering an exclusivist national home at the expense of the Palestinian people.

#19

The impact of World War I and the subsequent changes in Palestinian national sentiment from a love of country to a modern form of nationalism was accelerated by the spread of nationalism and its intensification during and after the war.

#20

The Palestinian press reflected the changing political identities of the people, from being under Ottoman rule to being ruled by Britain and the Zionist state-building project.

#21

The turning points in the evolution of Palestinian identity are difficult to pinpoint, but they can be seen in the use of the terms Palestine and Palestinians by sources such as the UN.

#22

The history of Palestinians reveals that their identity has always been based around opposition to Jewish national self-determination. This identity was developed in response to many stimuli, including the threat of Zionism.

#23

While the British attempted to peacefully assimilate and integrate the many Jewish refugees that arrived in the early 1920s, Palestinian Arab leaders understood that the Zionist movement’s real objectives were to take over Palestine and expel its Arab population.

#24

The Palestinian people were aware of the threat of Jewish settlers, but not everyone was. The French occupation of Syria in 1920 eliminated the fledgling Arab state, and the British occupation of Egypt in 1922 imposed a monarchy on Egyptians.

#25

The Mandate for Palestine, which was created by the League of Nations, formalized British governance of the country. It not only incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration, but substantially amplified it. The document states that for certain communities, their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.

#26

The Mandate gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status, with wide-ranging powers in economic and social spheres. This allowed the Jewish Agency to represent Zionist interests before the League of Nations and elsewhere.