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 invation 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 reevaluting the forces arrayed against the Palestinians|it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
