The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

There is a short author’s note near the end of Susan Abulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin. In the last paragraph, the author recounted the time she met Edward Said and how that influenced her. Abulhawa is a Palestinian American, just like Said. In that page, she mentioned that Said lamented how “the Palestinian narrative was lacking in literature.” After that conversation, she “incorporated his disappointment into [her] resolve.”

Reflecting on that, I think in some instances literature and art in general can be more effective in promoting a cause than academic or non-fiction pieces of work.

Over the past two years or so in response to the killings in Gaza as well as the constant illegal Israeli settlers’ violence in the West Bank, I have attempted to educate myself further about the Palestinian experience. Wikipedia has been a constant companion because it is the easiest access to a generally good source of information. But reading Wikipedia might be dissatisfying and it is easy to drown in a sea of dry hyperlinks and articles that are too long for the screen.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine has been helpful in guiding me through the narrative and make sense of all the information on Wikipedia. The book is the best non-fiction work on Palestine I have read yet.

But non-fiction makes you work for it. This might not work for many who read for entertainment purposes instead of learning. And non-fiction can be dry. I think the reason The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine reads great is because Khalidi merges his personal stories to make sense of the facts, which makes the grand historical narrative spanning for more than a lifetime more human.

Here is where Mornings in Jenin excels. First published in 2006 under the more controversial original title The Scar of David, the novel for me is the most emotional book I have read in a long time. The characters are fictional but they live through real events described in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. There were multiple segments of the novel where I was on the verge of tearing up. Reading it was an emotional rollercoaster that makes one sympathizes with the Palestinian people even more. It adds an extra dimension that is hard for most non-fiction to tap into.

As it turns out, Mornings in Jenin is the first English literature that explores the Palestinian experience and so, fulfilling Abulhawa’s promise to herself to incorporate Palestine into modern literature. That makes Mornings in Jenin an important novel to read in order to understand the Palestinian sufferings better.

And so, I feel Edward Said is right about the importance of literature to the Palestinian experience.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of those things that is always present in the background. Almost everybody is aware of it, even those who do not give any headlines any serious thoughts. It is easy to take it for granted, expecting the conflict to last a lifetime if not for eternity. It is as if it is a trouble that has no beginning. It just exists.

Throughout the 2000s, that was definitely my context. And I remember the decade as a violent period for Israel and Palestine. The news on TV, radio and on the internet told me so.

As a member of a Malaysian generation at that time who had only (mostly) experienced peace, that violence was hard to stomach. What is more is that it was easy for an outsider like me to fall into the stereotype that the modern Middle East is doomed to an endless cycle of violence. So, from the outside, it felt natural to blame both Palestinian groups and Israel for the bloodshed all at the same time. The Palestinian groups were wrong for their bombing tactics, and Israel was wrong for its disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.

My views of the long conflict have changed over the last 20 years. Previously, I was willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt… because the whole business was complex. And Israel appeared different from the rest in the region.

Now, no longer. Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right government played a role in that. The Arab Spring, in some cases, showed the Arab states are capable of reforms and could be democratic. And over two decades since, Arab states definitely have shown capacity for economic growth. All these developments and more made Israel less special.

But the recent leveling of Gaza by Israeli military has removed completely any sympathy I might have for Israel.

The ongoing Israeli atrocities have prompted me to read more about Palestine and Israel beyond disparate Wikipedia articles. I bought several fictions and non-fictions to do just that. One of them was The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by historian Rashid Khalidi.

The book reframes my experience of the 2000s and makes me understand why I had some sympathy for Israel at that time.

During that decade, Palestine and Israel were going through what is now known as the Second Intifada. It involved suicide bombings and other deadly tactics carried out by multiple Palestinian groups. The violence itself was the result of deep frustration at a decade-long peaceful process that was never meant to succeed.

The deadliness of the Second Intifada, as Khalidi notes, had sapped global support for Palestinian cause, which was abundant before. Not too many governments (and definitely liberals, which I roughly identify myself as then and now) were willing to justify violence even in the face of injustice during the 2000s. The decade after all began with the September 11 Attacks that marked the start of the US War on Terror.

So, the Second Intifada was ruinous for Palestinian reputation as far as outsiders were concerned. And I was among the many outsiders who frowned at the violence.

But what I did not understand then was that the Second Intifada came after period of relative peace, even as Palestinians continued to suffer injustice. The First Intifada that began in the late 1980s and ended in the 1990s was a peaceful organic Palestinian resistance. But Israel would have none of it and suppressed it brutally. The non-violent Palestinian approach, and the violent reaction by Israel forces created deep international sympathy the Palestinian cause. At the time, for the first time in a long time, Israel was seen as the bad guys. So strong was the sentiment that it jumpstarted a peace process.

Unfortunately, as the author argues, that peace process was problematic. On the Palestinian side, the PLO led by Yasser Arafat was incompetent and shortsightedness (who themselves were victims of Arab states’ political maneuvering against each other and were victims of Israel’s policies). On the Israeli side, there was no sincerity about the peace process and about the establishment of the state of Palestine. Meanwhile, the US was not an honest broker; the author describes the US as Israel’s lawyers instead of arbitrators. Already during negotiations, Palestine’s legal team was no match for Israel’s. In the end, Palestine sacrificed too much for nothing with Israel offering no real concession. This brought the successes and the hopes of the First Intifada to naught.

This made many Palestinians bitter. The First Intifada was an organic resistance which was hijacked by PLO. And when PLO had the chance to do something do, they botched it badly.

In Palestinian eyes, as the author sees it, this discredited the PLO and Yasser Arafat immensely. They felt betrayed by the PLO, by the US and even angrier at Israel (especially as the peaceful route towards independence was closed). This created a split in the Palestinian leadership and a room for Hamas to rise in Gaza, at the expense of the PLO which after Arafat’s death, was led by an uncharismatic and ineffective Mahmoud Abbas.

As I mentioned, that recontextualizes the bloody uprising of the 2000s.

But the The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not just about the First Intifada, the subsequent 1990s peace process that failed and the Second Intifada in the 2000s. Rashid Khalidi goes back to the earliest days of Zionism to argue how the whole conflict should be seen within the lens of settler colonialism. He goes through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1947-1948 war that led to the Nakba, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1982 Israel invasion of Lebanon and all the way to the Trump years.

Each of these events represented a major turning point in Palestinian struggle for statehood over 100 years. In each of these events, the author demonstrates that it was never an even fight for the Palestinians.