I’ve just finished the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi and I found it very illuminating. The greatest impact it’s had on my thinking so far, and what I will be digesting for some time, is how the book changed my view of the Palestinian side of the conflict. This is not to say that I had previously doubted the justice of the Palestinian cause, I never have. What this account did was complicate the view I had of the trajectory of that cause and the effectiveness of its adherents.
The conversation to be had about Palestinian political developments is necessarily a conversation with two roads that must somehow be walked at the same time. On one hand, it has to be acknowledged that every issue here stems from the Israeli occupation. There is no essential “rightness” on the Israeli side except for their own cynical exploitation of their citizens to marshal the European world’s public opinion against Palestine. On the other hand, as Khalidi’s book appears dedicated to, there are serious deficiencies on the pro-Palestinian side that have ripped opportunities to secure their position away. It’s this part which I did not know existed and which this book was so illuminating about.
As a content warning, I will discuss war rape much later in the article; it won’t be a physically detailed discussion but I felt I would make note of it here.
Let me stop now and give the customary caveats. I am not a Palestinian nor am I an Israeli, nor am I from the region, nor am I a specialist in the region. I am an interested observer with sympathy for Palestine and a desire to understand the political processes at work. If I don’t preface everything with “I think”, please don’t take that as me making some pronouncement. These are just my reactions to the book based on what I do know of the region and conflict.
I don’t have a strong structure for this blog but I do have a skeleton. I think Khalidi lays out three main “spheres” of failure that have led to (or, rather, caused to not be prevented) the current calamity of the Palestinian people. I’m going to list them in a rough causal order, with the first one listed also being the logically first event in the chain. Of course, like I’ve already said, the actual beginning of this process is the Israeli subversion and domination of the country. We can consider that the zeroth step. There’s certainly some failures involved here, but the imposition of Israel upon Palestine was largely the doing of outside actors, and what I want to talk about are elements within the Palestinian liberation movement itself.
The first failure in the long-running Palestinian crisis was that of the Arab states. Khalidi made me realize that I have had a somewhat naive view of the Israeli colonization of the Middle East. In fact, he at several points criticizes my exact prior position: that Israel is simply an extension of the Western powers. One thing that is very clear in Khalidi’s account is the independence of Israeli policy, strategy, and ambition. The reason that Britain and then the United States never moved against Israel is that they were not particularly interested in doing anything else in the region. European powers have long hoped to play suzerain in the Middle East, controlling affairs through puppet governments. Since that was their goal, Israel was never directly impacting American projects, and so its preferences were allowed to rule the day.
What I had previously believed was that the Anglo project to prop up Israel was so that they would have a European colony in the Middle East. But that isn’t the case. I don’t think this is explicit in Khalidi’s book, but what he made me realize is that Israel is not the colony: the Middle East is the colony. The purpose of Israel in the Middle East isn’t that Israel itself should be strong and independent; Israel is a slave driver, cracking the whip on Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iran whenever necessary to keep them in line. The fact that Israel is like a mad dog in the region perfectly serves the United States’ interests because it forces everyone to keep coming to the US for mediation.
This state of affairs is something that states like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt happily accept, and this is largely because these states are autocracies. That is to say, they are states which are highly at odds with their societies; or, in more usual terms, ruling classes at war with their people. Because this is the case, and because all of these places have experienced periods of significant unrest that threatened autocratic rule, their alliance with the United States helps to strengthen their own positions. As Khalidi points out several times, despite the fact that the people of Arab, North African, and Middle Eastern countries often had strong sympathy for the Palestinian cause, their rulers never shared this sympathy; the people would have acted had they been given the chance, as we have seen with groups such as the Houthis of Yemen.
Regardless, the purpose of Israel is clear, as is the reason that the US doesn’t intervene strongly against them. As long as Israel continues to put the other countries off-balance, it is worth them continuing to support Israel. I won’t editorialize too much further now; there is something to say about the reasons in favor of standing up against this state of affairs, but I am not convinced that’s a productive discussion at this time.
Ultimately, the failure of the Arab states to successfully struggle for their own independence from a world superpower is what allowed for the genocide against Palestine. This leads to the second event of the series, which is not a true failure. If I was to call it a failure, it’s a negative failure: the failure of the Palestinians to nominate good leaders. However, this is a consequence of Israeli strategy to assassinate almost every Palestinian leader of importance throughout the history of the occupation, including Yasser Arafat whose death was certainly linked to a beating he’d sustained at the hands of Israeli forces some months before.
The Palestinians did have able leaders. Among those Khalidi mentions by name are Ghassan Kanafani, Kamal Nasser, Kamal ‘Adwan, Abu Yusuf Najjar, and Abu Hassan Salameh. He says that Yasser Arafat was able at many political affairs, though he did make many mistakes nearer to the end of his life. The issue is that all of these people were killed and they were not able to be replaced. The ones who stepped into the breach were those like Mahmoud Abbas who was not so much picked out as a toady by the Israelis as much as he had never done enough to warrant being targeted by Israel and, once in office, proved not to be up to the task of protecting his people.
If they had been able to retain more of this leadership, they possibly would have seen more value in tactics such as those Khalidi proposes, like getting public opinion in America and Europe on the side of the Palestinians. They may have been able to avoid the disastrous situations that were created by Fatah and Hamas. However they were murdered, and the frustration caused by those murders helped create the situation where fruitless attacks on civilian populations led to massive blowback from the Israeli state.
This is another situation where the ability to see this in two ways is helpful. Because of my own desire for a fully moral protagonist, it has been hard for me to criticize the tactics of Palestinian liberation groups before. But I think I can take the line Khalidi appears to, or at least which is said by a veteran Arab revolutionary (the name escapes me now and I would have to hunt back through to get this reference, forgive me), which is that the specific nature of the conflict makes the kind of armed “resistance” that Palestinian groups had been undertaking, such as suicide bombings and other civilian attacks, were counter-productive.
But to say that the Palestinians caused their situation is going much too far. The other side of this situation is that Israel never appeared close to accepting Palestinians at any point. Israel had always been determined to ignore and minimize Palestine, and the US as well as neighboring states had frequently colluded with Israel in doing that. This is not a situation where Israel has sought a fair settlement but found it rejected. Israel has continually worked to bring one thing about: the genocide of Palestine. Despite any changes such as lessening of severity, Israel has never once budged on that point.
Khalidi also complicated my view of the Hamas-Israel relationship. The way that it is generally put across is that Hamas was a more hardline Muslim challenger to Fatah and the PLO which was supported by Israel as a way to split Palestinian support, only for Hamas to “get too strong” and start to cause Israel problems. This is either portrayed as “karma” taking effect or as evidence that everything Hamas does is in some way engineered by Israel. In that latter reading, the attack on October 7 was a kind of false-flag attack, something which was created by Israel specifically to allow them to take their action.
There is a grain of truth in this: it’s something similar to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, where clear warnings were given and were ignored. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Israel would have decided not to prepare against an initial attack in order that they could unleash a disproportionate counter-attack. I cannot make any claim at knowing the real order of operations here. What I will say is that despite the perception of Hamas as mere puppets for Israel, or purely as a product of Israel sidelining the PLO, the truth is that Hamas are a fully-independent actor whose growth is less the result of Israel and more the result of failures of the PLO; of course, these failures have in large caused by Israel, but nevertheless the key decisions the PLO made cannot be laid at the feet of anyone but themselves.
As Khalidi points out, when the PLO decided to get sucked into the farcical peace process that included Oslo I & II as well as the Camp David summit, this did not lead to an improvement in the Palestinian condition. Instead, though Yasser Arafat was allowed to return and believed himself to be riding to the leadership of a semi-independent or independent Palestinian state, he had instead delivered himself directly into his enemy’s hands. It is Fatah’s lack of foresight which led to their loss of position and Hamas’s electoral victory in the 2006 Palestinian National Authority elections. Khalidi believes that this victory was largely based on a rejection of Fatah, and I am inclined to believe that this is true.
Hamas had been the faction leading the suicide bombings and other attacks of the Second Intifada. This was a strategy borne out of utter desperation; how could it be anything else? This and other mistakes constitute the third major failing of the Palestinian resistance: failures of judgment, especially as regarded their conduct.
While the tactics of the Second Intifada deserve great criticism, I earlier saw a major issue with the conduct of the Palestinian forces in Lebanon. Their heavy handedness and other misdeeds as related by Khalidi certainly cost them allies in Lebanon and elsewhere. His contrast between the First and Second Intifada drives this home further, as does the decision by Arafat and his circle to relocate after the clearly illusory assurances granted by the United States and Israel. By doing this, the Palestinian resistance boxed themselves into a corner. While I criticize Arafat for not seeing that he was throwing himself into a trap, I have to acknowledge (which I don’t recall Khalidi doing) that he was likely not too welcome in Tunis by the time he left, and therefore may have felt that there was less difference in the two locations than I can perceive from here. Still, on these and many occasions, the Palestinian leadership made decisions which diminished their cause in the eyes of others.
Of course, these failures in judgment have to be seen in light of the first two failures: that of the Arab states and that of their depleted leadership. If the Arab states had continued to view the Palestinian crisis as an existential question for their own sovereignty, they may have united or at least saw it as desirable to continue to host and shield Palestinians despite disturbances. Instead, they agreed to become slaves of the United States; not clients, because clients are not frequently whipped the way that Israel whips its neighbors. If the Palestinian leadership had not been depleted, they may have been able to avoid the mistakes that were made in dipomatic meetings and in overall strategy. Though Arafat would likely have continued to hold power, it’s probable that he would have listened to many of those who had been assassinated much more readily than he would listen to someone like Khalidi, who narrated Arafat’s dismissiveness towards him in their meetings.
I want to end with a slightly tangential thought but one that has some bearing on this issue of Palestinian conduct. It often upsets supporters of Palestine, and I’m sure Palestinians themselves, that every misdeed of Palestinian resistance is strongy amplified while all of Israel’s atrocities are swept under the rug. To say this is a result of power relations is reductive, no matter how true it is; we haven’t explained anything. To truly explain this specific situation we have to talk about historical circumstances and so on. I want to make a suggestion here, but the form my reasoning will take may be distasteful.
This is the part that I warned about earlier. I am going to ask you to do something temporarily which you will not want to do, and which I don’t want to do, but I intend to make a stark point here. My point is not to legitimize this idea but to reference it as a practical fact rather than purely as a moral choice.
What I would ask you to do is, for a moment, set aside the moral condemnation of war rape and instead view it as a tool of war.
To explain my point I will crib from Wikipedia (which must be protected) and their article “Wartime sexual violence”: “During war and armed conflict, rape is frequently used as a means of psychological warfare in order to humiliate and terrorize the enemy. Wartime sexual violence may occur in a variety of situations, including institutionalized sexual slavery, wartime sexual violence associated with specific battles or massacres, as well as individual or isolated acts of sexual violence.”
To state this another way, war rape is a weapon used to psychically attack one’s enemies. I don’t know if I could say that it creates greater fear than the existence of enemy soldiers who will “just” murder you, but it does add a different dimension to the fear. As evidenced by me cribbing from Wikipedia rather than any direct source, this is not a topic that I have researched deeply, though I expect to return to this subject as I continue my studies into society.
As a tool of war, rape is an expression of domination. It is that in other contexts as well, but I make this explicit here to make the point that it does not really serve as a tool of resistance by the oppressed, it only serves as a tool of the oppressors. I believe this is because the oppressors already possess impunity with regards to the oppressed, so they cannot enlarge their moral wrongness by harming them.
Israel provides a good example of this. The use of various kinds of sexual violence against Palestinians is well-documented, and this is often done in a systematic way (or in so pervasive a manner that it appears systematic). Despite this, condemnation doesn’t stick to Israel on this point. There are of course factors specific to Israel and its situation that lead to this outcome, but there is also the fact that Israel, as the oppressor, has the ability to justify themselves and to act as though such actions are either aberrations or terrible weapons justified by circumstance.
The rape committed against Israelis by Palestinian militants, on the other hand, serves to massively discredit the Palestinian cause. When I say this, I am not giving my own assessment of the situation, I am trying to relate what I see in the Anglo media and culture. What I am going to say next will be a bit rough from a moral sense, but again, indulge me for a moment so I can make my point. The fact that Israeli rape of Palestinians is largely ignored by the media and Palestinian rape of Israelis is greatly magnified is extremely unfair, and it gives Israel an advantage that they can use. They are permitted to use the weapon of war rape while Palestinians are not.
I bring up this fact of war rape as a weapon, and its effects in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, because I believe there is another weapon that may be used, and which will serve Palestine better: virtue. Don’t misunderstand me, Palestinians are already virtuous in many resepcts. What I am talking about here is virtue as a political-military strategy, virtue as a discipline which is consciously practiced.
We can use Israel as a comparison again in this point. A lot of people in Anglodom refer to Israel’s military as “the most moral army in the world”, and as Khalidi explains several times, the Israelis benefitted greatly from appearing to be the underdogs in their situation. In fact, I would say that this underdog perception is a large reason of why they are called the most moral army in the world despite the atrocities which they have routinely committed. They had a great deal of help in crafting that image, another advantage that Palestine does not help, but the fact remains that this image is one of their great weapons in the arena of public opinion.
Actions speak louder than words, however. The fact that Palestinian groups don’t have access to the media machine available to Israel should not deter their militants from practicing virtue. In fact, that makes it so much more important that they consciously practice virtue, because any cross action they take will not be able to be covered over by a media push. The way that these fighters and activists conduct themselves will be the propaganda that they let forth, and with even a partially-friendly media environment (such as the Palestinians do have at this point), this practice of virtue will multiply support.
We’ve already seen part of this by Hamas’s treatment of the Israeli hostages. The return of hostages from Hamas custody, which has happened for some but not all, has actually presented a great deal of problems for the Israeli state. This is largely because the hostages all spoke well of their treatment by their captors, who endeavored to keep them safe even when Israeli forces took reckless actions that may have killed them. The idea that Palestinians would never be accommodating to Israelis was, to some extent, discredited.
There is also the example of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban revolutionaries. While I would not claim that they were completely faultless or without sin, their reputation is of being an aid and protection to their people, for fighting bravely, for considering their targets well and being effective, and for acting with dignity. This is certainly the basis for the continued popularity of Che; it is akin to the adoration of a saint. Compare that record with the record of Palestinian groups, who during the Second Intifada conducted many suicide bombings which achieved nothing but backlash, and whose attack on 10/7 similarly had no clear military objective and provided the justification for Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestine. These measures have not only failed, they have greatly discredited the Palestinian cause; Khalidi makes this plain about the Second Intifada and, while the book was published before the current campaign, it is clear to me that any legitimacy Hamas may have gained in the eyes of the West (which ultimately determines events in Israel and Palestine) has been demolished due to their actions.
This is not to blame Hamas or any other Palestinian group for their situation. These are certainly mistakes but they are reasonable mistakes; even the suicide bombings are understandable from the perspective of resenting a grinding occupation, even if it is a morally abhorrent action. The point I am making is that while reckless actions like this are understandable, especially from one’s disadvantaged position, they are likely inferior to the practice of virtue. If Hamas’s attacks had often been productive in some military sense, or even if they had fixed their targeting to specifics, I do not believe they would be so vilified today. The same goes for the PLO, Fatah, and other Palestinian groups.
Virtue represents rising above one’s position, achieving a kind of freedom of action. Because of this, it serves those who are oppressed better than the oppressors. The oppressors, by using tools such as war rape, express that they have the ability to use such tools, that they can get away with it and there is nothing that the oppressed can do. Naturally, revenge in kind is demanded, and no one objects if it can be executed. But if it cannot be fully executed, then all the ugliness will naturally rebound on the oppressed. That is to say, Israel does not need to “look good” in this situation; they have power, and they are exercising this power through rape and oppression.
Without power, Palestinians must find a way to break the power of the Israeli regime. This can only be achieved through ensuring that the situation is seen as a travesty of justice, and that even greater injustice will follow if this one is not corrected. That is what has historically motivated movements such as those which came to fight for Spain against Franco and those which came to fight for Ukraine against Russia, and many other such international volunteers. I am not saying that such a force is needed, but this does demonstrate the extent to which people are willing, when properly motivated, to support the search for justice even in places quite removed from themselves. In fact, if we can view groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda neutrally for a moment, we also see this phenomena with these groups, and for the same reasons (though we may, thinking morally, believe those recruits to have chosen badly).
A virtuous cause is a major driver of such support. Think about Ukraine, where so much effort was expended in hiding the neo-nazi proclivities of some of its military primarily in order to make the case that Ukraine was a virtuous cause, a cause worth fighting for. This is how support is built for the oppressed. It is a double-standard, I agree, but it is one that should be used to one’s advantage if possible; it could be called “unfair” that humans can’t fly while birds can, but we just had to deal with that and figure out how to get into the air some other way. Until recently, the Palestinian pressure groups were not attempting to use virtue as a strategy at all.
I say this in particular with reference to Yasser Arafat’s residency in South Lebanon before the war between Israel and Lebanon forced him out. Khalidi mentions the high-handedness of Arafat and even grave crimes committed by his lieutenants. He also says that Arafat never moved to discipline his lieutenants for these actions. This is a lack of practicing virtue. While the ideal is that every person will act virtuously (if using virtue as a weapon in this way), it is not strictly necessary. What is necessary is that anti-virtuous behavior is properly dealt with. If this is done early, and the tone of the organization is set, there is less likelihood of people getting out of line in the future, and the maintenance of a virtuous reputation becomes routine. None of this appears to have happened in the Palestinian liberation movement before the year 2000. It is one of the major reasons, I believe, that the Palestinian leadership eventually had no real friends in the Arab world, despite the known existential nature of their crisis for the other Arab countries.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is an essential read unless you are already an expert in the subject. I will probably end up reading it again at some point to further absorb details. The light it paints on this conflict, both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, is immediately invaluable to me. While I do not agree with all of Khalidi’s critiques, his line of critique will hopefully become the starting point in a constructive shift in the focus of the Palestinian movement, one which will lead to the complete liberation of Palestine.