A story about the hundred years of war against the Palestinians, told by the leading American historian of the Middle East through crucial 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 to Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the dangers ahead and ended his note by saying, "In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace."
Thus, Rashid Khalidi, great-grandson of al-Khalidi, begins this extensive history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Based on a wealth of untapped archival material and reports from generations of family members —mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists— The Hundred Years' War in Palestine challenges the accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic confrontation between two peoples claiming the same territory.
Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war against the Palestinians, first waged by the Zionist movement and later by Israel, but backed by Great Britain and the United States, the great powers of the time. He highlights key episodes of this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to the endless and futile peace process.