In a confidential September 1919 memo (not publicly known until its publication over three decades later in a collection of documents on the interwar period45), Balfour set out for the cabinet his analysis of the complications Britain had created for itself in the Middle East as a result of its conflicting pledges. On the multiple contradictory commitments of the Allies—including those embodied in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Covenant of the League of Nations—Balfour was scathing. After summarizing the incoherence of British policy in Syria and Mesopotamia, he bluntly assessed the situation in Palestine:

Only the Palestinians were denied these advantages, while representative institutions and progress toward self-rule were obtained by the Jewish population in Palestine, which benefited uniquely from Article 22 of the covenant. For decades, British officials disingenuously but steadfastly maintained that Palestine had been excluded from wartime promises of Arab independence. However when relevant extracts from the Husayn-McMahon correspondence were revealed for the first time in 1938, the British government was forced to admit that the language used was at the very least ambiguous.43 In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish.The personal stories give important credence to the conclusions that Khalidi draws from both his academic research and his front-row seat to history. Khalidi heaps huge responsibility regarding all that has happened to Palestine on the British and the Americans, as well as other Western countries.

The third chapter highlights the colonial role of the US in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's approbation of Israel's preemptive strikes on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 War, as well as in its support for UNSC Resolution 242, which legitimated the conquest of East Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights and made no mention of Palestine or the Palestinians or their rights. [3] "The Fourth Declaration of War, 1982" [ edit ] They were among the thousands of men still absent from their homes at war’s end. Some had emigrated to the Americas to escape conscription while many, the writer ‘Aref Shehadeh (later known as ‘Arif al-‘Arif) among them, were being held in Allied prisoner of war camps.19 Others were in the hills, dodging the draft, like Najib Nassar, editor of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Haifa newspaper al-Karmil.20 Meanwhile, there were Arab soldiers who had deserted the Ottoman army and crossed the lines, or who were serving in the forces of the Arab Revolt led by Sharif Husayn and allied with Britain. Still others—such as ‘Isa al-‘Isa, the editor of Filastin, who had been exiled by the Ottoman authorities for his fierce independence with its strong echoes of Arab nationalism—were forced from the relatively cosmopolitan confines of Jaffa to various small towns in the heart of rural Anatolia.21 It’s only toward the end of her book that Tishby’s goal becomes clear: this is a guide to countering Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activism and the swelling of anti-Zionist perspectives on US college campuses — all told in the voice of Carrie Bradshaw. Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now desired to return to their homeland.42 Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs who happened to be abroad when the British took over were denied it. Finally, other articles allowed the Jewish Agency to take over or establish public works, allowed each community to maintain schools in its own language—which meant Jewish Agency control over much of the yishuv’s school system—and made Hebrew an official language of the country. The turmoil of the period did not spare even well-off families, such as my own. When my father, Ismail, was born in 1915, four of his adult brothers, Nu‘man, Hasan, Husayn, and Ahmad, had been conscripted for service in the Ottoman army. Two of them sustained wounds in the fighting, but all were fortunate to survive. My aunt ‘Anbara Salam al-Khalidi remembered harrowing images of starvation and deprivation in the streets of Beirut, where she lived as a young woman.14 Husayn al-Khalidi, my uncle, who served as a medical officer during the war, recalled similar heartbreaking scenes in Jerusalem, where he saw the bodies of dozens of people who had starved to death lying in the streets.15 The wartime exactions of the Ottoman authorities included the hanging, on charges of treason, of my aunt’s fiancé, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraysi, alongside many other Arab nationalist patriots.16After the failure of a conference held in the spring of 1939 at St. James’s Palace in London involving representatives of the Palestinians, the Zionists, and the Arab states, Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab, and Indian Muslim opinion. This document called for a severe curtailment of Britain’s commitments to the Zionist movement. It proposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and on land sales (two major Arab demands) and promised representative institutions in five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands). Although immigration was in fact restricted, none of the other provisions was ever fully implemented.71 Moreover, representative institutions and self-determination were made contingent on approval of all the parties, which the Jewish Agency would never give for an arrangement that would prevent the creation of a Jewish state. The minutes of the cabinet meeting of February 23, 1939, make it clear that Britain meant to withhold the substance of these two crucial concessions from the Palestinians, as the Zionist movement was to have effective veto power, which it would obviously use.72 Throughout, Khalidi engages in nuanced self-criticism, interviewing former diplomats to understand how Israel outmaneuvered the PLO in the 1990s, during the Oslo peace process that followed from Madrid, and how Arafat and the old guard had grown out of touch with a new generation of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He uses the framework of settler colonialism to explain the success of the Zionist movement in taking the land and emptying it of its inhabitants. He reads primary sources and documents conveying displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, to demonstrate how Israel has prevented an independent Palestine through six historical periods that constitute a century-long war against Palestinians. The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the “independent nation” of Palestine than in that of the “independent nation” of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.… The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. Well-informed Palestinians were aware of what the Zionists were preaching both abroad and in Hebrew in Palestine to their followers—that unlimited immigration would produce a Jewish majority that would permit a takeover of the country. They had been following the doings and sayings of Zionist leaders via the extensive reportage on the subject in the Arabic press since well before the war.38 While Chaim Weizmann had, for example, told several prominent Arabs at a dinner party in Jerusalem in March 1918 “to beware treacherous insinuations that Zionists were seeking political power,”39 most knew that such assertions were strategic and meant to cloak the Zionists’ real objectives. Indeed, the Zionist movement’s leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy,” but knowledgeable Palestinians were not deceived.40

In this book, Mandatory Palestine was “ mostly empty” and the Arabs were always trying to “wipe the new Jewish state off the map”. She spends more space censuring the United Nations and its refugee aid work for Palestinians than in understanding how and why Israel displaced Palestinians. Khalidi, for his part, goes into great depth on the “violent transformation” of that year, notably the ethnic cleansing and land theft that would shape Israel’s establishment. He details the “post-Nakba political vacuum” of Arab disunity and complex intra-Palestinian politics, which Tishby tends to dismiss as a hot mess and indicative of the absence of a real Palestinian identity or a claim on the land. Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain. a b c Hughes, Matthew (7 May 2020). "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi review – conquest and resistance". the Guardian . Retrieved 13 October 2022.

Rashid Khalidi’s account of Jewish settlers’ conquest of Palestine is informed and passionate. It pulls no punches in its critique of Jewish-Israeli policies (policies that have had wholehearted US support after 1967), but it also lays out the failings of the Palestinian leadership. Khalidi participated in this history as an activist scion of a leading Palestinian family: in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and as part of the Palestinian negotiating team prior to the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. He slams Israel but his is also an elegy for the Palestinians, for their dispossession, for their failure to resist conquest. It is a relentless story of Jewish-Israeli bad faith, alongside one of Palestinian corruption and political short-sightedness. In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonised with the declaration, the Covenant, or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry. As war clouds loomed in Europe in 1939, however, momentous new global challenges to the British Empire combined with the impact of the Arab Revolt to produce a major shift in London’s policy, away from its previous full-throated support of Zionism. While the Zionists had been delighted by Britain’s decisive smashing of Palestinian resistance, this new shift confronted their leaders with a critical situation. As Europe slid inexorably toward another world war, the British knew that this conflict would be fought, like the previous one, in part on Arab soil. It was now imperative, in terms of core imperial strategic interests, to improve Britain’s image and defuse the fury in the Arab countries and the Islamic world at the forcible repression of the Great Revolt, particularly as these areas were being deluged with Axis propaganda about British atrocities in Palestine. A January 1939 report to the cabinet recommending a change of course in Palestine stressed the importance of “winning the confidence of Egypt and the neighbouring Arab states.”69 The report included a comment from the secretary of state for India, who said that “the Palestine problem is not merely an Arabian problem, but is fast becoming a Pan-Islamic problem”; he warned that if the “problem” was not dealt with properly, “serious trouble in India must be apprehended.”70