Summary of Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

By IRB Media

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#1 I lived in Jerusalem for several months in the early 1990s, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families. I found a worldly man with a broad education who was deeply interested in comparative religion.

#2 Yusuf Diya was an Ottoman government official who spent much of his career training to be a diplomat. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the Ottoman parliament in 1876, supporting parliamentary prerogatives over executive power.

#3 Yusuf Diya was a well-read man, who had gained knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism from his time in Vienna. He was aware of the anti-Semitism in Europe, and knew that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood with the rights and well-being of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.

#4 The letter from Yusuf Diya was the first response by a founder of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl established what was to become a pattern of dismissing as insignificant the interests, and sometimes the very existence, of the indigenous population.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822503403

IRB Media

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Insights on Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years War on Palestine

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I lived in Jerusalem for several months in the early 1990s, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families. I found a worldly man with a broad education who was deeply interested in comparative religion.

#2

Yusuf Diya was an Ottoman government official who spent much of his career training to be a diplomat. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the Ottoman parliament in 1876, supporting parliamentary prerogatives over executive power.

#3

Yusuf Diya was a well-read man, who had gained knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism from his time in Vienna. He was aware of the anti-Semitism in Europe, and knew that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood with the rights and well-being of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.

#4

The letter from Yusuf Diya was the first response by a founder of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl established what was to become a pattern of dismissing as insignificant the interests, and sometimes the very existence, of the indigenous population.

#5

The letter addressed the issue of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. Herzl understood that the Arabs could not be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement intended for Palestine. He assumed that they could be bought off or moved to another country.

#6

The modern history of Palestine can be best understood as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population by a variety of parties to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.

#7

The conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is often portrayed as a simple national clash between two peoples with rights in the same land. But the reality is much more complex. The Palestinians have been depicted in the same condescending language used by European colonizers to describe their indigenous populations.

#8

The idea that the Palestinians do not exist, or are the invention of those who wish Israel ill, is supported by fraudulent books such as Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial. It is based on European travelers’ accounts, new Zionist immigrants’ stories, and British Mandatory sources.

#9

The message of Zionism is also represented in popular culture in Israel and the United States. Works such as Leon Uris’s novel Exodus and the Academy Award–winning movie that it spawned have had a vast impact on a generation of Americans.