Okay, thoughts now that I’ve finished it:
- This book claims the Kennedys (bafflingly) had Palestinian-leaning sympathies pre-JFK’s assassination, and doesn’t mention Bobby Kennedy at all. “Why were American-Palestinian relations strained during the 60s-80s? Could it be because the PLO assassinated the brother of a man whose own assassination was one of the greatest cultural traumas of American history? No, it’s the Jews who are to blame.”
- An absurd number of citations here amount to “my dad told me this” or “trust me I heard this as a child.” Most maddening are the ones related to the 1967 war; we could take the word of the numerous records and transcripts made by Israeli and American diplomats at the time, or we could trust Khalidi and his dad by word of mouth. It’s bad history.
- That Egypt, Syria, and Jordan weren’t planning an attack in 67 is taken as a given, and any allusions to the contrary are framed as Zionist propaganda, or, in Khalidi’s words “Israeli myth.” The fact that these countries were blockading Israel and rallying troops at the border is neglected entirely.
- “The hard-line Zionists defined their success on the replacement of Palestine by Israel… for them, if Palestine existed, Israel could not.” Maddening sentence written by a man who has spent the past 116 pages arguing that if Palestine were to exist, Israel wouldn’t. If his goal is to prove the hard-line Zionists wrong, he is failing on every front.
- Beyond ignoring the agency of Palestinians, Khalidi goes out of his way to minimize the agency of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
- The claim that Egypt and Jordan, from the beginning, “welcomed mediation with Israel” and were willing to acknowledge its sovereignty is such an egregious form of historical revisionism that I’m amazed anyone takes this book seriously. If your understanding of Egyptian-Israeli relations is that Egypt was open to recognizing Israel and Israel “ungratefully” refused to accept their recognition (what???? On what grounds?) you have absolutely no business writing on 1967 at all.
- Finally we get a mention of Syrian agency! According to Khalidi, Syria’s primary role thus far has been to “sabotage” the PLO by “sponsoring nihilistic terrorist groups” (unlike the PLO itself, of course) which “killed Israelis and Jews indiscriminately,” (again, also unlike the PLO, of course).
- We’ve reached the Israel-Lebanon war, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Khalidi should have written an autobiography instead of a history. We’ve moved beyond “my father told me,” to “let me tell you what I experienced in the war,” which would be fine, it would be a very interesting first-hand account in an autobiography, but it has no business taking up nearly a tenth of what is meant to be the foundational text of Palestinian history.
- One thing I find interesting is that there isn’t discussion about competing political ideas within Israeli or Palestinian spaces. Khalidi frames it always as a zero-sum game: all Israelis want to kill all Palestinians, and as a result, all Palestinians want to kill all Israelis. Another thing that I’ve noticed is that whenever the overarching goal is framed as noble and just, all actions towards that goal are framed as being supported by all Palestinians. When anything happens that is harmful to Palestinians, it’s framed as the fault of specifically Arafat, specifically Abbas, specifically individuals or outside forces. In this way, Palestine cannot be held responsible for any Palestinian action that causes harm, nor is there room for debate on the best strategy or course of action for Palestinians.
- It’s really interesting reading this after reading Rabin’s biography. Khalidi portrays the American/Israeli relationship as being strong from the beginning, whereas actual Israeli and American documents and records recount serious animosity and frustration between their diplomats even throughout the 1970s.
- There is no mention of Israel’s offer to return Gaza to Egypt along with the Sinai — actually, I’m surprised that he didn’t talk about Israeli control of the Sinai as proof of them trying to build a “Greater Israel.” Probably too difficult to square that with them giving it back.
- These people always tell on themselves by blaming AIPAC instead of CUFI for American policy.
- We completely skip: the Munich Massacre, ALL OF 1973?? HOW????, Rabin’s assassination, the Ramallah lynchings, Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, and only one off-hand sentence is devoted to all of Black September. At this point this isn’t just revisionism of Jewish history, but Palestinian history as well.
- I was hoping for more of an explanation on the Second Intifada. From an Israeli perspective, it doesn’t make any sense: they were offering Palestinians the right to sovereignty and self-governance they’d wanted, and as they were about to sign the treaty, Palestinians set off over a hundred suicide bombings and said that they would reject all terms of statehood and fight to the death. In Son of Hamas, Mosab Yousef Hussain explains this by saying that Arafat realized he would be richer through aid money and didn’t want to commit to the hard work of building a functional state; this makes logical sense. By Khalidi’s account, the Second Intifada just kind of happened one day, as if it were predestined and unstoppable. Khalidi is exceptionally good at describing Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood, but he completely falls apart trying to justify WHY any of this is happening. Anything Palestinians do is righteous and justified. Why are they doing it? Israel, don’t worry about it.
- “Such considerations [negative consequences] were undoubtedly far from the minds of the men (and a few women) who planned and carried out these suicide bombings.” I love this sentence. I’m obsessed with it. Women can commit ill-conceived suicide bombings too! This is feminism.
- According to Khalidi, American media focused exclusively on rockets that hit Israel in the 2014 war, and neglected any coverage of Israeli missiles hitting Gaza. I find this very hard to believe, considering both the past two years, and my own memories of 2014.
- And we end the book with a BDS call to arms! I’m incredibly disappointed that this is considered the standard of Palestinian history; I had hoped for a more thoughtful development of ideas and introspection, or at the very least commitment to the actual events that occurred. My only consolation is that this explains an awful lot of English-speaking antizionists’ gaps in history, and historical revisionism. There are a lot of strong cases to be made for Palestinian statehood; in my opinion, this book undermines its own argument with consistent dishonesty and omission.