The Palestinian-American historian whose The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is the current flagship of the “Zionism = settler-colonialism” thesis. The main academic proponent your arguments are built to answer — and one Benny Morris rebuts point-by-point.
Key Facts
Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia; successor to Edward Said‘s framing.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) frames the entire conflict as a settler-colonial assault on an indigenous people.
Benny Morris’s “The War on History” (a review you cite) dismantles Khalidi’s key claims — inflated British troop numbers, the colonialism mischaracterization, and selective omissions. → Colonizers · Zionism
Debate Relevance
When opponents cite “the historians,” this is usually who they mean. Counter with Morris’s critique and the legal record. → Violence Against Jews Before 1948 (the pre-1948 violence his frame downplays)
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Indeed, during 1991–1993, Khalidi was an official, presumably salaried, advisor to the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, later the (PLO) Palestinian delegation, to the Middle East peace conference in Madrid and during the subsequent Israeli-Palestinian-American negotiations in Washington, DC. Interestingly, this fact nowhere appears in Khalidi’s Wikipedia biography and goes unmentioned in the short biographies of Khalidi featured in his various books.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is no revisionist history, and Khalidi is no Palestinian “new historian.” In fact, the book turns out to be yet another somewhat turgid recitation of the traditional Palestinian narrative, its mantras being Western and Zionist guilt for everything that has befallen the Palestinians and a passionate, personal assertion of Palestinian innocence.
Khalidi’s bottom line is that Zionism is a “colonialist” enterprise, a doctrine enunciated in the Palestine National Charter of 1964. From this original sin stem all the evils of Zionism and all Palestinian suffering. The subtitle of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, says it all. Indeed, Khalidi goes so far as to say that Zionism is a “classic nineteenth-century European colonial venture.”
Khalidi is far less than honest in his depiction of Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the Palestinian national movement’s leader, when he obliquely mentions, in another context, that Husseini had spent time in Germany during World War II. Nowhere does Khalidi tell his readers that Husseini had supported the pro-Axis revolt in Iraq in 1941 and had fled to Berlin. There, Husseini was given a hefty salary to make anti-British radio broadcasts to the Middle East, calling on the Arabs to rebel against the Allies and kill the Jews. He also toured Yugoslavia to recruit Muslims for Germany’s SS and Wehrmacht and wrote letters to various European leaders, urging them to bar Jews from leaving their countries (thus perhaps indirectly contributing to their demise in the Holocaust). These are well-known, undisputed facts. Khalidi’s failure to mention them—he prefers to tell us what his father, who had little historical significance, was doing during the war—shows the extent to which he willgo to avoid an unvarnished look at his people’s narrative.