Rashid Khalidi speaks with Nora Barrows-Friedman in a 2020 KPFA event upon the release of his book, Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
Rashid Khalidi is the author of seven books about the Middle East, among them the award-winning Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, and The Iron Cage.
Nora Barrows-Friedman is a longtime broadcaster and journalist who has focused on Palestine and Palestinian rights issues for nearly 20 years. She was the co-host and senior producer of Flashpoints on KPFA from 2003-2010, and has since been an associate editor and reporter for The Electronic Intifada. Nora is the author of “In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine.”
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.