The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017

Rashid Khalidi frames the modern history of Palestine as a sequence of six distinct colonial declarations of war, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and continuing through the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the military occupations of the 21st century. He rejects the standard framing of two competing nationalisms, instead defining the conflict as a settler-colonial project backed by major global powers against a native population. Khalidi combines academic archival research with personal family history and diplomatic anecdotes to document how the British Empire and later the United States provided the indispensable military and legal scaffolding for Palestinian dispossession.

The book serves students of Middle Eastern geopolitics and readers looking for a rigorous historical argument against the traditional parity narrative. It provides a technical understanding of international law, diplomatic maneuvers, and the specific mechanisms used to erase land sovereignty. Readers acquire a structural framework for analyzing the role of external superpowers in local conflicts and a detailed timeline of Palestinian resistance strategies. The text replaces broad metaphors with specific policy analysis and historical data regarding demographic engineering and territorial annexation.

Deep and outward-looking; a moderate read.

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