The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

Professor Rashid Khalidi, a historian at Columbia University in the City of New York, has written a brilliant account of the Palestinian people's struggle for national self-determination.

He shows how in the 1920s and 1930s, the British Empire deprived the Palestinians of all democracy to stop them defeating the Zionist project. The Mandate for Palestine, like the Balfour Declaration, made no reference to Palestinians or Arabs, only to `non-Jewish communities' who had only civil and religious, not national or political, rights. By contrast, both Mandate and Declaration asserted that the `Jewish people' had the right to a `national home'.

Khalidi notes the British Empire's `vast experience in thwarting the will of majorities in different countries'. He shows in detail how it divided, diverted and distracted all opposition to its rule. The Empire's rulers always presented the colonies as made up of incompatible religious and ethnic communities, who would be at each other's throats without the benevolent presence of the British.

Khalidi dissects the Zionist myth that `seven Arab armies' invaded Israel in 1948-49. The fiercest fighting was the Jordanian army's defence of areas assigned by the UN to the Arab state, and of the UN-defined area around Jerusalem, against Israeli offensives.

He records that in 1991, the first Bush Government pledged "to oppose settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967, which remains an obstacle to peace." But the US government broke its word: it backed the Israelis throughout the 1990s building new settlements to reinforce their illegal occupation.

Finally, he shows how, at the behest of the Israeli government, the USA imposed rules for negotiations on the Palestinians which "indefinitely froze dealing with any of the issues of substance between the two sides (the final status issues: occupation, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, water, and permanent borders), while there was no concomitant freeze on the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem." In April 2004, Bush II openly tore up his father's pledge when he wrote to Sharon recognising the `new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers'.

Why have the Palestinians failed? A passionate but critical account. (4/6 people found this helpful)

In the long introduction to his very repetitive book in which he sets out to explain why the Palestinians have failed in their struggle for statehood, Professor Khalidi of Columbia University explains how the odds were stacked against them as the result of the policies of Britain, the United States, the surrounding Arab states and of course of the yishuv and then of Israel. All of this, he says, is well known, though not as well-known as it should be. However, he writes that he would focus on the role the Palestinians played themselves, and will `put the Palestinians at the centre of their own story'.

To what extent does he manage in the main part of the book to fulfil that aim? The first chapter does indeed look at the internal weaknesses of the Palestinians compared with the Jewish immigrants: they were less educated (though better than the Arabs in the neighbouring countries); they had fewer economic resources; the majority was rural rather than urban; they were less united; and they failed to build up the infrastructures of future statehood.

But then in the second chapter, he places the blame for this latter failing on the British Mandate. The Mandate for Palestine incorporated the entire text of the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the national character of the Jews, while failing to mention the national character of the Palestinians. The mandatory authorities insisted in all the encounters with Palestinian nationalists that acceptance of the Balfour Declaration was a prerequisite if the Palestinians were to be given representative institutions and the kind of status that the Jewish Agency enjoyed. The Palestinians never would provide such acceptance, and as a result, the author says, the British would not recognize any representative body such as the Palestinian Arab Congress, and they always denied the Palestinians the same status as the Jewish Agency enjoyed and which enabled the Jews to build up the infrastructure of the future state. In Egypt, Transjordan, or Iraq, the British had installed native rulers and officials through whom they ruled these territories, but who would provide an infrastructure and a focus for there future independence of these states. The Palestinians, by contrast, did not have even that.

At this stage the reader might ask, `What about the Supreme Muslim Council, which was recognized by the British, was an elected body, and whose leader, the Mufti, did in fact become the spokesman of Palestinian nationalism?' Professor Khalidi presents the Mufti as, for the most part, a British stooge, until, in the mid-1930s he could no longer contain the political passions of his followers. Throughout the second chapter, Professor Khalidi mocks the claim that the British tried to be even-handed, and portrays them as pro-Jewish and anti-Palestinian. He even describes the `alliance' between the British and the yishuv growing `stronger and more determined as the situation of the Jews of Europe worsened dramatically' during the 1930s. All of this will read oddly to those who recall that from the Churchill White Paper of 1922 onwards, the British steadily whittled down their interpretation and implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

The third chapter, headed `A Failure of Leadership', explains the rivalry, dating back to Otttoman times, between different Arab notables, but again emphasises how the British played on these rivalries, putting many of them on their payroll, to prevent Arab unity; and anyway these notables, even if they wished the British out, were unwilling to mobilize the Arab masses and they were eager to discredit such leaders as emerged.

These divisions still operated during the great Arab Revolt against the British from 1936 to 1939. The British were so hard pressed by the Revolt that they armed the Zionists to help them. In the end the Revolt was crushed: some 5,000 fighters were killed (sources I have read put the figure at 2,850), their leaders were imprisoned or deported to the Seychelles, and factions within the Arab movement assassinated their rivals. Professor Khalidi sees the events of 1947-49 as `in an important sense no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936-1939' .

In May 1939, with war approaching, the MacDonald White Paper offered the Arabs an independent multiracial state within ten years. The notables and the neighbouring Arab rulers (who for the first time were drawn into the Palestinian Question, from which time onwards they played a key role in frustrating Palestinian ambitions) were for accepting the White Paper; but the Mufti, fearing to lose control of the militants still in the field, rejected it. Khalidi blames him for this, though he does say that there was little hope that, given the certain resistance of the Zionists who by now made up 30% of the population of Palestine, the proposal could ever work. In any case, the Mufti's flight to and alliance with Nazi Germany contributed to the fact that after the war none of the victorious powers would support the Palestinians against the State of Israel.

The trenchant analysis in the last two chapters shows how the high hopes placed in Arafat and the PLO (who for the first time were internationally recognized as the representatives of the Palestinian people) were dashed by a long series of mistakes, first by the collective leadership and then, after 1991, by Arafat personally . High among these Professor Khalidi places the Oslo Agreement, negotiated secretly by inexperienced Palestinian representatives behind the backs of the more sophisticated negotiators (who included Khalidi) who were involved in the Madrid-Washington Conferences from 1991 to 1993. The decade of negotiations that followed the Oslo Agreements led to the Palestinians `negotiating for an end to Israel's occupation while Israel reinforced it' by further settlements and appropriations of Palestinian land, culminating with the Wall, intended to keep the Palestinian terrorists out of Israel proper, but in fact being the symbol of the Iron Cage in which the fragmented Palestinians areas are trapped.

The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

Rashid Khalidi

Reader Reviews:

Very good account of the Palestinians' struggle for national self-determination (3/3 people found this helpful)

Why have the Palestinians failed? A passionate but critical account. (4/6 people found this helpful)

Similar Products

Categories