The iron cage The story of the Palestinian struggle for statehood

PERHAPS Rashid Khalidi would have done better calling his book "Cry, the Beloved Country That Never May Be." That title would have conveyed how glum he is about the likelihood of the Palestinians ever getting their own state. By some calculations, he says, they are worse off than they have been in decades. "In spite of their vigorous sense of collective national identity," Khalidi writes, "the Palestinians have never succeeded in creating an independent state of their own, and have no sure prospect in the future of ever having a truly sovereign state or of possessing a contiguous, clearly demarcated territory on which to establish it." How did the Palestinians sink into this sorry nonstate of affairs? Principally, in Khalidi's view, by landing on the wrong side of three Rs: repression, rapaciousness and racism. One power after another used one R or another - sometimes all three - to keep Palestinians in their place. The British did so when they were in charge of Palestine after World War I. The Israelis did so before and, far more aggressively, after they won control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. The Americans did so with their thorough support of Israel, more unblinking than ever under George W. Bush. For a sense of Khalidi's bleak assessment, you need go no further than the book's cover photo. In it, the tops of Palestinian houses are barely visible behind the hideous concrete barriers that Israel has built in the name of security across the West Bank. Khalidi is the director of the Middle East Institute and the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. His description of the Palestinians as forever on the short end of history's stick is neither new nor surprising. But he makes this more than an exercise in self-pity by refusing to let the Palestinians themselves off the hook. If they indeed live in an iron cage, well, Khalidi says, they helped mold the bars themselves. From their repeated failures at even the rudiments of state-building (in stark contrast to the Zionists) to their embrace of a terrorism "both morally indefensible and disastrously counterproductive strategically," Palestinians have often been their own worst enemy. Let's not even talk about woeful decisions by their leadership, from the Jerusalem grand mufti's support for the Nazis in World War II to Yasir Arafat's aligning with Saddam Hussein after Iraq grabbed Kuwait in 1990. "Where were Palestinian leaders when they were most needed?" Khalidi asks. "These are questions that have recurred in modern Palestinian history, in the late 1930s, the 1970s and 1980s, and now at the beginning of the 21st century." He might also have wondered where, far too often, were ordinary Palestinians. Images of West Bank celebrations after the 9/11 attacks hardly bolstered international confidence in the Palestinians' moral compass or political wisdom. The same may be said about their election last year of a government led by the radical Islamic group Hamas, which refuses to accept Israel's right to exist. However aggrieved Palestinians may have felt, no matter how much they may have merely wanted to end government corruption, and whatever one may say about respecting democratically made choices, where did they think that vote would get them? Khalidi says that an offer of a long-term truce by some Hamas leaders "probably did amount to a tacit and de facto acceptance of Israel." But "tacit and de facto" doesn't make it, not in this situation; actual words have to cross the lips. Evaluating Khalidi's version of the past will be left to historians. This is, remember, a conflict in which each side presents itself as history's true orphan. While some Israeli scholars would agree with Khalidi's analysis, many more Israelis and their supporters are sure to challenge his assertion that most Arabs were forced from their homes and did not flee of their own volition when the state of Israel came into existence in 1948. When he talks about repressive Israeli measures having been "sometimes imposed on the pretext of security," critics are bound to ask: What pretext? How many suicide bombings of cafes and pizza shops does it take before a country has a right to end them by any method that seems to work? Still, wherever responsibility for their plight may lie, Palestinians are undeniably in a bad way. They live under "a suffocating blanket of permanent restrictions," they are unable to move freely between their villages, they are poor (with the prospect of yet deeper poverty) and they are helpless as Israel's settlements - and those barriers - expand on West Bank land that, in theory, is to be the nucleus of a Palestinian state. But then, Khalidi is unconvinced we will ever see such a state. He remains committed to the concept of a two-state solution: Israel and Palestine, side by side. Yet he also asks if Palestinians are "perhaps too obsessed with the very idea of a state." In that question lies the hint of a conjecture that maybe statehood need not be the ultimate goal after all. But he does not really explore this thought, or suggest what an acceptable alternative might be. We are left to wonder if anything might change the status quo of anger, violence and retribution, followed by more of the same, possibly for years and years to come.

Historian Khalidi (Resurrecting Empire), a leading expert on the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, brings vital perspective to Palestinian attempts to achieve independence and statehood. Admirably synthesizing the latest scholarship and concentrating on the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) established by the League of Nations after WWI, Khalidi describes the process by which a newly arrived European Jewish minority overcame, with help from its imperial ally, the claims and rights of the native Arab majority in what became Israel and the occupied territories. Khalidi shows Palestinians under the mandate facing comparatively severe systemic, institutional and constitutional obstacles to the development of any para-state structure contrary to British promises of Arab independence and Article 4 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Meanwhile, the Jewish minority could count on a system biased in its favor to develop the structures that became those of the Israeli government in 1948 amid violent expulsion of over half the indigenous population. In bringing this narrative up to the present, Khalidi rigorously details the missteps of the Palestinians and their leadership. Khalidi curiously refrains from drawing any detailed proposal of his own to resolve the ongoing conflict, but his first-rate and up-to-date historical and political analysis of the Palestinian predicament remains illuminating. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved