The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

In March 1899, a prescient letter crossed the Mediterranean from Jerusalem to Paris, carrying a warning that would echo through the next century. Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, the former mayor of Jerusalem, wrote to Theodor Herzl with remarkable foresight: "Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others." This exchange between a Palestinian notable and the founder of modern Zionism captured the essence of what would become one of the longest and most devastating colonial conflicts in modern history.

The story that unfolds from this moment reveals not just a struggle between two peoples, but a systematic campaign of dispossession orchestrated by successive great powers. From Britain's imperial calculations to America's Cold War strategies, the Palestinian experience illuminates how colonial projects adapt and persist even as empires rise and fall. This is a tale of how international law, diplomatic negotiations, and humanitarian promises have repeatedly been weaponized against an indigenous population, while a settler-colonial movement successfully transformed itself from European outcasts into a nuclear-armed regional superpower backed by the world's dominant empire.

The transformation of Palestine from an Arab-majority land into a Jewish state began not with military conquest, but with a carefully worded diplomatic document. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour issued a declaration that would reshape the Middle East for generations. The sixty-seven words of the Balfour Declaration promised a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine while relegating the 94 percent Arab majority to mere "existing non-Jewish communities" whose only guaranteed rights were "civil and religious," not political or national.

This was no accident of diplomatic language. Balfour himself understood the colonial implications perfectly. In a brutally frank 1919 memo, he acknowledged that Britain had no intention of consulting "the wishes of the present inhabitants" and that "the four Great Powers are committed to Zionism." The declaration represented the first systematic attempt by a great power to negate Palestinian national existence, setting a pattern that would repeat throughout the century.

The British Mandate that followed institutionalized this colonial framework through legal and administrative mechanisms. While other Arab territories received mandates that recognized their eventual independence, Palestine was unique. The Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration verbatim and granted the Zionist movement quasi-governmental powers through the Jewish Agency, while denying Palestinians any comparable representation. Article 6 facilitated Jewish immigration and land acquisition, while Article 7 allowed Jewish immigrants to acquire Palestinian citizenship while denying it to Palestinian Arabs abroad.

The 1930s witnessed the acceleration of this colonial project as Nazi persecution drove massive Jewish immigration to Palestine. Between 1933 and 1939, the Jewish population grew from 18 percent to over 30 percent of the total. This demographic transformation, combined with the creation of an autonomous Jewish economy and paramilitary forces, prompted the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Britain's crushing of this uprising, using 100,000 troops and killing or wounding 10 percent of the adult male Arab population, demonstrated the iron wall of force necessary to maintain the colonial project.

By 1939, the infrastructure of a Jewish state was in place, awaiting only the right moment to declare independence. The Palestinian political leadership had been systematically destroyed through exile, imprisonment, and assassination, leaving Palestinian society leaderless at the crucial moment when the future of their homeland would be decided in the aftermath of World War II.

The end of World War II brought new global powers to the Palestine question, but the outcome for Palestinians remained devastatingly familiar. The United States and Soviet Union, despite their emerging Cold War rivalry, both supported the 1947 UN partition plan that allocated 56 percent of Palestine to a Jewish state, even though Jews comprised only one-third of the population and owned merely 6 percent of the land. This represented the second declaration of war by great powers against Palestinian national existence.

The Palestinian leadership found itself trapped in an impossible position. Weakened by the suppression of the 1930s revolt and lacking the institutional framework that the Mandate had provided to the Zionist movement, Palestinians faced a well-organized adversary backed by the world's emerging superpowers. The Arab states, newly independent but still under heavy Western influence, proved unreliable allies. King Abdullah of Jordan secretly negotiated with Zionist leaders to partition Palestine between them, while other Arab rulers prioritized their own survival over Palestinian rights.

The Nakba that followed was both inevitable and systematic. Between November 1947 and the end of 1948, Zionist forces expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroyed over 400 villages, and seized 78 percent of historic Palestine. This was not the chaotic byproduct of war, but the deliberate implementation of Plan Dalet, designed to create demographic facts on the ground. The massacre at Deir Yassin and dozens of other villages served as warnings to Palestinians that resistance meant death.

The international community's response revealed the colonial nature of the entire enterprise. The UN, which had mandated partition, did nothing to prevent the destruction of the Arab state it had theoretically created. The United States and Soviet Union, having achieved their goal of establishing Israel, showed no interest in Palestinian rights or refugee return. The Nakba thus completed the colonial transformation begun in 1917, turning Palestine from an Arab country into a Jewish state through the systematic use of force and the complicity of the international community.

The aftermath created the basic framework that persists today: an Israeli state controlling most of historic Palestine, Palestinian refugees scattered across the Middle East, and a traumatized population that would spend the next two decades learning to resist from positions of extreme weakness and dispersion.

Twenty years after the Nakba, the Palestinian national movement had begun to resurface, but it faced a transformed regional landscape. The 1967 war, triggered partly by Palestinian guerrilla activities that embarrassed Arab governments, resulted in Israel's occupation of the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine, along with Egyptian and Syrian territory. More significantly, it marked the full emergence of the United States as Israel's primary patron, replacing the declining British Empire in the role of imperial sponsor.

The war's aftermath produced UN Security Council Resolution 242, which constituted the third declaration of war against Palestinian national existence. Drafted primarily by the United States, the resolution treated the conflict as purely a state-to-state matter between Israel and Arab countries, making no mention of Palestinians, Palestine, or Palestinian rights. The "refugee problem" merited only a passing reference, while Israel's withdrawal from occupied territories was made conditional on peace treaties and "secure boundaries" that Israel itself would help define.

Resolution 242's genius lay in its ability to erase the Palestinian dimension of the conflict while appearing to address it. By focusing exclusively on the consequences of the 1967 war, it ignored the fundamental issues arising from 1948: the refugee question, the theft of Palestinian property, and the denial of Palestinian self-determination. This allowed Israel and the United States to fragment the conflict into separate bilateral negotiations with individual Arab states, preventing the emergence of a unified Arab position and sidelining the Palestinians entirely.

Paradoxically, Israel's crushing victory in 1967 also resurrected Palestinian nationalism. The defeat of Arab armies convinced Palestinians that they could rely only on themselves, leading to the emergence of new resistance organizations and the revival of Palestinian identity. Writers like Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish gave voice to Palestinian steadfastness, while organizations like Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine challenged both Israeli occupation and Arab government inaction.

The Palestinians had returned to the historical stage, but they faced a far more formidable adversary than ever before. Israel now controlled all of historic Palestine and enjoyed the full backing of the world's dominant superpower, while Palestinian resistance would have to operate from the margins of a regional order increasingly aligned with American interests.

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon represented the first major war aimed specifically at the Palestinians rather than Arab armies. Conceived by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and endorsed by the Reagan administration, the invasion sought to destroy the PLO militarily and politically, thereby facilitating Israel's absorption of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Secretary of State Alexander Haig's green light to Sharon demonstrated that this was not merely an Israeli operation, but a joint Israeli-American war against Palestinian nationalism.

The ten-week siege of Beirut subjected an Arab capital to the most intensive bombardment since World War II. Israeli forces systematically targeted civilian areas, using American-supplied weapons in clear violation of their intended defensive purpose. The siege aimed not just to expel PLO fighters, but to terrorize the Palestinian civilian population and turn Lebanese opinion against the Palestinian presence. Over 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed, most of them civilians, while entire refugee camps were destroyed.

The PLO's forced evacuation from Beirut in August 1982 was secured through American promises to protect Palestinian civilians left behind. These guarantees, delivered through Lebanese intermediaries and enshrined in official US commitments, proved worthless. When Israeli forces occupied West Beirut following the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, they facilitated the entry of Lebanese Forces militias into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where over 1,300 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were massacred between September 16-18, 1982.

The Sabra and Shatila massacres revealed the true nature of the Israeli-American alliance. While Lebanese militias carried out the killings, Israeli forces provided the weapons, training, and illumination flares that made the slaughter possible. American diplomats, despite their promises to protect civilians, proved unable or unwilling to prevent the tragedy. The massacres represented the logical culmination of a colonial project that had always viewed Palestinian civilians as obstacles to be removed.

Yet paradoxically, the PLO's expulsion from Lebanon ultimately shifted the center of Palestinian resistance back to Palestine itself. Cut off from their external bases and facing an increasingly isolated leadership in Tunis, Palestinians under occupation would soon discover new forms of resistance that would prove more effective than decades of armed struggle from abroad.

The Palestinian uprising that erupted in December 1987 caught everyone by surprise, including the PLO leadership in Tunis. Born from twenty years of accumulated frustration under military occupation, the intifada represented the first unmitigated Palestinian victory in the century-long colonial war. Unlike previous forms of resistance, the largely nonviolent uprising mobilized entire communities, from professionals to refugees, women to students, in a coordinated campaign of civil disobedience that Israeli force could not suppress.

The intifada's power lay not in its ability to militarily defeat Israel, but in its capacity to expose the true nature of the occupation to global audiences. Television images of heavily armed Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian children with clubs, following Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin's orders to "break bones," shattered Israel's carefully cultivated image as a democratic victim. The eight-to-one casualty ratio, with 1,422 Palestinians killed compared to 175 Israelis, revealed the asymmetric nature of the conflict while demonstrating Palestinian determination to resist.

The uprising's success, however, contained the seeds of its own betrayal. Desperate to escape their isolation following disastrous support for Iraq in the Gulf War, PLO leaders in Tunis were willing to accept any negotiations that promised international recognition. The 1993 Oslo Accords, negotiated in secret without input from Palestinians under occupation, represented the fifth declaration of war against Palestinian rights. Disguised as a peace agreement, Oslo institutionalized permanent Israeli control over Palestinian life while granting limited autonomy over a fraction of the occupied territories.

Oslo's fundamental flaw was its acceptance of the colonial framework established by previous agreements. By agreeing to interim arrangements that postponed all substantive issues to future "final status" negotiations, the PLO allowed Israel to continue its colonial project under the guise of a peace process. The Palestinian Authority created by Oslo became a subcontractor for the occupation, responsible for Palestinian behavior while Israel retained control over land, water, borders, and security.

Three decades later, Palestinians remain trapped in this "interim" arrangement, their national aspirations sacrificed on the altar of a peace process designed to prevent rather than achieve Palestinian independence. The Oslo framework transformed the language of liberation into the vocabulary of collaboration, creating new forms of control that proved more effective than direct military rule.

The hundred-year war on Palestine reveals the remarkable adaptability of colonial projects in the modern era. What began as a classic European settler-colonial movement backed by British imperialism successfully transformed itself into a strategic asset of American global hegemony. Throughout this century-long struggle, the pattern remained consistent: great powers provided the diplomatic cover and material support necessary to dispossess an indigenous population, while international institutions legitimized each stage of the colonial process through carefully crafted legal formulas that denied Palestinian national existence.

The Palestinian experience offers crucial insights for understanding contemporary struggles against oppression worldwide. It demonstrates how colonial projects survive by constantly adapting their rhetoric and methods while maintaining their essential goals. The transformation of Zionism from an explicitly colonial movement into a supposed anticolonial liberation struggle, and the rebranding of Palestinian resistance as terrorism, show how successfully colonial powers can control the narrative surrounding their actions. Most importantly, the Palestinian case reveals how international law and diplomatic negotiations can be weaponized against the very people they claim to protect, turning the language of human rights into an instrument of dispossession. For anyone seeking to understand how power operates in the modern world, the century-long war on Palestine provides an essential case study in the persistence of colonial logic beneath the veneer of international legitimacy.