Iron Cage : the Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
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PRAISE FOR THE IRON CAGE “Khalidi, tackling ‘historical amnesia,’ brilliantly analyses the structural handicap which hobbled the Palestinians throughout 30 years of British rule . Khalidi re- stores the Palestinians to something more than victims, acknowledging that for all their disadvantages, they have played their role and can (and must) still do so to determine their own fate.” —Ian Black, The Guardian “A deeply thought-provoking book about Palestinians by a foremost Palestinian scholar that refreshingly challenges stereotypes. Necessary and important.” —Ghada Karmi, author of Married to Another Man: Israel, the Palestinians, and the One-State Solution “A lucid and compelling examination of the Palestinian dilemma by ‘ arguably the foremost US historian of the modern Middle East’.” —Warren I. Cohen, Los Angeles Times “A first-rate and up-to-date historical and political analysis of the Palestinian predicament.” —Publishers Weekly, voting The Iron Cage one of the 100 Best Books of the Year “Khalidi asks crucial questions regarding the state of Palestinian identity and vi- ability that no other historians or political analysts have covered with such depth.” —Alejandra Juárez, Political Affairs “The Iron Cage is a patient and eloquent work, ranging over the whole of modern Palestinian history from World War I to the death of Yasser Arafat. Reorienting the Palestinian narrative around the attitudes and tactics of the Palestinians themselves, Khalidi lends a remarkable illumination to a story so wearily familiar it is often hard to believe anything new can be found within.” —Jonathan Shainin, Salon “Khalidi concentrates on the Palestinian side of this complex sui generis case . Yet Kahlidi ’s book is no exercise in victimology. He is tough on the British, the Israelis, and the Americans, but he is scarcely less hard-hitting in appraising the Palestinians. The final chapter provides an excellent critique of the Palestine Liberation Organ- ization’ s labored moves toward the recognition of Israel and the idea, increasingly bruited, that a two-state solution is no longer feasible. —L. Carl Brown, Foreign Affairs “The author of numerous critically acclaimed works including Resurrecting Empire, Rashid Khalidi is a historian’s historian. The Iron Cage is his most accomplished effort to date . Magisterial in scope, meticulous in its attention to detail, and decidedly dispassionate in its analysis, The Iron Cage is destined to be a benchmark of its genre.” —Joel Schalit, Tikkun “Rashid Khalidi’s Iron Cage is a must-read historical and political study of the national Palestinian movement . Supporters of the Palestinians and of Israel will read this book in different ways and with different eyes, but both will find Khalidi’s presentation richly illuminating.” —Neil Caplan, Middle East Journal “A work of forceful historical analysis written in a spirit of self-examination . The Iron Cage compels us to reflect more deeply on the problems that continue to bedevil the Palestinian movement.” —Bashir Abu-Manneh, The Nation Also by Rashid Khalidi British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914 Palestine and the Gulf (coeditor) Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making during the 1982 War The Origins of Arab Nationalism (coeditor) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East The Iron Cage The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood Rashid Khalidi A Oneworld book First published in USA by Beacon Press First published in Great Britain by Oneworld Publications, 2007 Copyright © Rashid Khalidi, 2006 All rights reserved Copyright under Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN-13:978–1–85168–532–5 Typeset by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Cover design by D.R. Ink Printed and bound by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Arabic words have been transliterated in keeping with a modified version of the system used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (the only diacritics represented being the ain and the hamza), with exceptions for common nouns, individual names where there is a common spelling, and words within quotations. All translations from Arabic and French are the author's own. Oneworld Publications 185 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7AR England www.oneworld-publications.com NL08 Learn more about Oneworld. Join our mailing list to find out about our latest titles and special offers at: www.oneworld-publications.com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ontents Introduction: Writing Middle Eastern History in a Time of Historical Amnesia 1. Arab Society in Mandatory Palestine 2. The Palestinians and the British Mandate 3. A Failure of Leadership 4. The Revolt, 1948, and Afterward 5. Fateh, the PLO, and the PA: The Palestinian Para-State 6. Stateless in Palestine Notes Acknowledgments Index Introduction Writing Middle Eastern History in a Time of Historical Amnesia This book examines the failure of the Palestinians to establish an in- dependent state before 1948, the year of Israel’s founding and of the dissolution of Arab Palestine, and the impact of that failure in the years thereafter. Such a topic provokes a sequence of questions that relate to the present as much as to the past: What purpose is served by such a study when, nearly six decades after 1948, an independent Palestinian state—in any real sense of the word “independent”— still does not exist, and when its establishment continues to face formidable obstacles? The obstacles to independent Palestinian statehood only ap- peared to grow as violence escalated in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon during the summer of 2006. As these lines are written, in late July, Lebanon is the scene of hundreds of civilian deaths, enormous de- struction, and fierce ground combat. Almost forgotten as a result of the carnage visited on Lebanon by Israel, and of Hizballah’s re- peated rocket barrages against northern Israeli cities and towns, has been the suƒering in Gaza caused by months of Israeli siege and bombardment. It is also forgotten that all of this started with Pales- tinian eƒorts to create a democratic structure of governance while still under Israeli occupation. Specifically, this latest escalation began with response by Israel and the United States to the elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in January 2006, which brought to power a Hamas-led government. Their campaign quickly moved from a crippling financial siege of the PA, with the aim of bring- ing down that government, to an escalation of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian militants, and to artillery and air attacks in Gaza that introduction killed and wounded scores of civilians. Hamas had for eighteen months observed a cease-fire in the face of these and earlier provo- cations (other factions were not so restrained, firing rockets into Is- rael). However, after a major spike in Palestinian civilian deaths and the particularly provocative Israeli assassination of militant leader Jamal Abu Samhadana, whom the PA government had just named to a security post, Hamas finally took the bait and responded with the capture of one Israeli soldier and the killing of others. The pre- dictably ferocious Israeli response—even more killings of civilians, more assassinations, and ground incursions in Gaza—finally pro- voked Hizballah (or perhaps gave Hizballah and its allies, Iran and Syria, the preemptive opportunity they had been searching for). The rest of this tragic scenario then unfolded with the grim, bloody, unthinking precision we have seen so many times before in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. This book is not about that conflict but about its Palestinian component, specifically the eƒort of the Palestinians to achieve in- dependence in their homeland. The ongoing war in Gaza and Leb- anon illustrates once again how intimately this eƒort is intertwined with regional and international factors. It illustrates also the crucial importance of a careful reading of recent Palestinian history to at- tain an understanding of the Middle East conflict. The one-dimen- sional and ahistorical approach to the conflict through the prism of terrorism that is prevalent in the United States obscures thoroughly the specificity of Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and other regional ac- tors, like Syria and Iran, and how these relate to one another. The Palestinian quest for independence is only one of many elements that must be grasped in order to understand the causes of conflict in the Middle East. But because for nearly a century this quest has been so central to events there, willfully ignoring it leads to the kind of reductive, partial, and misguided American o‰cial thinking that has helped produce the profound problems that a~ict the region. This book raises other questions as well: Is a historical study of why something occurred—or in this case did not occur—justified be- introduction cause it sheds light on apparent similarities with events that are cur- rently taking place? Or are these two failures in state building—one in the past and the other ongoing—completely unrelated, and is any attempt to examine them in relation to one another an histori- cal error, not to say an abuse of history?1 It might be asked why I describe this failure to achieve indepen- dent statehood as a Palestinian failure.