The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

In The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, the historian Rashid Khalidi reframes a century of conflict — from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the present — as a sustained colonial war waged against the indigenous Palestinian population and backed, in turn, by British and then American power. Rather than treating the events as a symmetrical clash between two national movements, he argues that they are best understood as the dispossession of one people to make room for another.

Khalidi organizes the book around six pivotal moments he calls "declarations of war" on the Palestinians, tracing the through-line that connects them across the decades. He draws not only on deep archival research but on his own family's records and diplomatic history, giving the account an unusually personal dimension.

Widely read and widely debated, the book offers an accessible analytical framework for a contested history and an insistent argument that Palestinians have the right to narrate their own past. It has become one of the most influential single-volume histories of the subject written for a general audience.