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18+ Works 1,377 Members 16 Reviews 1 Favorited

About the Author

Rashid Khalidi is the author of six books about the Middle East, including Palestinian Identity, Resurrecting Empire, The Iron Cage, and Sowing Crisis. His writing on Middle Eastern history and politics has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many show more journals. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York. show less
Image credit: 23 January 2009. Next Left Notes (Photo Credit: Thomas Good / NLN)

Works by Rashid Khalidi

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The War on Lebanon: A Reader (2007) — Foreword, some editions — 16 copies

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This book may be one of the best modern books you will read on Palestine. While I have been up in arms about the recent genocidal behaviour of the Israelis, I had also a smattering of understanding of the apartheid regime of Israel.
It is easy to allow emotion to blind you. However, when you read this book, you realise the genuine horror of the situation. Rashid Khalidi lived through some of the bombing, yet wrote a balanced, well-researched book. He does not spare the Palestinian authorities for their incompetence, nor does he spare the Arabic countries for their almost useless approach to the problem.
However, it becomes clear that the Americans have allowed the Israelis free hand. It is also clear that Israel owns American political strategy in the Middle-East.
Excellent companion books to this one are "The General's Son," Orientalism, "Culture and Colonialism." When you read the latter three books, you will understand the cultural context of the Palestinian problem, the genocide and apartheid.

Meanwhile, read this book. The scholarly, readable book does not conceal his pain.
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RajivC | 6 other reviews | Jan 26, 2024 |
There is a lot of truth here, but also a lot of strategic omission, to an extent that even I — not a professional historian — felt was deliberate and wrong. I was hoping Khalidi would bring out a new perspective, a way to understand the conflict and the Palestinian view that would be more productive, but instead this felt — in tone, and in the selection of events — like propaganda.

I listened to the book, and noted all of my skepticism about his reporting of history:

Why did Palestinian Arabs not support the Peel commission at all, or offer a cogent counteroffer, either then or in 1947? Khalidi doesn't engage with those proposals in detail; he doesn't confront the Arab belief at the time that Jews had no place in Palestine — a refusal to engage with the Zionist idea that Jews had nowhere to go and that, in hindsight, Palestine was the only solution for them. What would he have done, if he were a Jew in the 1930s? Is asking him to consider this question too much?

Khalidi has nothing but criticism for Abdullah in Jordan, for stifling Palestinian nationalism — though he was one of the only Arab leaders to give them full citizenship after 1948. Why was there no discussion of how they are fully naturalized citizens of Jordan? Does Khalidi wish for refugees to be denied absorption into their new countries?

He mentions Abu Iyad — as an important Palestinian leader, later assassinated — and discusses him admiringly, without mentioning at all that he masterminded the Munich Massacre. Did he ever express regret for helping plan the murder of Israeli athletes? And why would Khalidi completely fail to mention that about Abu Iyad? Why would Khalidi fail to mention the Munich Massacre in the book at all? That seems to have been a central moment in the Palestinian story, an instance in which the Palestinian cause commanded global attention, and perhaps a major backwards step in their struggle — completely ignored by Khalidi. Is this because he intended for this book to target Western audiences that would not sympathize with the strategies of the Palestinian movement?

The failure of the Oslo accords, the Camp David negotiations in 2000 — no mention of the sticking point of refugee return, or of the Clinton Parameters for peace that Barak accepted but Arafat did not? No mention of the 2008 negotiations, in which Olmert drew up an offer on a napkin that Abbas left on the table? Sure, all these negotiations were flawed, the offer may not have been attractive to Palestinians, or the Palestinian leaders may not have felt that they had the popular mandate to accept them (a different problem altogether) — but there was scant or no mention of these discussions in this book. How can Khalidi claim to disagree with the Zionist thesis of Palestinian rejectionism without addressing the most recent and salient points of data that support it?

Khalidi very heavily criticizes the Oslo process and its facade of peace, which he claims concealed the continued entrenchment of Israeli occupation — but he doesn't cite the horrible suicide bombings during this period that cooled the Israeli public's desire for peace. He only brings up the terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada section, and even then more as a strategic failure for the Palestinian movement.

When discussing the start of the Second Intifada, he mentions the tunnel built under the Temple Mount but doesn’t explain its archeological purpose or the defamatory propaganda that inflamed Palestinians' hysteria about it, and about Sharon's ascent to the Temple Mount. He mentions the Israeli bulldozing of the neighborhood adjacent to the Western Wall — which, yes, was awful — but he never mention Jordanian and Palestinian destruction and desecration of the Jewish quarter after 1947. And the most aggravating thing for me, personally, was his language around terrorist attacks: Suicide bombings “followed” other events, "were carried out" by Hamas, etc. — were they not heavily supported by the Palestinian public at the time? Who carried them out? And does he not see that Israelis' response to these attacks would be utter unwillingness of any rapprochement with Palestinians?

Anyway. Those were my thoughts as I was reading, and on the whole I agree with the prism that Khalidi uses to view this conflict: It is at heart a settler conflict vs. native encounter, and Israel is mostly in the wrong, seeing as it has the upper hand in nearly every way. But the book proved to be a wholly minor addition to my understanding of the conflict — saying nothing new, sticking by the Palestinian narrative, while also calculatingly omitting events that could lead a Western audience to lose sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
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Gadi_Cohen | 6 other reviews | Sep 22, 2021 |
When I started reading this book, I wasn't very familiar with the details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and I felt that the book was very argumentative and aggressive. After reading more books on the subject and coming back to this one to finish it, I didn't get that impression. It could be that from Ch.6 on his writing style changed, or it could be that I understood the issue more fully and had gotten over the idea that any attack on Israel is somehow inherently bad. Where did that idea come from anyway?

The Iron Cage is by no means light reading, but it's informative reading and a good supplement to a library of books on the Arab-Israeli / Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Don't let it be your first book on the subject, though.
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SGTCat | 3 other reviews | Feb 25, 2021 |
This guy repeats himself too much. I could have read just the last two chapters. They include everything else in the previous chapters. The first three chapters read like an introduction, an introduction to an introduction, and another introduction. The chapter on the newspapers was way too drawn out and repetitive and the important points were summarized in the later chapters as well.
 
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SGTCat | Feb 25, 2021 |

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