[Marxism] NY Times review of Rashid Khalidi's "The Iron Cage"

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, October 7, 2006
Books of The Times
Assessing the Role Palestinians Have Played in the Failed Bid for Statehood
By STEVEN ERLANGER

It’s difficult to overestimate the virtues of 
secular history, especially in such a God-smacked region as the Middle East.

You could argue that the peoples of the region 
would benefit from a little less attention and 
devotion; their struggles become both magnified 
and abstracted by exiles and co-religionists 
whose own passions sometimes seem to have little 
relationship to life on the ground.

Rashid Khalidi, American-born, comes from one of 
Jerusalem’s most distinguished families, which 
has also provided another distinguished 
historian, Walid Khalidi. Together they have done 
much to provide a Palestinian narrative rooted in 
their personal histories but disciplined by the 
standards of Western scholarship.

Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is 
at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide 
why the Palestinians, unlike so many other 
peoples and tribes, have failed to achieve an 
independent state. To Mr. Khalidi’s credit, the 
answers are not very comforting to Palestinians, 
whose leaders have often made the wrong choices 
and have not yet built the institutional structures for statehood.

He often contrasts the weakness of Palestinian 
decision-making, especially before 1948, with the 
more organized behavior of the Jewish population 
of British Palestine, known as the yishuv.

At the heart of the book is his anguished 
question about what the Palestinians call al 
nakba, the catastrophe — “why Palestinian society 
crumbled so rapidly in 1948, why there was not 
more concerted resistance to the process of 
dispossession, and why 750,000 people fled their homes in a few months.”

Mr. Khalidi has his own set of external culprits: 
British colonial masters like Lord Balfour, who 
refused to recognize the national rights of 
non-Jews; lavish financial support for Jewish 
immigration; the romanticism and cynicism of Arab 
leaders, themselves newly hatched from the colonial incubator.

Like Britain before it, he argues, the United 
States “consistently privileged the interests of 
the country’s Jewish population over those of its 
Arab residents,” helping Israel to push 
“Palestinians into an impossible corner, into an 
iron cage” from which, he suggests, a viable 
Palestinian state may not, in the end, emerge.

But he has plenty of blame for the Palestinians, 
too — for the rivalries among rich Palestinian 
families who competed to serve their colonial 
masters, for leaders who failed to see the impact 
of Hitler on Jewish immigration to Mandate 
Palestine, for those who mismanaged the 1936-39 
Palestinian revolt against the British and 
especially for Yasir Arafat, who, along with his 
colleagues in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation 
Organization, has a special place in Mr. 
Khalidi’s pantheon of Palestinian failure.

While his book is more of an analysis than an 
exercise in original research, Mr. Khalidi 
provides another service for Western readers. He 
gives a relatively dispassionate description of 
Palestine in the periods of Ottoman and British 
rule, and of the nature of Arab society before 
the combination of Zionism and Nazism led an 
increasing flow of European-born Jews to settle in the Holy Land.

Whatever the justice of history — if the notion 
of justice can be applied to history at all — it 
is useful for Americans to understand that at the 
beginning of the 1930’s, Jews made up only 17.8 
percent of the population of British Palestine, 
and annual Jewish immigration was declining to only a few thousand a year.

But by the end of the 1930’s, Mr. Khalidi writes, 
“after the rise to power of Hitler spurred the 
annual arrival of many tens of thousands of 
refugees,” the Jewish population rose to more 
than 30 percent. In 1935 more than 60,000 Jews 
went to Palestine, which equaled the entire Jewish population in 1919.

Even in 1948 there were 600,000 Jews to 1.4 
million Arabs in British Palestine, and Arabs 
owned nearly 90 percent of all private land.

Jews did not begin the fighting, but from March 
to October 1948, slightly more than half the Arab 
population — 750,000 people, Mr. Khalidi 
estimates (and his footnote on the topic is well 
worth reading) — fled, were forced to flee or 
were expelled from areas that became part of the new state of Israel.

Like a new generation of Israeli historians, Mr. 
Khalidi makes the point that a Jewish homeland in 
Palestine meant that many of the pre-existing 
Arab majority, who owned most of the private 
land, had to be removed or “transferred,” a 
dilemma much discussed among mainstream Zionist leaders.

After the fighting halted in 1949, Israel 
controlled 78 percent of mandatory Palestine, 
compared with the 55 percent allotted under the United Nations partition plan.

These uncomfortable facts, long before Israel 
conquered the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, 
help to explain the anger, bluster and shame that 
have fueled so much of Palestinian politics.

This is not to say that Mr. Khalidi, currently 
director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia 
University, where he holds the Edward Said Chair 
in Arab Studies, is without passion. His book is 
bound to stir angry responses from those who 
think that any Palestinian effort to fight the 
soldiers of the Israeli occupation represents 
terrorism, or from those, Muslim or Jew, who 
think that their divinity gave all of Palestine exclusively to them.

In a long introductory essay, “Writing Middle 
Eastern History in a Time of Historical Amnesia,” 
he insists that at almost every stage, 
Palestinians “were the weakest of all the parties 
engaged in the prolonged struggle to determine 
the fate of Palestine” and “remain considerably 
less powerful by any measure than the forces that 
stand in the way of their achieving independent statehood.”

He is overly defensive about choosing to analyze 
Palestinian failures, but his book represents a 
brave response to Palestinians who see themselves only as victims.

While he is quite critical of the long Israeli 
occupation, supported by successive American 
governments, that has stunted Palestinian 
choices, Mr. Khalidi respects what the Israelis 
have built on the ashes of the Holocaust. Though 
he doesn’t quite put it this way, he would like 
his own people to emulate a little more and complain a little less.