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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, by Rashid Khalidi. Beacon Press, 2006, 281 pages, including index. $24.95, hardcover.
Philip C. Wilcox, Jr.
President, Foundation for Middle East Peace
Rashid Khalidi’s brilliant inquiry into why Palestinians have failed to win a state of their own is a welcome antidote to the propaganda and mythology that still dominate American discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the title signals, Khalidi believes the foremost causes have been the overwhelming obstacles that first Great Britain and then Israel, supported by the United States, have placed in the way of Palestinian self-determination. His analysis of these factors is a rich and compelling explanation of why Palestinians have been unable to escape from the “iron cage” constructed by vastly more powerful external forces.
But Khalidi also recognizes that Palestinians have not been passive actors in their tragedy of dispossession and defeat. They too, albeit within severe limits, made choices that have affected their destiny and for which they should be accountable. Khalidi describes the curse of poor Palestinian leaders who often made bad decisions and failed to create effective institutions of resistance, though he does not answer the question of whether wiser policies would have substantially altered the outcome. But he insists, rightly, that Palestinians were not only victims, but also actors, and that there is much to learn from their history at a time when the goal of statehood is as distant as ever.
Khalidi’s “iron cage” metaphor describes the powerful, unyielding external policies that the Palestinians have confronted from the beginning of their quest for statehood. Great Britain’s League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was unlike other League mandates that anticipated eventual self-determination for indigenous peoples. Instead, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that was later incorporated into the Mandate was a commitment to Jewish “settler colonialism.” It promised the Jews a “national home” in Palestine without a similar promise of self-determination for the Palestinians, although at the time Jews represented only about 10 percent of the population. British policy thereafter fostered a Jewish proto-state with its own institutions while denying similar structures and equal rights and resources for Palestinians. Although the Palestinians were more advanced than most other Arab societies and had a distinct sense of national identity, the British considered them “natives,” not a people like the Jews with their own rights.
Khalidi explores why the Palestinians did not do more to win their rights and create alternative institutions to resist the British and their Zionist protégés. Like other scholars, he faults the Palestinian “notable” leadership for collaborating with the Mandate, accepting government positions, and falling prey to British patronage and divide-and-conquer policies that pitted clans and factions against each other. The notables were ill-prepared for mass-based politics and protest strategies. They consistently underestimated the determination of Zionism and its “national” character, and, while bitterly protesting to the British, they naively assumed that their rights would be recognized. They also acquiesced in the institution of the Mufti of Jerusalem, led by Hajj Amin Husseini, a political tool the British invented as an Islamic counterweight to nationalist forces. Husseini served British interests by suppressing rival grassroots and other opposition groups for 15 years before the great revolt in the 1930s, when he broke with the UK and recast himself as a radical nationalist.
As Jewish emigration to Palestine rose in the 1930s with the coming of the Nazis, Jewish-Arab communal strife and grassroots Palestinian protest accelerated, resisting British efforts to keep the lid on. In 1936, a long general strike led to the great Palestinian revolt, a spontaneous, bloody uprising that the notables initially opposed but were ultimately obliged to join and sought to lead. Their leadership was inept, however, and what began as a popular rebellion against the British and the Zionists degenerated into internecine Palestinian violence.
Ironically, as the revolt foundered in 1939 and the Palestinian leadership disintegrated, British support for Zionism was waning. In 1936, the Peel Commission recommended partition, and in 1939, the White Paper proposed a unitary Jewish-Arab state in ten years, in which power would be shared according to population. Disunity prevented the Palestinians from using these initiatives to their advantage. Khalidi blames the mufti, especially, for rejecting the White Paper, though the plan was probably doomed from the start, since it required approval from the Zionists.
Khalidi believes that the failed revolt, which decimated the Palestinian leadership, cost the lives of 10 percent of adult males and destroyed the economy, was a more important watershed than the 1948 war in the defeat of the Palestinians. It gravely weakened them and undermined their capacity to resist the Zionists when the British left and war broke out in 1948.
The dominant Israeli and Western narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the Palestinians “never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity” and defeated themselves by their feckless behavior and militant refusal to accommodate to Zionist national aspirations — for example, by rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan that the Zionists accepted. Khalidi rejects this popular and self-serving “blame the victim” approach. But he thinks the Palestinians were, variously, too rigid and too compliant. He suggests that if they had mobilized for resistance and developed their own institutions in the 1920s, rather than trying to work within the Mandate and waiting to rebel until the late 1930s, when it was too late, this might have tempered British and Zionist policy and enabled the Palestinians to salvage a better result.
On balance, Khalidi leans toward concluding that the Palestinians faced an impossible dilemma. The British had suppressed all rebellions elsewhere in the empire between the two great wars, and no other society under foreign domination had willingly ceded territory to a settler minority. Moreover, it was never clear that the British and the Zionists would have recognized Palestinian national rights that were commensurate with their majority status, if the Palestinians had agreed to partition. Ultimately, Khalidi believes that the superior power of the British and the Zionists was probably decisive. He quotes Ze’ev Jabotinsky, saying Zionism is a “colonizing venture” based on the use of force and that success “stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”
Although the author does not answer conclusively the question of “what if” the Palestinians had been more adroit, he suggests that the Zionists were so dedicated and the supporting external forces so strong, especially after the rise of the Nazis, that the Palestinians’ defeat was inevitable. Nevertheless, he suggests that, if they had made fewer mistakes during the Mandate, they might have salvaged something for themselves in the 1920s and early 1930s or have been better prepared to deal with the crises of 1948 and thereafter.
After the disaster of 1948, the Palestinians’ first challenge was survival, and they were forced to cede political leadership to the Arab states. Khalidi credits Yasser Arafat and the PLO with reviving the Palestinian national movement against great odds, eventually wresting control from the Arab states and winning recognition from most of the world that Palestinians were a people with legitimate national rights.
Khalidi otherwise faults Arafat for his personalized, devious and manipulative style, although he thinks this helped the PLO survive in the political milieu of the Diaspora. Notwithstanding Arafat’s failure to create strong PLO institutions, he did preside over an increasingly pragmatic leadership that led to acceptance of two states and an end to armed struggle in 1988, and later, the decision to participate in the Madrid Conference in 1991. This collective leadership, however, was undermined by the assassinations of Abu Jihad, Abu Iyyad and other senior PLO leaders in the 1980s by Palestinian radicals and Israel. The death of these strong figures, who could stand up to Arafat’s autocratic tendencies, was a severe loss, and Arafat’s physical and intellectual decline thereafter further crippled effective decision making.
Khalidi believes the Palestinians’ worst mistake was accepting the Oslo framework. He thinks Arafat’s team was out-negotiated in a lopsided deal that, far from advancing statehood, had the opposite effect. By agreeing to terms that did not halt Israeli settlements, whose population in the West Bank subsequently doubled, and allowing growing Israeli controls over Palestinian life, Arafat acquiesced in an even more onerous occupation. Also, he and his colleagues proved unprepared for negotiations that followed and seemed to have no clear approach to governance and statehood. Like the mufti in the 1930s, Arafat worked to thwart democracy and institution building, relying instead on patronage and manipulation
Khalidi blames Israel and the United States for trying to impose an unfair “take it or leave it” deal at the Camp David Summit in 2000, although he thinks Arafat handled it ineptly. But he regards the second intifada as a disaster for the Palestinians, like the failed revolt of the late 1930s. He condemns Arafat for weak, incoherent leadership and a failure to grasp the devastating impact of Palestinian terrorism on Israelis, reinforcing their own narrative of exclusive victimization, and on American and world opinion. The intifada also enabled Israel to tighten its “matrix of control” over the Palestinians. By expanding settlements, checkpoints and “settler only” roads, clamping an economic vise on Palestinians and building a massive separation barrier, Israel has created what Khalidi calls “open-air prison camps.” The devastation of the intifada and the corruption and incompetence of Fatah’s leadership also led to the election of the Islamist Hamas, which Khalidi thinks may foreshadow new forms of Palestinian leadership and resistance. (Since the publication of The Iron Cage, the failure of President Mahmoud Abbas and the newly elected Hamas government to collaborate, the turn to internecine violence by their militias, and the divide-and-conquer tactics of the Bush administration to undermine Hamas recall, ominously, the disunity of the Palestinians in the 1930s and similar British tactics of that era.)
The inexorable spread of “facts on the ground” in the Palestinian territories has led some to despair of a two-state solution and to support a single binational state. Khalidi thinks this is unrealistic, given demographics that could undermine the Jewish state. He criticizes these advocates for underestimating the commitment to Zionism and for their failure to think through how the national rights of both Jews and Palestinians could be satisfied in one state. Still, he believes the prospects of a genuine two-state solution are increasingly dim, given Israeli policies of de facto annexation and cantonization of the Palestinian territories.
Khalidi is bitterly critical of the Bush administration for deferring to Israeli policy while at the same time claiming to endorse a genuine Palestinian state that current Israeli policy precludes. He regards President Bush’s letter of April 14, 2004, to then-Prime Minister Sharon accepting some Israeli settlement in the West Bank and making other concessions as a betrayal of bedrock U.S. policies that could be fatal to the prospect of a Palestinian state. (Perhaps he exaggerates the finality of these undertakings, given Bush’s caveat that all must be negotiated in any case.)
Yet elsewhere, Khalidi suggests that eventually Israel will realize that the current structure of repression, settlement and colonization must be dismantled to end the conflict. Meanwhile, without a major shift in the policy of America, Israel’s powerful protector, the “iron cage” Israel has constructed with American support will continue to force the Palestinians into an “impossible corner,” with dangerous results for all. Still, Khalidi believes the Palestinians must do a better job of creating new institutions and more effective leadership to help rescue themselves from permanent subjugation.
Khalidi appeals to Americans to go beyond their exclusive fascination with the drama and tragedy of Jewish history and their laudable desire to make amends for calamities the Jewish people suffered at the hands of the West and to understand also the history of the Palestinians. Unless the United States does so and accepts Palestinian equities as no less important than Israel’s, he predicts that American interests in the Muslim and Arab world will continue to suffer.
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