Real RAD Reads

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After the book I ‘reviewed’ last week, this seemed like the next step in my learning about Palestine. This book was highly recommended across the board as required reading when it comes to the subject of Palestine resistance.

This book is an incredibly well researched history of Palenstine and Khalidi’s family history in the region. History can be a lot. It can be dry and tedious filled with dates and documents etc. Khalidi mixes personal history with the history of the region really well. This book is well written and keeps you engaged in the story.

The book covers 1917 through 2017, starting with The Balfour Declaration (Nov, 1917) and the politics leading up to the 1948 Nakba.

There is so much to talk about here. The politics behind the British Empire giving a piece of foreign land to another foreign group – without acknowledging the presence or desires of the native majority who reside there.

I came into the book with my known biases. I was raised in a Zionist home. My father taught me that the return of Jews to the middle east was a step toward the second coming of Jesus. I was raised Mormon, but I can’t say if this belief is one that is “Mormon doctrine” or the rantings of my dad. He had a way of making his opinions on anything seem like it was coming from God himself. It’s a gift narcissists possess, I guess. When I left religion, I left most (okay, all) of his opinions behind, but didn’t really reconcile some of those beliefs until I started reading this book. I wasn’t aware of the Balfour Declaration and didn’t give much thought about anything that happened in the region prior to the Jewish people moving to what would soon become Israel. I had a very soft understanding of the Nakba – I certainly didn’t know the meaning of the word as everything around the events of 1948 in that region was whitewashed.

The Balfour Declaration was written by, for and in support of the Zionist movement. It is vague and yet this one page letter seemed to usher in a century of war, gas-lighting, propaganda, and genocide.

Khalidi writes:

Significantly, the overwhelming Arab majority of the population (around 94 percent at that time) went unmentioned by Balfour, except in a backhanded way as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” They were described in terms of what they were not, and certainly not as a nation or a people—the words “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not appear in the sixty-seven words of the declaration. This overwhelming majority of the population was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By way of contrast, Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a tiny minority—6 percent—of the country’s inhabitants.

I learned here, and it seems so obvious now, that in order for the Jewish population in the region to have ‘national power’, they needed to have the majority population. This didn’t just mean that more Jewish people needed to move in. It meant there needed to be less of other communities. What happened leading up to the Nakba and through to present day is the attempted eradication of an entire group of people.

Events have been and continue to be denied or re-written with a Zionist skew – and done so pretty successfully too. It’s hard to find a current politician or a news source that isn’t heavily one-sided with a pro-Zionist perspective.

Learning and in turn un-tethering our selves from the biases of western Zionism is not an easy undertaking. The majority of our leaders have entrenched themselves in the propaganda and found power and influence within it. Not to mention they have lined their pockets with campaign funds from PACs like AIPAC, PIA or their Super PAC, UDP.

Organizations like Track AIPAC can help show you if this money is going to your representative. Decolonize Palestine has an extensive list of books to read to help learn more about the people, their culture and history. They also have a collection of common myths and talking points related to the Palestinians and they include further reading on that particular subject.

There are others – but those are the ones that have sent me down my reading rabbit holes.

I strongly encourage additional reading and Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is a great starting point. I’m sure it will be revisited at some point in my own reading.

RAD Rating:

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