Palestine - A Short History by Rahid Khalidi
Rashid Khalidi’s Palestine: A Short History sets itself a difficult task: to compress more than a century of conflict, dispossession, diplomacy and resistance into an account accessible to readers approaching Palestinian history for the first time. That it does so without losing the human scale of the subject is one of the book’s considerable strengths.
Adapted from Khalidi’s larger The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the book begins before the familiar landmarks of 1948 and 1967, placing the modern conflict within the final decades of Ottoman rule and the transformation brought by British imperial policy. From the Balfour Declaration onwards, Khalidi traces the political decisions, wars and failed settlements that progressively narrowed Palestinian control over land and political destiny. The Nakba, occupation, the Oslo process and the later cycles of violence are presented as connected developments rather than isolated crises.
Khalidi writes from an explicitly Palestinian perspective, and there is no pretence that this is a neutral encyclopaedic survey. His interpretation places settler colonialism, imperial intervention and unequal power at the centre of the story. That clarity is useful. Readers know the framework through which events are being interpreted, and Khalidi supports his argument by connecting diplomatic decisions to their consequences for ordinary Palestinians.
What prevents the book from becoming an impersonal political chronology is Khalidi’s use of family history. The al-Khalidi family’s long connection with Jerusalem allows him to move between archives and lived experience. Political events alter streets, homes and childhoods. Wars are not only maps changing colour; they become displacement, fear and inherited memory. Khalidi’s own experiences, including the effects of war on his family, give the historical argument an emotional immediacy without replacing scholarship with memoir.
The condensed form does impose limits. Complex political disputes sometimes move quickly, and readers unfamiliar with the period may need to pause over organisations, agreements and shifting alliances. The book also cannot offer the depth of competing historiographical interpretations that a fuller academic study might provide. Anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives will need to read further and across different scholarly perspectives.
That does not diminish the usefulness of Khalidi’s intervention. Indeed, one of the book’s more valuable qualities is his willingness to examine failures within Palestinian leadership alongside the actions of Britain, Israel, the United States and other powers. His account is partisan in the proper sense of the word: it has a position, but it is not uninterested in Palestinian error.
Khalidi’s prose is direct, controlled and remarkably accessible given the density of the history. For younger readers in particular, the book offers a manageable route into events whose vocabulary can otherwise feel forbidding.
Palestine: A Short History cannot settle a history this contested, nor does it attempt to. Its achievement is to make a Palestinian account of that history coherent, human and difficult to dismiss. For readers trying to understand why the present cannot be separated from 1917, 1948, 1967 or the decades that followed, it provides a clear and deeply informed place to begin.
Chris Reed
Profile Books
