Two Books and a Movie About Palestine

 

"All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people." - President Jimmy Carter

TWO BOOKS AND A MOVIE ABOUT PALESTINE

Nonfiction: History

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

“A colonial war (in 1917) waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.”

“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… 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.”

This book tells the story of an indigenous people colonized and deprived of their land over a 100-year period. The first colonization was by the British who conquered Palestine during World War I from the Ottoman Empire. They issued the Balfour declaration in 1917, stating their intention to provide a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. Although 94% of the population in Palestine in 1917 was Palestinian, the declaration did not promise them the same political or national rights guaranteed the Jews.

Palestine 1916

Britain then embarked on a program granting Jewish immigrants preferred status in their new colony. Britain even armed Jewish immigrants to help suppress the revolt against the British from 1936-1939. Britain savagely suppressed the revolt, killing, wounding, or exiling 10% of the adult male Palestinian population.

The author frequently compares the Irish rebellion of 1919-21 to the Palestinian rebellion of 1936-39. He comments that the British used veteran "Black and Tan" soldiers of the Irish rebellion. The "Black and Tans" were renowned for their cruelty. Many of them were criminals that Britain released in return for being part of the force suppressing the Irish rebellion.

Due to British support, the Zionist movement after 1939 was provided with 2 advantages: (1) they had an emerging military force and (2) it greatly weakened the native population. The subsequent 1947-48 war between the Palestinians and Jewish settlers saw the Zionists win and steal more land and homes from thousands of Palestinians. This theft is continuing today, and Israel calls it "settlements" and they even go as far as to say Palestinians do not and did not ever exist!

“It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” – Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, June 15, 1969

Although initially not overtly supportive, the United States changed its somewhat neutral stance to Pro-Israel during the Johnson Administration. Unfortunately, this has drawn our country into this “colonial settler” versus “indigenous people” conflict. Our nation is complicit in the theft of Palestinian land, in that gives billions of dollars yearly to Israel. Israel has the upper hand while Palestinians are forced to become refugees in foreign lands that, for the most part, do not want them.

Khalidi is very upfront about the positions he’s taking, after all his family was directly impacted by the Balfour Declaration and all the violence that followed in the next 100 years. His sympathy is reserved for Palestinian refugee’s oft-harrowing flights from countries that despised them, robbed them, and sometimes murdered them. The Palestinian point of view is rarely presented in the US today. Furthermore, there are more than enough books in the world coming from a predominantly Israeli viewpoint, so there is no harm – and much good – in a counterweight.

Readers Across the Seas Book Club Nonfiction: History, Travel, Memoir (Palestine)

A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle by Raja Shehadeh

I enjoy researching my family history and have traveled to “set foot” on the land where my ancestors lived and worked. Naturally I was interested in A Rift in Time.

The author, Shehadeh, began researching his family history and he discovered a great uncle, Najib Nassar. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Uncle Najib was put on a wanted list by the Ottoman authorities in Palestine when he voiced his opposition to participation in the conflict. Najib went on the run. Shehadeh decided to follow in his uncle’s footsteps.

We cut back and forth between Najib's timeline and the present as Shehadeh traces his uncle's journey, and the events that led up to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, and beyond.

Shehadeh unearths powerful connections between Najib's encounters as a journalist who proudly defined his identity as an Arab Ottoman, despite accusations of treason, and his own struggle as a campaigning Palestinian lawyer and activist.

"Both Najib and I were non-combatants who saw our role in the realm of advocacy: I through the law, my great-great-uncle through journalism. In retrospect I realize that we both attributed too much significance to our form of struggle. [...] It soon became evident that Israel was bent on seizing Palestinian land and was using a veneer of legality to conceal its actions. [...] To my great dismay, law and legality did not prove to be decisive weapons in our battle against Israeli colonialism."

Part travelogue, part memoir and part elegy to a lost ecology, A Rift in Time explores how the stability of geography and the continuity of the land have disappeared from the life of Palestinians. Given that A Rift in Time was first published in 2010, and must now, in 2025, be read considering the current, ongoing slaughter taking place in Gaza, I wonder if Shehadeh would shift his focus away from ecology. Would he even be able to write this story now, considering the even tighter restrictions on movement the Palestinians are facing?

Still, I think Shehadeh pieced together a profound portrait of Palestine now fragmented by numerous political borders. A Rift in Time offers a compelling vision both of what the land once was and of what it could be if only the hostilities ceased.

AND A MOVIE...

In A Rift in Time Raja Shehadeh expressed his frustration with “the numerous checkpoints and the abominable wall.” There is a documentary film entitled “Wall” (the filmmaker is Simone Bitton, an Arab Jew), about the “abominable wall.”  It is available, free, streaming via your public library’s Kanopy app.

Wall explores the separation fence that is destroying one of the most historically significant landscapes in the world, while imprisoning one people and enclosing the other.

This is not a Ken-Burns-Type-Production with still photos and a musical soundtrack. Much of the movie features long pans of the wall itself, an immersion of sight and sound into what it is like to live with the wall. There are off-screen and on-screen conversations with children, Israelis (including a man who was born and still lives on a Kibbutz and a settler), and Palestinians. These are interspersed with interview segments with the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. He explains the why and how of the wall. (His manner and exit at the end of the film are interesting.) You will see teenage soldiers enforcing the “wall” concept at a checkpoint; how visitors are “greeted” at Rachel’s Tomb; and how the wall impacts people’s “commute” during their daily activities.

NOTE: Some people have called this film “sleepy.” Yes, it is slow compared to other films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no violence, just regular people trying to live with the wall. If you watch it, you can make up your own mind! 1 hour, 36 minutes, subtitled in English (Arabic, Hebrew)