After several years as an adviser and spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Rashid Khalidi took up a professorship of history at the University of Chicago, and later moved to Columbia, where he succeeded Edward Said. In some of his earlier works, writes Benny Morris, Khalidi showed an ability to express “glimmerings” of criticism of the Palestinian national movement. But no sign of reflection or scholarly detachment can be found in his newest book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance:

[T]he book turns out to be yet another somewhat turgid recitation of the traditional Palestinian narrative, its mantras being Western and Zionist guilt for everything that has befallen the Palestinians and a passionate, personal assertion of Palestinian innocence. . . . Khalidi’s bottom line is that Zionism is a “colonialist” enterprise, a doctrine enunciated in the Palestine National Charter of 1964. From this original sin stem all the evils of Zionism and all Palestinian suffering.

Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition.

To fit the facts to his narrative, Khalidi employs “a number of misinterpretations and distortions.” For instance:

Khalidi stresses that “over 12,000” Palestine Arabs served in the British army in World War II—a figure that is probably double the true figure, with most serving as service personnel, not combatants, in bases inside Palestine. Khalidi produces this number to obfuscate the much larger truth—that, to judge by impressionistic evidence (in the absence of opinion polls), most Arabs, including most of Palestine’s Arabs, supported Germany and an Axis victory in World War II, if only because they hated the British, who had just crushed their revolt, and hated the Jews, who were their antagonists in Palestine.

Apart from misinterpretations and distortions, the book contains a series of whoppers, almost all of them politically tendentious. For instance, . . . Khalidi tells us that by running a slate of candidates in the parliamentary elections of 2006 Hamas implicitly “accepted . . . the two-state solution,” which is to say Israel’s existence. In fact, Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist party and terrorist organization that governs the Gaza Strip, has never gone back on its 1988 founding charter’s espousal of the destruction of Israel as its primary goal.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.