by Brady Yauch

Created on: January 19, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Many of the commentaries on the current Palestine-Israel conflict tend to be polemical, often resulting in one group pointing a finger at the other, and ultimately, merely contributing to the present impasse between the two camps. Too often, Israel is presented as a military pawn of American foreign policy and the Palestinians as supporters of terrorist-style resistance. The result is a perpetual simplification of the deep historical evolution of both countries (or more simply, the creation of one country at the expense of another) and how both sides have contributed to the failure of reaching a solution.

What Rashid Khalidi attempts to do in The Iron Cage is piece together the fragmented and politicized history of the Palestinians in order to reach an understanding of why they still don't have a self-governing nation to call their own. But he does so without the ideological stubbornness that commonly permeates such a discussion. Khalidi doesn't present the Palestinians simply as victims of an aggressive Israeli movement created after the end of the Second World War. Although Khalidi (obviously) says that, ultimately, it was the result of this internationally-supported military conquest in 1948 that forced millions of Palestinians to flee from their homeland; he doesn't neglect to expose the many Palestinian errors that allowed such a military coup to come to fruition.
Khalidi provides the reader with a multitude of factors that allowed the state of Israel to be created and how the Palestinians came to be second-class citizens in their own land. He takes us back to the end of the First World War and the policies of the (then world superpower) British government and their support for the Zionist political movement, most notably in the Balfour Declaration. Khalidi recounts some of the obvious disparities between the two groups, ranging from their economic backgrounds to their literacy rates to the power of their international allies. What he shows is that from the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, the Palestinians were fighting an uphill battle. But he doesn't simply say that Palestine had no chance to halt the train of Zionism. He admits that such of feat would have been difficult, but not impossible.
Khalidi believes that it wasn't simply the economic and military power of the Zionist movement that caused the displacement of the Palestinian people and nation. He looks at the Arab states surrounding Palestine and their reluctance to oppose the colonial

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>