Book Club on Palestine series — Prof. Rashid Khalidi‘s book, ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’
(If you have received this post by email, please click on the title to see the most up-to-date version).
The new series of the Book Club on Palestine was launched last Wednesday. In this series we are studying The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Prof. Rashid Khalidi. We were delighted to have Prof. Khalidi as a guest in our well-attended launch meeting. We had an opportunity to hear Prof. Khalidi speak with authority, and passion about the history of Zionist settler-colonialism, its state, Israel, the crime of genocide that is at the heart of all settler-colonialist projects, and about activism. If it were up to me, I would spend all day listening to Prof. Khalidi. Please watch the video of our first meeting, and feel free to share it as widely as you wish. The wider it reaches, the better.
To feel confident in our activism, we have to be well-informed. The Book Club on Palestine is a forum to learn, and become better grounded in knowledge. The Book Club is a welcoming, safe, and supportive community, where people are in the presence of others with whom they share human values, and concerns. It is an international forum that reaches humanity wherever it is. It crosses artificial state, religion, gender, race, and ethnicity barriers that have plagued our species for thousands of years, and that have unnecessarily separated us from one another.
Israel, and the Western world and its state and corporate media, have managed to turn what should be a simple issue of supporting victims of genocide, oppression and injustice into a toxic, emotive, ‘controversial’ issue. There is nothing inherently problematic, controversial, or ‘sensitive’ about supporting the Palestinian people. However, Israel has managed to twist supporting the Palestinian people into a matter of loyalty to Israel, which fraudulently claims to represent the ‘Jewish people’. Israel’s idea of Jewishness is racial. So, if you do not support Israel, you are labeled racist against Jews, or ‘antisemitic’. This is as perverse, as it is fraudulent. Racialism, and tribalism are not only fictitious and ludicrous, they have no place in a modern world that considers itself ‘progressive’. I have written about this in a few of my essays on this Substack channel.
Supporting the Palestinian people is a simple, and straightforward act of standing shoulder to shoulder with our fellow human beings, when they are subjected to injustice, oppression, abuse, and murder. Studying together enables us to dispel the fog of confusion, and emotionality that Israel has so successfully been able to spread, in order to disable opposition, and isolate the Palestinian people. Israel has not invented anything new. What Israel is doing is routinely done by all perpetrators of abuse, and by abusive systems.
I remember this fog of confusion well, and have been successful at removing it from my colonised, indoctrinated cult brain. It took learning the truth about the country that I grew up in, its history, culture, and the heinous crime that is at the heart of it. Learning the truth validated my instinctive, human feelings of empathy for the Palestinians. Knowledge and education gave me the strength to stand up for my values and principles, and act on my empathy.
As M. Scott Peck says, “Love is as love does”. Love is something we do. If we keep our empathy to ourselves, and feel too scared, or unconfident to act on it when others need our help, we are not loving them. Love in this sense is a verb, not a noun. As M. Scott Peck also says, “Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Or, we can choose not to. But it is a choice nonetheless. When people abandon those who need their help, they actively choose not to love them. I am passionate about helping activists feel confident, so they can be more effective. I am therefore grateful to have been invited to be a part of the Book Club on Palestine. It enables me to be loving, actively.
Israel cannot be allowed to win. A victory for Israel means the elimination of the Palestinian people. It also means generations of ongoing survivor trauma, inflicted on people whose only ‘crime’ was that they happened to live on a land the Zionists were determined to colonise with their own people. Historically, this nightmare began with Western support, and it continues with full, unashamed, and obscene Western support. Israel cannot complete its settler-colonial goal without Western support. We are citizens of countries that collude with Israel’s genocide. It is our job to stop our governments.
No meaningful, positive change in human history has ever come from the mainstream. It always takes a minority of determined, noisy people who would not go away, would not be silenced, and would not be fobbed off, to lead necessary change. Throughout human history, the mainstream has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing. If it were not for determined activists, women would still not be able to vote, and slavery would still be legal, to use two obvious examples.
If you wish to register for this Book Club on Palestine series, please use this link. The link does not seem to work on iPad (not sure about other tablets), but should work fine on computers. You can follow the Book Club on Palestine on Facebook. You are welcome to attend one, or more meetings. You will always be welcome. Needless to say I highly recommend the book. It is beautifully and clearly written, and it is very readable.
If you have trouble accessing any of the above links, you can email the Book Club on Palestine at: bcop0081@gmail.com and ask to be registered.
The Book Club on Palestine meetings are recorded. You can find past recordings under ‘videos’ on the Book Club for Palestine YouTube channel. It can take a few days for recordings to be posted on YouTube.
Thank you for reading!
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Thank you so much for reading my work!
Thank you for hosting again, Avigail. I'm so glad I was able to express my appreciation for his work to Prof Khalidi directly, and for the excuse to re-read the book. This was the first book I read when I started educating myself about Palestine a year ago and it is masterful at being both incredibly informative and highly readable.
A great host too.
"Let a 1000 flowers bloom"