Customer Reviews

The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

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It's so interesting to see the reviews for Khalidi's books as opposed to Chomsky or even Morris. People review based on their personal opinion of Rashid Khalidi and not the book itself. People, he is not a politician, but a historian, and his arguments are historically, well argued. Its fine to disagree, if you have a point, make it, but for the readers on Amazon its tiring to see the attacks and praise on the author and not on the book, and quite irrelevant really.
I personally found this book to be quite well balanced on both sides, Khalidi aruges that the Palestinians are partially responsible for their failed state, due to poor political decision making, so how can this be an entirely biased thesis? I really wish people would read the books they review.

In the long introduction to his very repetitive book in which he sets out to explain why the Palestinians have failed in their struggle for statehood, Professor Khalidi of Columbia University explains how the odds were stacked against them as the result of the policies of Britain, the United States, the surrounding Arab states and of course of the yishuv and then of Israel. All of this, he says, is well known, though not as well-known as it should be. However, he writes that he would focus on the role the Palestinians played themselves, and will `put the Palestinians at the centre of their own story'.

To what extent does he manage in the main part of the book to fulfil that aim? The first chapter does indeed look at the internal weaknesses of the Palestinians compared with the Jewish immigrants: they were less educated (though better than the Arabs in the neighbouring countries); they had fewer economic resources; the majority was rural rather than urban; they were less united; and they failed to build up the infrastructures of future statehood.

But then in the second chapter, he places the blame for this latter failing on the British Mandate. The Mandate for Palestine incorporated the entire text of the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the national character of the Jews, while failing to mention the national character of the Palestinians. The mandatory authorities insisted in all the encounters with Palestinian nationalists that acceptance of the Balfour Declaration was a prerequisite if the Palestinians were to be given representative institutions and the kind of status that the Jewish Agency enjoyed. The Palestinians never would provide such acceptance, and as a result, the author says, the British would not recognize any representative body such as the Palestinian Arab Congress, and they always denied the Palestinians the same status as the Jewish Agency enjoyed and which enabled the Jews to build up the infrastructure of the future state. In Egypt, Transjordan, or Iraq, the British had installed native rulers and officials through whom they ruled these territories, but who would provide an infrastructure and a focus for there future independence of these states. The Palestinians, by contrast, did not have even that.

At this stage the reader might ask, `What about the Supreme Muslim Council, which was recognized by the British, was an elected body, and whose leader, the Mufti, did in fact become the spokesman of Palestinian nationalism?' Professor Khalidi presents the Mufti as, for the most part, a British stooge, until, in the mid-1930s he could no longer contain the political passions of his followers. Throughout the second chapter, Professor Khalidi mocks the claim that the British tried to be even-handed, and portrays them as pro-Jewish and anti-Palestinian. He even describes (p.106) the `alliance' between the British and the yishuv growing `stronger and more determined as the situation of the Jews of Europe worsened dramatically' during the 1930s. All of this will read oddly to those who recall that from the Churchill White Paper of 1922 onwards, the British steadily whittled down their interpretation and implementation of the Balfour Declaration.

The third chapter, headed `A Failure of Leadership', explains the rivalry, dating back to Otttoman times, between different Arab notables, but again emphasises how the British played on these rivalries, putting many of them on their payroll, to prevent Arab unity; and anyway these notables, even if they wished the British out, were unwilling to mobilize the Arab masses and were eager to discredit such leaders as emerged.

These divisions still operated during the great Arab Revolt against the British from 1936 to 1939. The British were so hard pressed by the Revolt that they armed the Zionists to help them. In the end the Revolt was crushed: some 5,000 fighters were killed (sources I have read put the figure at 2,850), their leaders were imprisoned or deported to the Seychelles, and factions within the Arab movement assassinated their rivals. Professor Khalidi sees the events of 1947-49 as `in an important sense no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936-1939' (p.123).

In May 1939, with war approaching, the MacDonald White Paper offered the Arabs an independent multiracial state within ten years. The notables and the neighbouring Arab rulers (who for the first time were drawn into the Palestinian Question, from which time onwards they played a key role in frustrating Palestinian ambitions) were for accepting the White Paper; but the Mufti, fearing to lose control of the militants still in the field, rejected it. Khalidi blames him for this, though he does say that there was little hope that, given the certain resistance of the Zionists who by now made up 30% of the population of Palestine, the proposal could ever work. In any case, the Mufti's flight to and alliance with Nazi Germany contributed to the fact that after the war none of the victorious powers would support the Palestinians against the State of Israel.

The trenchant analysis in the last two chapters shows how the high hopes placed in Arafat and the PLO (who for the first time were internationally recognized as the representatives of the Palestinian people) were dashed by a long series of mistakes, first by the collective leadership and then, after 1991, by Arafat personally (pp.146 to 149). High among these Professor Khalidi places the Oslo Agreement, negotiated secretly by inexperienced Palestinian representatives behind the backs of the more sophisticated negotiators (who included Khalidi) who were involved in the Madrid-Washington Conferences from 1991 to 1993. The decade of negotiations that followed the Oslo Agreements led to the Palestinians `negotiating for an end to Israel's occupation while Israel reinforced it' by further settlements and appropriations of Palestinian land, culminating with the Wall, intended to keep the Palestinian terrorists out of Israel proper, but in fact being the symbol of the Iron Cage in which the fragmented Palestinians areas are trapped.

This is a marvellous read on an extremely complex and massively relevant topic. I.e., it got great reviews from the New York Times. I was much surprized to see the rant and attack on it here on Amazon as the only review at this moment in early October 2006...however, the book is just out. It is unfortunate that the single reviewer so far does nothing but blow their stack. Viewing the book, which is amazingly middle of the road, it is certainly somewhat critical of both sides in a conflict but highly informative. Given that the topic itself is so over heated even a book such as this by Khalidi will receive from one group or another being discussed angry rants: it would be unfortunate if any reader was stopped by that type of response. Rather it is understandable that anger arises, and arises in the context of the topic. This in itself signals the desperate need for a book such as this...a brave and noble attempt to balance and assess histories of people who for the most part are incapable of doing that themselves.
Khalidi's is a book about two histories, intertwined to the point of suffocation and anhilation; namely, that of the Palestinians and to some extent the Israeli's very little thanks. Yet, such responses are symptoms of the injury and wounds that don't heal. And it is because each side refuses the Other, the experience of the Other, and the arguments of the Other, that such a book or books are desperately needed. Khalidi is an eminant scholar and a highly respected one. It is unlikely that any one can do better than he does in covering the topics he covers with considerable skill and sensitivity. This is a must read, especially for those who most violently refuse. One might say that Khalidi is attempting to de-toxify one of the most historically toxic problems in the Middle East. No less important, he is a major, highly nuanced and skilled historian with a strong ethnographic capability, the book is also fascinating for those of us who wish to know more about the land of Palestine before it became so intensely impacted with conflict.

It is painfully apparent that the reviewers who dislike Mr. Khalidi's book do so out of their desire to act as one-sided apologists for the Israeli state, instead of seriously engaging in a historical debate of the issues. If you are interested in the Truth about the core of today's problems in Israel / Palestine, buy and read this book.

Professor Rashid Khalidi, a historian at Columbia University in the City of New York, has written a brilliant account of the Palestinian people's struggle for national self-determination.

He shows how in the 1920s and 1930s, the British Empire deprived the Palestinians of all democracy to stop them defeating the Zionist project. The Mandate for Palestine, like the Balfour Declaration, made no reference to Palestinians or Arabs, only to `non-Jewish communities' who had only civil and religious, not national or political, rights. By contrast, both Mandate and Declaration asserted that the `Jewish people' had the right to a `national home'.

Khalidi notes the British Empire's `vast experience in thwarting the will of majorities in different countries'. He shows in detail how it divided, diverted and distracted all opposition to its rule. The Empire's rulers always presented the colonies as made up of incompatible religious and ethnic communities, who would be at each other's throats without the benevolent presence of the British.

Khalidi dissects the Zionist myth that `seven Arab armies' invaded Israel in 1948-49. The fiercest fighting was the Jordanian army's defence of areas assigned by the UN to the Arab state, and of the UN-defined area around Jerusalem, against Israeli offensives.

He records that in 1991, the first Bush Government pledged "to oppose settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967, which remains an obstacle to peace." But the US government broke its word: it backed the Israelis throughout the 1990s building new settlements to reinforce their illegal occupation.

Finally, he shows how, at the behest of the Israeli government, the USA imposed rules for negotiations on the Palestinians which "indefinitely froze dealing with any of the issues of substance between the two sides (the final status issues: occupation, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, water, and permanent borders), while there was no concomitant freeze on the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem." In April 2004, Bush II openly tore up his father's pledge when he wrote to Sharon recognising the `new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers'.

Khalidi does it again! Like in his previous books, he informs the general reader about the real story behind the headlines. Smear campaigns against Khalidi by groups like Campus Watch seem to be part of a strategy to convince the US public that there is no such thing as a rational, reasonable Palestinian. That is precisely what New-York-born-and-raised Khalidi is - and an important voice for the public debate in America. His former colleagues at the University of Chicago (many of them Jewish) hold him in high esteem.

Khalidi poses the question of why Palestinian political development is so weak, certainly not up to the standards of contemporary high-income republics.

By itself, this question might not be very interesting, as the high-income countries' level of political development is so difficult to achieve that its absence hardly needs explanation. People who think that England and France set the norm may not remember those countries' internal wars of religion in the 1600s and the ruthless methods used to integrate their territories. Thus, the Palestinian experience should hardly surprise us.

Khalidi's purpose in answering the question about political development, however, is to show what the Palestinians' efforts have been.

Khalidi's main point is that there was no sustained effort to create a coherent Palestinian political structure in the first forty years after the early 1920s, when partition first created a territory termed "Palestine." He relates that Palestinians initially tried to work through the British rather than to set themselves up as independent. Then, after Israeli forces expelled them in the 1947-48 run-up to Israel's formal independence on May 15, 1948, Palestinians' lives were simply too disrupted for political organization.

In the subsequent period from the early 1960s on, Khalidi gives the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) credit for three essential achievements in political organization: (1) winning most Palestinians' recognition of the PLO as their first-ever central point for political cooperation, (2) winning Arab countries' recognition of a Palestinian national cause, and (3) finally winning global recognition that the Palestinian nation existed.

At the same time, Khalidi also identifies three failings: (1) not setting up internal democracy and efficient service bureaucracies, (2) not being categorical enough when they gave up armed resistance to the Israelis after the mid-1970s, and (3) neglecting Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza when Israel allowed the PLO leadership to return in the mid-1990s.

Khalidi's final chapter is a separate essay on Israel's progress toward absorbing the West Bank, the role of the peace process in promoting this, and the likelihood that it has made a Palestinian state impossible.

Returning to the history, it is unfortunate that Khalidi does not clarify the impact of partition, which separated Palestine from the rest of the Arab nation, including the political centers -- Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo. Khalidi points out that the Arab provisional government in Damascus opposed partition and wanted a unified nation. But Khalidi does not say what the people suddenly isolated in Palestine thought about the Arab nation. In particular, did they have the sense that building separate Palestinian political institutions would work against Arab goals and play into British hands?

Indeed, given the degree of longstanding social interaction across the borders partition created, is it objectively reasonable to speak of Palestine in 1920 as a nation? Or was it rather one portion of a partitioned nation?

The writing in Khalidi's historical chapters is indeed somewhat repetitive (a carryover from Arabic poetry's style?), but interested readers will persevere.

I will not duplicate the excellent summations of this important work by Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi. Nor do I challenge his research or analysis of a complex situation. What I will add (and concur with another reviewer) is that it is a very slow and tedious read -- repetitious, lacking in vivid narration, and plagued with ackwardly constructed and convoluted arguments that make it difficult to even skim. The Iron Cage is worth reading to glean the important points the author makes about why Palestinians have achieved so little in their long, sad history, and their failure to achieve sustained good leadership. But, to be honest, reading this book was an uphill battle. I was very motivated because of my interest in the topic, otherwise I would have put it aside and looked for another well informed book written by a person with a better feel for the written language. (That being said, I heard the author discuss his book on C-SPAN and found him more compelling as a speaker.)

I really enjoyed this account of Palestinian history, but it was a struggle to overcome the first two chapters of poor editing (though otherwise well researched). The book provided me with a greater understanding of the Palestinian struggle, it's failures, the contributions -both external (Zionism, European and US collaboration)- & internal (a lack of experience in state-running and the resulting chaos & infighting). I had read Fisk and Pappe's accounts of the Oslo accords and their stranglehold on the Palestinian way of life, but Khalidi provided even further insider knowledge into how everyday life has been controlled and restricted with breathtaking similarities to apartheid. The cynical nature of pre-talk agreements between Israel and the US prior to coming to the tables with whatever Palestinian delegation was sent (usually the wrong one) ensured that Israel was starting the debate on a far superior footing to an already muted Palestinian delegation. "Iron Cage" does do justice to the manner in which Palestinians now live, to Europe, Zionists (not world Jewry as is constantly falsely claimed), and the US's eternal shame.

Content Summary: Rashid Khalidi's account provides some valuable historical context for the Palestinian struggle for Independence from the 1920s to the Revolt of 1936 to 1939. This is where is book is at its strongest (Chapter 1-4). He offers some summary analysis and very general overview of the years after the 1948 war - including some on Arafat and the Oslo accords.

Analytical Review: Khalidi's book is strongest in Chapter 1-4, as mentioned. I was disappointed that he glossed over the very critical years of Arafat, the PLO, the intifada, Hamas, and terrorist attacks on Israel (be it the Olympics or the suicide bomber attacks). He lost a lot of narrative events he could have developed critically. Additionally, his opening remarks about U.S. support of Al-Qaeda and OBL seem very off-the-mark, almost implying that we directly funded both. It is one thing to say we were both supporting the war against the Soviets, another to supply concrete evidence of a link - which he implies but for which he furnishes no evidence. This made me somewhat wary of his objectivity and accuracy. After that he recovered somewhat, and his conclusion that peace is very difficult right now, is an observation most would share. I would say this book is worth the investment - but more reading is necessary to fill in the obvious gaps he leaves in the Palestinian account.