The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood by Rashid Khalidi

From the Publisher

A timely and compelling examination of the Palestinian dilemma, named one of the 100 best books of the year by Publishers Weekly

In Resurrecting Empire, Rashid Khalidi dissected the failures of colonial policy over the entire span of the modern history of the Middle East, predicted the meltdown in Iraq that we are now witnessing with increasing horror, and offered viable alternatives for achieving peace in the region. His newest book, The Iron Cage, hones in on Palestinian politics and history. Once again Khalidi draws on a wealth of experience and scholarship to elucidate the current conflict, using history to provide a clear-eyed view of the situation today.

The story of the Palestinian search to establish a state begins in the era of British control over Palestine and stretches between the two world wars, when colonial control of the region became increasingly unpopular and power began to shift toward the United States. In this crucial period, and in the years immediately following World War II, Palestinian leaders were unable to achieve the long-cherished goal of establishing an independent state—a critical failure that throws a bright light on the efforts of the Palestinians to create a state in the many decades since 1948. By frankly discussing the reasons behind this failure, Khalidi offers a much-needed perspective for anyone concerned about peace in the Middle East.

“Rashid Khalidi is a historian’s historian. The Iron Cage is his most accomplished effort to date . . . Magisterial in scope, meticulous in its attention to detail, and decidedly dispassionate in its analysis, The Iron Cage is destined to be a benchmark of itsgenre.” —Joel Schalit, Tikkun

“At heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians . . . have failed to achieve an independent state.” —Steven Erlanger, New York Times

“Khalidi, tackling ‘historical amnesia,’ brilliantly analyses the structural handicap which hobbled the Palestinians throughout 30 years of British rule . . . Khalidi restores the Palestinians to something more than victims, acknowledging that for all their disadvantages, they have played their role and can (and must) still do so to determine their own fate.” —Ian Black, Guardian

“Khalidi uses history to provide a clear-eyed view of the region and assess the prospects for peace. He strives successfully for even-handedness.” —Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon’s Trumpet and Make No Law

“. . . we have to open a dialogue with Hamas—not to embrace it, but to lay out a gradual pathway that will bring it into relations with Israel. As Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Palestinian expert and author of The Iron Cage points out: ‘If we let the Palestinian Authority be destroyed, and then we keep Hamas isolated’—even though it won a democratic election that we sponsored—‘we will end up with the hard boys, the gangs you see today on the streets of Gaza, who respond to no authority at all.’” —New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman

The New York Times - Steven Erlanger

While his book is more of an analysis than an exercise in original research, Mr. Khalidi provides another service for Western readers. He gives a relatively dispassionate description of Palestine in the periods of Ottoman and British rule, and of the nature of Arab society before the combination of Zionism and Nazism led an increasing flow of European-born Jews to settle in the Holy Land…This is not to say that Mr. Khalidi…is without passion. His book is bound to stir angry responses from those who think that any Palestinian effort to fight the soldiers of the Israeli occupation represents terrorism, or from those, Muslim or Jew, who think that their divinity gave all of Palestine exclusively to them.

Publishers Weekly

Historian Khalidi (Resurrecting Empire), a leading expert on the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, brings vital perspective to Palestinian attempts to achieve independence and statehood. Admirably synthesizing the latest scholarship and concentrating on the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) established by the League of Nations after WWI, Khalidi describes the process by which a newly arrived European Jewish minority overcame, with help from its imperial ally, the claims and rights of the native Arab majority in what became Israel and the occupied territories. Khalidi shows Palestinians under the mandate facing comparatively severe systemic, institutional and constitutional obstacles to the development of any para-state structure contrary to British promises of Arab independence and Article 4 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Meanwhile, the Jewish minority could count on a system biased in its favor to develop the structures that became those of the Israeli government in 1948 amid violent expulsion of over half the indigenous population. In bringing this narrative up to the present, Khalidi rigorously details the missteps of the Palestinians and their leadership. Khalidi curiously refrains from drawing any detailed proposal of his own to resolve the ongoing conflict, but his first-rate and up-to-date historical and political analysis of the Palestinian predicament remains illuminating. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

The larger conceptual framework into which The Iron Cage mustbe fitted is a history of two contending nationalisms that have not yet reached an acceptable accommodation. Zionism resulted in Israel, but the Palestinian struggle for statehood got off to a shakier start and remains unfinished. These two unequal contenders, moreover, have always been caught up in regional and international politics. Khalidi concentrates on the Palestinian side of this complex sui generis case. His image of the "iron cage" is meant to demonstrate how the Palestinians faced and still face unusually imposing obstacles — an argument that can hardly be denied. Yet Khalidi's book is no exercise in victimology. He is tough on the British, the Israelis, and the Americans, but he is scarcely less hard-hitting in appraising the Palestinians, including such leaders as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and Yasir Arafat. The final chapter provides an excellent critique of the Palestine Liberation Organization's labored moves toward the recognition of Israel and of the idea, increasingly bruited, that a two-state solution is no longer feasible.

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Table of Contents