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  • The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
  • Gershon Shafir
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, by Rashid Khalidi. Boston: Beacon, 2006. 281 pp. $24.95.

This is a bold book—perhaps even bolder than its author intends. While disclaiming to write a revisionist history as did the school that emerged in Israel in the past two decades, Khalidi comes close to producing one. The question that animates this broad-brush survey of Palestinian history from Mandatory times to date is: Why have Palestinians failed to establish an independent state not once but twice: both before the 1948 naqba and after Oslo? In particular, are the two failures related in ways that tell us something deeper about Palestinian political life?

This way of phrasing the “Palestinian question” is more commonly associated with writers hostile to Palestinian national aspirations; having them put forth by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, is sure to raise eyebrows. Khalidi clearly and repeatedly finds fault with the “iron cage” of the British Mandate and later U.S. pro-Israeli policies under which Palestinians labored, but does not buy into the view that consequently Palestinians have been reduced to the passive objects of larger forces. In fact, one of Khalidi’s explicit goals in writing this book was “to ascribe agency to the Palestinians . . . [who] had many assets, were far from helpless, and often faced a range of choices, some of which were better, or at least less bad, than others” (p. xxx). Without agency there can be no choices, and without choice there are no failures, only victims. By focusing on Palestinian decisions, Khalidi identifies failures but [End Page 206] also can “put the Palestinians at the center of a critical phase of their history” (p. xxx).

Khalidi’s inquiry leads him to examine three dilemmas and conclude that (a) Palestinians would have benefited from resorting to more militant resistance to the Mandatory authorities much before 1936; (b) the Palestinian leadership probably should have come to terms with the British in order to gain some measure of political representation; (c) it would have made no difference if Palestinians had accepted some form of Jewish national home within the context of an Arab state in Palestine before 1939, since Zionism was intent on creating a Jewish majority in the country and after Hitler’s rise to power a showdown was probably inevitable between the two national movements. Surprisingly, though, he chastises the Grand Mufti for singlehandedly rejecting the 1939 British White Paper which would have required give-and-take with both the British and Zionism. Even more surprising is that Khalidi does not examine the most momentous decision Palestinians made—their rejection of the UN November 29, 1947 partition resolution which also would have meant a historical compromise with Zionism—and ask whether it was a mistaken one.

Khalidi concludes, more forcefully than others before him, that the cooptation of the Palestinian notables by the British into newly invented Islamic institutions and leadership positions, and the notables’ reluctance to mobilize the Palestinian masses, rendered them ineffective. It was only in 1936–1939 that this class abyss seemed to have closed for a while as a result of a bottomup Palestinian uprising, but its defeat condemned Palestinians to the loss of the ability to exercise their agency from 1939 until the founding of the PLO.

Moving to the post-1948 era, Khalidi is critical of the PLO for getting involved in the conflicts in Jordan in 1970 and in Lebanon in 1982, and for aligning itself with Saddam after his conquest of Kuwait in 1990. While wrestling with the issues he raises, Khalidi’s arguments are often ambivalent and sometimes even self-contradictory, but he minces no words in criticizing the PLO for failing to evolve from a liberation movement to a para-state and eventually to a full-fledged independent state (p. 150). The quasi-state the PLO developed in Lebanon was a “patronage-laden and largely ineffective system rife with cronyism” (p. 204), but when the time came to create the Palestinian...

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