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

It is no secret that American media--controlled by corporate interests throughout the world--is highly selective and biased in its reportage of international issues that impact us every day. The Iron Cage, along with The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, New and Revised Edition, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, and others, provide a carefully documented and refreshing perspective on the current core issue of the Middle-East. They are a sorely needed corrective lense for the media distortions called "news".

I am Jewish and the "state" of "Israel" is an embarrassment to worldwide Jewry. More and more Jews are waking up to this fact. This book does an excellent job of exposing the cruelty which Jews inflicted (and continue to inflict) on the indiginous Palestinians after Jews stole their land in 1948.

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.

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'.

I love anything this man writes. He is balanced, articulate, and thorough in his knowlege of the history of the Palestinian people. It is only biased, as some reviewers have called it, if you, the reader, are biased. I have studied this tragic struggle from both sides, and while each side has contibuted to the bloodbath, it cannot be possible for any rational, intelligent or sensitive mind not to see the responsibility that Israel holds. While the question of whether Israel has a right to exist is a moot point at this time, it must be acknowleged that it could not have come to be without the violent removal of hundreds of thousands of existing Arab people. How can you possibly ignore this tragic event? If this were not enough, Israel continues to do more and more ethnic cleansing, and is at the moment erecting a "fence" which is literally choking off any possible chance the Palestinians have of actually manintaining their own state. Yes, here is your land, you are now prisoners in it, you cannot consrtuct any infrarstrucure, you cannot conduct business, you have no fertile land to til, but here we generous Israelis give you your prison-now shut up and leave us to our business, and above all be grateful. I hope in my or my children's lifetime, we see an end to the misery that BOTH sides must endure.