The Iron Cage Quotes

“In all the media coverage of militias and militants, Hamas, Fateh, and the Israeli army, one forgets that they operate in the midst of these large numbers of innocent people, crammed into 360 square kilometers, an area “slightly more than twice the size of Washington, DC.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“Most of the population of the Strip is not originally from there, but rather from a swath of villages in the southern regions of Israel, whose inhabitants were driven or fled there during the fighting of 1948–49, and who were never allowed to return to their homes. The Gaza Strip is thus not only a victim of a forty-year occupation that started in June 1967. Most of its 1.5 million people constitute the single largest concentration of the refugees produced as a direct, inevitable result of creating a Jewish state in 1948 in a country with a nearly two-thirds Arab majority.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“If there is ill will toward the United States in many Middle Eastern countries, it is a mistake to try to explain it by reference to Islamic doctrine, to the alleged propensity of Muslims for violence, or to the supposed centrality of the concept of jihad to Islam. One need look no further than the corrupt and autocratic regimes propped up by the United States all over the Middle East, and at American policies regarding Palestine, Iraq, and other issues that are highly unpopular in the region.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“This basic asymmetry with respect to archives is a reflection of the asymmetry between the two sides. While one side, operating through a modern nation-state, has used its documentary and other resources to produce a version of its history that has subtly shaped the way the world sees the conflict, a version that is now ironically being undermined from within via use of these same resources, the production of a standard “official” Palestinian narrative was never really possible on the other side.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“Political Islam has served as a vehicle for resistance as well as collaboration in different eras of Palestinian history, notably in the form of the grassroots combination of Islamic revival and nationalism espoused by the charismatic Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, whose “martyrdom” in 1935 can be said to have inspired the revolt of 1936–39. The same can be said of the more recent Islamic Jihad movement, an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founders were disgusted with the Brotherhood’s quietism and passivity toward—and, some even alleged, collaboration with—the Israeli occupation. Their attacks on Israeli military personnel in 1986 and 1987 helped spark the first Palestinian popular uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 and helped provoke the transformation of the major part of the Muslim Brotherhood organization into Hamas. Hamas itself has played a major part in the resistance to Israel, although some of the tactics that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have pioneered in the Palestinian arena, particularly suicide attacks on civilians inside Israel, have been both morally indefensible and disastrously counterproductive strategically.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“Islamic institutions, leaders, and movements, far from being invariably anticolonial, radical, anti-Western, or anti-Zionist (which of course they often were), were also at various times over the past century seen as useful allies by the Western powers, by Israel, and by conservative Arab regimes aligned with the West.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“The sad fact is that, alien as the attacks of September 11 may seem, they were in fact a refraction, distorted beyond recognition over the years, of policies and practices emanating from Washington, the blowback, more horrible than anyone could have imagined, of covert operations gone disastrously awry.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“The Palestinians 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.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“The unfortunate case of Palestine illustrates strikingly the long-term perils and pitfalls of great powers following shortsighted policies that are not based on their own professed principles, and are not consonant with international law and legitimacy. This was just as true during the many decades during which Britain dominated the Middle East, as it has been of the more than half a century since then, during which time the United States has been the preeminent power in that region.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“Great Britain enabled the Zionists to create the springboard from which they were ultimately able to take over the entire country at the expense of its indigenous population. It thereby helped significantly to produce a conflict that only became more bitterly intractable as time went on.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“The United States never unequivocally and in practice supported the self-determination and independent, viable statehood of the Palestinians, and often acted to undermine this and other universal principles of international law and legitimacy.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“In making policy on Palestine over most of the past century, leaders in both Britain and the United States were driven primarily by powerful strategic and domestic political considerations, rather than by principle. The strategic considerations included the goals of dominating this crucial piece of territory, keeping it in friendly hands, and denying it to others. The political ones included cold calculations of the considerable domestic electoral and financial advantages to be obtained from supporting Zionism, as against the negligible domestic political costs. There also existed naive sympathy for Zionism among many British and American politicians, based on a particularly Protestant immersion in the Bible. This sympathy was often combined with a laudable desire to make amends for the persecution of the Jews in different parts of Europe (often combined with a less laudable, indeed reprehensible, desire to have the victims of persecution find haven somewhere other than Great Britain or the United States). The result of such attitudes, which necessarily ignored or downplayed vital realities on the ground in Palestine, has been an enduring tragedy.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“Palestinians 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.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“My argument is that rather than being compared with the yishuv, a community to which they were not in any way similar (but with which they were in deadly conflict for control of the country), Palestinian society should instead be compared with other Arab societies at an analogous stage of development.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood