The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It's not entirely clear who first said it, but the French aphorism seems all too true of the horrors we see, again, being acted out on the bodies and souls on Gazan Palestinians and traumatized Jewish Israelis.

Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, has as much access to broad scale American media as any Palestinian; he uses this to try to explain the tribulations of the land of his ancestors.  In 2020, he published his seventh history, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. It's more than slightly appalling to realize how little has changed in the interaction of Palestinians and Zionist Jews since a Jewish nationalism to be based in Palestine was first articulated the 19th century.

Khalidi's great-great great uncle Yusef Diya, was mayor of Jerusalem under the Ottoman empire. He corresponded with Theodor Herzl, the Austrian founder of European Zionism, and tried to warn Herzl that Palestine "is inhabited by others ..." The point was not taken then and remains obscured to this day, says the professor:

Either the Zionist leader meant deceive him by concealing the true aims of the Zionist movement, or Herzl simply did not see Yusuf Diya and the Arabs of Palestine as being worthy of being taken seriously."

When it came to pass in 1948, the founding of the Jewish Israeli state depended on the nakba, the cleansing, dispossession, and expulsion of as much of the Palestinian population as Zionists could manage. Once the Zionists had seized homes and power, they needed to deny the legitimacy of the history, culture, and society that had been displaced.

If they did not exist, then even well-founded Palestinian objections to the Zionist movement's plans could be simply ignored.

The Hundred Years War reports on a series of periods of Zionist upending of Palestinian life, beginning with the British imperial control of 1917-39, through the wars of 1947-1948, 1967, and 1982. Khalidi's account of the time of the first intifada (the locally led, predominantly non-violent protests 1987-1995) becomes more directly personal. He served as part of a Palestinian negotiating team involved in what came to be called "the Oslo process" which brought the old Palestinian leadership back inside the country without autonomy and with responsibility for tamping down local Palestinian unrest on behalf of the Israeli state.

His conclusions, written half a decade before current agonies, still seems on point:

 ... the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them over their heads, or pretending they do not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds.... for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past.

... While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people's extermination or expulsion by the other.

 • • •

Today (April 11, 2024) Khalidi writes in the Guardian that too little has changed since Hamas' raid of 10/7 and Israel's vengeful punitive war on Gaza.

... While much has changed since 7 October, the events of the past six months are not unique, and do not stand outside history. We can only properly understand them within the context of the century-long war waged on Palestine, notwithstanding efforts by Israel to deny the relevance of context, and to explain them in terms of the “barbarity” characteristic of its enemies. While the actions of Hamas and Israel since 7 October might appear to represent a change or a departure, they are consistent with decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, military occupation and theft of Palestinian land, with years of the siege and deprivation of the Gaza Strip, and with an often violent Palestinian response to these actions. ... an upheaval that might have been a catalyst of change may in fact produce continuity of colonisation and occupation, of the Israeli establishment’s exclusive reliance on force, and of armed Palestinian resistance.

... One constant in the 100 years of this war is that Palestinians have not been allowed to choose who represents them. ... In the absence of Palestinian agreement on a unified and credible political voice representing a national consensus, this would mean that crucial decisions about the future of their people will be made by outside powers, as has happened so many times in the past.

... Looking back over the past six months – at the cruel slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, the millions of people made homeless, the mass famine and disease induced by Israel – it is clear that this marks a new abyss into which the struggle over Palestine has sunk. While this phase reflects the underlying lineaments of previous ones in this 100 years’ war, its intensity is unique, and it has created deep new traumas. Not only does no end to this carnage appear in sight: we seem to be further than ever from a lasting and sustainable resolution, one based on dismantling structures of oppression and supremacy, and on justice, completely equal rights and mutual recognition.

Something has to give and it is not clear how. Neither national people is going away.