Iron Cage : The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood ISBN: 9780807003152 Platform/Publisher: PQ ebrary / Beacon Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a time Subjects: Palestinian Arabs : Politics and government : 20th century.;
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Rashid Khalidi is the author of seven books about the Middle East, including Palestinian Identity , Brokers of Deceit, Resurrecting Empire , The Iron Cage , and Sowing Crisis. His writing on Middle Eastern history and politics has appeared in the New York Times , Boston Globe , Los Angeles Times , Chicago Tribune , and many journals. For his work on the Middle East, Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York and is editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies .
