Before Their Diaspora

By Walid Khalidi. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1984. 352 pp. $60.00.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

This handsome volume is the most effective history of the Palestinians to appear in the United States, a potentially powerful weapon in combating the negative stereotypes about Palestine disseminated by Zionist propagandists. Assembled around a magnificent photographic display which reveals for anyone who didn't know it already that the Palestinians—men, women, and children—are a beautiful people, the book demonstrates that long before the Jews settled in any number in Palestine the native Palestinians had already developed scores of cities and towns and 800 villages and hamlets built of stone. Similarly with agriculture. For example, the author quotes a report by the U.S. Consul in Jerusalem a hundred years ago commending Palestinian farmers for developing the Jaffa orange (claimed for Jewish farmers in Zionist mythology) and noting that Florida fruit growers might profit from their tree-grafting techniques. Palestinians are depicted (correctly) as an intellectually notable people who honor in every way the great Hebrew and Christian sages of the past and who count as their forebearers not only the Arab conquerors in the seventh century but also the indigenous people who had lived earlier in Palestine, including the ancient Hebrews, and the Canaanites before them.

A Photographic History

The author of Before Their Diaspora, Dr. Walid Khalidi, includes 474 photographs in his book. Each is worth a thousand words in producing understanding, especially as the five sections of the book begin with an introduction, an excellent chronology of events from 1876 to 1948, and a commentary explaining the dates and circumstances of the photographs. The assembling, dating and selection of these photographs from among the several thousand available to Dr. Khalidi constitutes an astonishing work of scholarship. Many photographs, especially those from the latter years of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth centuries, have never before been published.

The whole tone of Before Their Diaspora is dispassionate and reconciliatory. For example, although Before Their Diaspora ends as a book on May 15, 1948, when Israel was established and the Palestinian diaspora began, Dr. Khalidi obviously writes from a more contemporary perspective of Israeli cruelty towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese accompanying the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Even so, Dr. Khalidi still calls for a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.

Having lost their land, the Palestinians have had to rely more than ever on their brains. Dr. Khalidi's book demonstrates that a love of education and talent in business and the professions began in Palestine a hundred years ago. Today the Palestinian professor in America and the Middle East (there are 150,000 Palestinians in the U.S.) is so omnipresent as to be almost a cliche. Less well known to younger Americans is the fighting Palestinian, covered in the third part of Dr. Khalidi's book.

Thousands of Palestinians died in a fierce rebellion against Britain from 1936 to 1939 to forestall the obvious British intention of creating a Jewish majority in Palestine. Britain eventually "won" that struggle but at so heavy a cost that London agreed to sensible limits on Jewish immigration. These limits were abandoned after World War II under pressure from the U.S. when Britain was exhausted and America, whose favor the Zionists had won, had almost overwhelming strength.

Less Expensive, Updated Edition Needed

At $60.00 a copy, Before Their Disapora may be too expensive to gain the broad readership it deserves. But those who do read it have an obligation to inform their fellow Americans that Palestinians will never abandon their dream of regaining their land, and that moderate intellectuals such as Dr. Walid Khalidi will slowly lose ground to passion and extremism the longer a negotiated solution to the Palestine Problem is delayed.

Since Before Their Diaspora ends in 1948, what is needed now is a similar book, with photographs, to bring us up to date. This would demonstrate the ever-widening reverberations of the tragic failure to assure the Palestinians a place they can call their own.

It would show piles of corpses from the Sabra and Shatila massacres; destroyed U.S. Embassies; assassinated U.S. soldiers and diplomats; kidnapped Americans and their anguished kin; the White House, the Congress, the State Department and U.S. embassies all over the Middle East behind concrete barriers; an Israel besieged more by a sick economy and internal divisions than by external foes; and zealous Jewish Americans, often deemed "Israel Firsters" in their passion for Israel. Such a book, if it could be assured wide circulation, might bring some balance back into U.S. Middle East policy.