The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The Security Council mandated two guests today.

The historian Rashid Kaleidi will review the long war in the

Palestinian people and the political scientist

Orili Dyer, we'll talk about Hezbollah in the wake of Israel's assassination of its leader, Hassan

Nasrallah. My first guest is the distinguished historian Rashid Kaleidi.

Kalei's family was a member of the old Palestinian elite that was destroyed in 1948

when Israel, freshly born as a state, expelled three quarters of million

Palestinians from their homes to make way for the settlers.

Along with the larger history, he writes extensively about that family in his book,

The Hundred Years War in Palestine,

a history of settler colonialism and resistance 1917 to 2017, which is

published by Metropolitan Books in 2020.

It's not a new book, though behind the news has never been impressed with novelty for novelty's sake,

but it has acquired a new relevance given the latest phase of that century-long war.

Kalidi has been an academic for much of his life, but he's also been deeply involved in Palestinian politics over the years.

He's just retired from teaching at Columbia, where he now has a merit of status.

We talk about the Balfour Declaration.

That document issued by the British government in

1917 by the Foreign Secretary Alfred Balfor announced its commitment to the

establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. While there were some Jews living there,

they only accounted for about 6% of the total population. The declaration

...