At 3:33 p.m. on Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden exited Nantucket Bookworks in Nantucket, Mass., carrying a copy of the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, per the White House pool.
According to the pool report, which went out after Shabbat started in Nantucket shortly before 4 p.m., a photograph that a reporter took revealed that Biden was carrying the book in question.
The 2020 book, which bears the subtitle “a history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917–2017,” is a “landmark” history of the “100 years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost U.S. historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history,” according to the publisher’s site.
It is also “the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective,” which “upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory,” per the publisher. “Instead, Khalidi traces 100 years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.”
Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote that the book’s author is a “former PLO spokesman,” who “served in that position when the PLO was a designated terror group here in the United States.”
Until recently, Khalidi was the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University.
“Why did he buy it? Why didn’t Obama just give him one of his dog-eared copies?” wrote Clifford May, the founder and president of FDD.
Khalidi told the New York Post, “I do not speak to the Post (or the Times for that matter), so this is not for publication, but my reaction is that this is four years too late.” (The Post noted it “did not offer or agree to any terms conditioning that response as off the record or on background.”
Dumisani Washington, founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, wrote that Biden appearing with the book suggests that the president is not a friend of Jews and Israel.
“Elections matter,” wrote Adam Mossoff, a law professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “Israel and the United States missed a metaphorical bullet of nihilism and antisemitism. Never forget the gaslighting by the Biden-Harris administration over the past year, and especially by Kamala Harris who periodically dropped her mask and did reveal her true beliefs.”
‘The double pander continues’
In a 2020 review of the work in question in Jewish Review of Books, the Israeli historian Benny Morris noted that Khalidi has downplayed his PLO connection in the past.
The book “turns out to be yet another somewhat turgid recitation of the traditional Palestinian narrative, its mantras being Western and Zionist guilt for everything that has befallen the Palestinians and a passionate, personal assertion of Palestinian innocence,” Morris wrote.
“Khalidi’s bottom line is that Zionism is a ‘colonialist’ enterprise, a doctrine enunciated in the Palestine National Charter of 1964,” he added. “From this original sin stem all the evils of Zionism and all Palestinian suffering.”
The New York Review of Books published an interview with Khalidi online, which will be in its Dec. 19 print issue, in which the author was asked how he responded to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been surprised because I’ve always expected that the intensity of Israeli repression would eventually produce a response, but I was certainly surprised by the extent of that response,” he said. “The overrunning of Israeli military bases and border settlements was something I certainly did not expect.”
“That was my first reaction. My second reaction, when the reports began to come in of the extent of civilian casualties, was shock,” Khalidi’ said. “And I was deeply concerned: I knew that it would have an enormous impact here in the U.S. and would lead to an absolutely ferocious Israeli military response.”
“The savagery of what Israel has done, its intentional targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure, is routine,” he added. “The level of it was unprecedented, obviously; the Palestinian death toll and now the growing Lebanese death toll are beyond what we’ve seen before. But that they would attack desalination plants and sewage plants and universities and demolish mosques and so on didn’t surprise me in the least.”
If what Israel has done “doesn’t fit the description of genocide, just throw out the Genocide Convention,” he said. “It’s absolutely worthless.”
Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, wrote that Biden said on Nov. 12 that “you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. I’m a Zionist.” And then, on Nov. 29, “Biden picks up The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” by “former PLO spokesman and anti-Zionist fanatic Rashid Khalidi.”
“The double pander continues right up to Jan. 20,” Pipes wrote.
