So Joe Biden’s reading Rashid Khalidi. You should too.
American Jews need a better understanding of the Palestinian narrative
President Joe Biden walks out of Nantucket Bookworks with son Hunter Biden, grandson Beau and daughter-in-law Melissa Cohen Biden in Nantucket, Mass., on Nov. 29. Biden is holding the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. Photo by Mandel Ngan
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman December 3, 2024
President Joe Biden walked out of a Nantucket bookshop on Black Friday carrying a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s book The 100 Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017 — and all hell broke loose.
The outrage came both from some Israel supporters — who accused Biden of harboring pro-Palestinian sympathies all along — and from pro-Palestinians. Khalidi, a Palestinian-American who taught at Columbia University for decades, summed up their response in a quote in the New York Post: “Four years too late.”
The tempest was quickly pushed out of the news by Biden’s Sunday pardon of his son, Hunter, but make no mistake: The issues Khalidi’s book raises will still be making headlines long after Hunter Biden pops up as a Jeopardy! clue.
That abiding relevance is just one reason why American Jews and Israel supporters should take a page from Biden, rather than lambast him, and read Khalidi’s book, now.
“Reading Khalidi,” Aziza Hassan, executive director of the Muslim-Jewish dialogue group NewGround, said in an email, “is one important step toward nuanced thinking and productive engagement. There is nothing more important right now if we seek to move together toward something better.”
“There is no better or more important introduction to this history from the Palestinian perspective than Khalidi’s book,” Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund, wrote in an email.
“From the Palestinian perspective” is the key. Most American Jews — the vast majority of whom are supportive of Israel — are raised with only one narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and are therefore unable to understand, or even consider, why Israel engenders so much opposition on college campuses, in the media, and abroad. Like the Passover story of the child who does not know what to ask, too many American Jews can’t even fathom that there is a different point of view, based on a different experience and interpretation of the same historical events.
In his book, published in 2020, Khalidi examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a prolonged settler-colonial project supported by imperial powers. He understands that Israel is unique in being a national project that enlisted colonial powers in its aid — a move that always struck me as realpolitik genius, but which Khalidi links to the systematic marginalization, displacement and subjugation of the Palestinian population.
He tracks the Zionist movement’s pre-statehood collaboration with imperial powers, and offers a revelatory history of Palestinian nationalism and resistance — challenging the myth, which I swallowed along with my first falafel, that Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” And he examines the United States’ role in enabling Israel’s expansionist designs, including through years of peace negotiations.
He is also — and few of his Jewish detractors will alert you to this — critical of many aspects of the Palestinian national movement, and especially its leadership. “The existing strategies of both of the leading Palestinian political factions, Fatah and Hamas, have come to nothing,” he writes in the concluding chapter.
Many American Jews will surely agree with that last point. But they would disagree, or challenge, many of the book’s other arguments, as do I. And that’s the nature of the history business. It’s all about narration, and different historians will emphasize or interpret historical events and personalities differently, especially as new facts come to light.
Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, for instance, that Khalidi underplays the toxicity of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the World War II-era Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whose propaganda campaign against the Jews, under the protection of the Nazi regime, helped poison Jewish-Arab relations. A recent book by Yardena Schwartz, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, expands on Morris’ point, tracking the enduring reach of Al-Husseini’s vitriol all the way to the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
Khalidi, who lives in Manhattan, himself earned the lasting enmity of many in the anti-Israel movement when he told The New Yorker, following the Oct. 7 attack, that he completely disagreed with Hamas’ tactics.
“If a Native American liberation movement came and fired an RPG at my apartment building because I’m living on stolen land, it wouldn’t be justified,” he said. “You either accept international humanitarian law or you don’t.”
Khalidi stood by that statement in a recent long interview with Haaretz, which, coincidentally, came out just before Biden’s inadvertent book promotion.
If you can’t read the book, read that interview, in which Khalidi answers challenging questions about his work and offers his post-Oct. 7 analysis. Historians can and should argue the details of the past, but all that is only worthwhile if doing so opens the way to a better future. It’s hard to come away from the interview with sunny optimism, but Khalidi’s insights are a challenge to Israelis and Palestinians — and the entrenched camps uninterested in hearing criticism of whichever of those parties they choose to support.
The reporter asked Khalidi if he understands why his comment to The New Yorker upset many younger pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S.
“I think many of them would disagree with all the distinctions I made about violence,” he said, adding, “I don’t care.”
That’s brave, as is sitting down with an Israeli media outlet in the first place, at a time when one litmus test of pro-Palestinian purity is so-called anti-normalization, refusing to engage with anything Israeli at all (except, you know, Waze, drip irrigation and microprocessors).
What makes the conflict so difficult to resolve, Khalidi said, is that it isn’t a pure example of settler-colonialism.
“It’s harder than any other liberation struggle,” said Khalidi, “because it’s not a colonial project in which people can go home. There is no home.” The Jews, he said, “have been in Israel for three or four generations. They’re not going anywhere.”
No one’s going anywhere. If you want to understand why, Khalidi’s book has long been required reading. And as of this week it’s the No. 1 bestseller in Amazon’s Israel and Palestine history category. Thank you, Mr. President.
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