Spending his Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket with his family, President Joe Biden was photographed walking out of a bookstore with a copy of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, written by Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi. It felt like a punchline to a sick joke: A world leader funding Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza finally got around to wondering exactly who was being cleansed.
Truthfully, I don't think he'll actually read it. If he does, it remains difficult to believe that the lame-duck leader of the United States, who just months ago acknowledged he didn't function well after 8 p.m., will be retaining any vital knowledge. But in a weird and genuine coincidence, I was reading Khalidi's book that same week. Seeing it in Biden's possession—the cover upside-down, an unintentionally perfect detail—motivated me to finish it quicker. It also enhanced my own reading experience: Would the president understand his own role in those hundred years?
In The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, Khalidi provides a basic history of how the world powers facilitated the occupation of Palestine and formation of Israel. Each of the six chapters is a different "declaration of war" between 1917 and 2017: the Balfour Declaration, the Nakba, the Six-Day War, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the First and Second Intifadas. Across these flashpoints, he weaves in his own family history to give the annals a personal touch. Khalidi's great-great-great uncle exchanged letters with Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. The author describes how he, his wife, and his two daughters were living in Beirut in 1982 when Israel began to bomb the city. The concluding chapter covers President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, as well as his full-throated support of the apartheid state. Khalidi then looks toward the future and considers a realistic path toward self-determination.
Khalidi's recommendations are pretty moderate and pragmatic by any sane definition. Like the late Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic whose name is on the professor emeritus title at Columbia University that Khalidi holds, he accepts that the settlers of Israel aren't going anywhere. Said, in The Question of Palestine, published in 1979: "Two things are certain: the Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will remain. To say much more than that with assurance is a foolish risk." Khalidi, in his book published in January 2020: "While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other."
The events of the past four years make some of the passages in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine seem almost quaint now. "Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes," Khalidi writes in the concluding chapter. "It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israel taking such a step." The author can't be blamed for a lack of clairvoyance, and anyway, he's revised his stance since then. "If there was anything that was unexpected, it was the participation of the U.S. government on every level, and its complete unwillingness to restrain Israel in any significant fashion," Khalidi said in a New York Review of Books interview published this month.
Biden, as a potential reader, presents a unique case: He's responsible for the history that will be written by a future Khalidi. Will he recognize himself in the echoes? Every few pages or so in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, the same feeling bubbles up: I've seen this before. The expelling and killing of Palestinians, the sabotaged negotiations, the emboldened occupation, and each time the United States—"Israel's lawyer," as former State Department official Aaron David Miller once wrote—helps its ally continue to act unimpeded.
One of the through lines in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine—truthfully, in most of the books I've read on Palestine—is that the history reads familiar and timeless. This is because Israel's actions are fundamentally the same each time, because they work: destroy, deny, denounce. Only the proper nouns and dates change—in fact, sometimes the proper nouns don't even change. "As the occupying Israeli troops swept through the Gaza towns and refugee camps of Khan Yunis and Rafah in November 1956, more than 450 people, male civilians, were killed, most of them summarily executed," Khalidi writes in the first 100 pages of the book. "Israel's claim, that the Palestinian deaths were the result of clashes with troops searching for feda'iyin, was decisively debunked by the UNRWA report." This is something that could have run in Reuters a dozen times over the past year.
The arc of Palestine's history is bent so perversely that yesterday's moderates would be today's radical left. In 1982, Thomas Friedman, then a Lebanon-based reporter for the New York Times, got in trouble with his editors for referring to Israel's bombing of Beirut as "indiscriminate." Weeks into that invasion, as his administration attempted to negotiate a ceasefire, President Ronald Reagan angrily called Prime Minister Menachem Begin after a bombing in West Beirut killed several hundred people. "I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered," Reagan wrote in his unedited diary entry. "I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with it’s arms blown off." (This line from an article on the phone call may sound familiar, too: "Asked if Mr. Reagan had threatened to suspend American arms aid or take other retaliation, [deputy White House press secretary Larry] Speakes replied, 'I won't discuss that.'")
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine was written to give a Palestinian perspective on history, a view the English-speaking reader doesn't often get. For those already familiar, it feels like a journey to see how low the bar has fallen: Ronald Reagan, the face of American conservatism, did what today's Democratic Party wouldn't. After consistently identifying as a proud and hawkish Zionist, after giving unequivocal permission for Israel to commit genocide, after he and his party treated Palestinians and their supporters like they're subhuman, Joe Biden is finally ready for another perspective, in the final months of his presidency. Just in time to do the same nothing about it.
