Biden’s reading doesn’t matter, but a false Palestinian narrative does
Rashid Khalidi’s book labeling Israel an illegitimate settler-colonial state illustrates the dishonest intellectual fashion that should be refuted.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Dec 5, 2024
Presidential reading lists are an endless source of fascination for those who want insight into policy questions. As historian Tevi Troy noted in his 2013 book, What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House, the question of what books, films or other content influences occupants of the White House matters greatly, as well as enhances our understanding of their administrations. But with only several weeks left in his term of office, the same can’t be said about what President Joe Biden is browsing these days.
He stirred up controversy this past week when—only two days before he gave his son Hunter a blanket pardon for all offenses committed since 2014—he was photographed leaving a bookstore in Nantucket, Mass., with Hunter and other members of his family. Sharp-eyed observers zeroed in on the hardcover tucked under his arm: Rashid Khalidi’s 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017. We don’t know whether Biden purchased it or if it was given to him in the store. Nor can we be sure that the president—whose growing cognitive impairment became so obvious that he was forced to step down as the Democratic presidential nominee by a coup carried out by party elites this past summer—will read it or could make much sense of it if he did.
Nevertheless, the photos provoked outrage from some in the pro-Israel community and rueful remarks from the author, who told the New York Post that putting the book in Biden’s hands came “four years too late.”
While the titles of the books on the bed stand of this lamest of lame-duck presidents are no longer relevant, the same can’t be said about Khalidi or his book, which, likely thanks to Biden, is currently No. 1 on Amazon’s category of books on “Israel and Palestine history.”
Rationalizing terror and smearing Israel
Khalidi has retired and now holds emeritus status as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He has also stepped down from his position as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. But during the course of his career, he helped to build the movement that created the current intellectual climate on American college campuses, where Israel and Jews have been demonized, and the Hamas-led atrocities committed in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, have been rationalized and even justified.
Despite this, he is something of a celebrity among left-wing Jews. A lengthy fawning interview with him was coincidentally published in Haaretz the weekend that Biden showcased his book, and a subsequent column in The Forward by Rob Eshman, lauded Khalidi for his bravery and sophisticated thinking.
A better insight into Khalidi’s significance and character can be found in an article in Commentary by Jonathan Schanzer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He wrote about his interview with Khalidi in 2001 when he was seeking to continue his studies by getting a doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he had been accepted by the Middle Eastern Studies Department.
Khalidi turned down Schanzer’s bid to do “comparative research on the ideologies of violent Islamist movements in the Middle East.” His response to that highly relevant line of inquiry was to say that it “sounds like something Zionist think tanks study.” He suggested that a better avenue of inquiry for Schanzer was to study “Palestinian poetry.” Several months later after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he called Khalidi and renewed his request, which had become even more timely. The professor again shut him down, saying that the study of Islamist terror should only be conducted by Muslims. Schanzer soon realized that the entire field of Middle Eastern studies had been captured by anti-Zionists, and the chances of him advancing in it were negligible. He went on to become a leading analyst about the subject but did so outside of academia.
As Schanzer noted, the belief that Westerners cannot possibly understand the Arab and Muslim world reflected the distorted thinking of Edward Said, the Columbia professor whose intellectually dishonest 1978 book Orientalism has become widely influential throughout academia and Western culture. Khalidi, though born in New York City, advised the Palestine Liberation Organization in international negotiations in the 1990s. But he has spent most of his career teaching at elite American universities, using these prestigious perches to advance the cause of discrediting any perspective about the war on Israel that doesn’t reflect the Palestinian narrative, which depicts the Jews as colonial interlopers in their ancestral home who had no right to be there.
Khalidi is more sophisticated than most anti-Zionist ideologues, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose recent book about the conflict was an ignorant screed analogizing Israel to the “Jim Crow” South, and who fantasizes about having the “courage” to have joined in the atrocities on Oct. 7. Khalidi was not a cheerleader for the barbaric acts committed by Hamas members and other Palestinians on Oct. 7. He also throws cold water on the desire of Hamas and most other Palestinians to destroy Israel, which he rightly says is an unrealistic goal. And he understands—as most of those chanting “From the river to the sea” on North American campuses or those Palestinians supporting Hamas do not—that the Jews are, unlike the French in Algeria, for example, “going nowhere.”
Still, as a general principle, he treats Palestinian violence against Jews as a justifiable response to “occupation.”
A distorted picture
In his books, like the one Biden clutched, he paints a distorted picture of the last century of conflict, which rationalizes the numerous instances of Palestinians rejecting compromise and even offers of independent statehood alongside a Jewish state as an appropriate response to the indignity of having to share the country with Jews intent on reclaiming sovereignty in their ancient homeland. He still brands Israel as a “settler-colonial” state that has no legitimacy, albeit a slightly different case than others. He dismisses every concession by Israel and the Jews to advance a compromise in the long conflict as meaningless. And he insists that any theoretical two-state solution must involve no safeguards against Palestinian terrorism, which even he must see is unreasonable after the way the wave of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 literally blew up any Israeli support for the peace process. The notion that the Palestinians were interested in peace on any terms was further obliterated by the slaughter on Oct. 7.
This is exactly the sort of mendacious arguments that explain the way big lies like the charge about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza have become so prevalent in American discourse and are spread by supposedly objective sources like Amnesty International.
While he is not the most extreme of advocates for the claim that Israel is a “white” oppressor state, treating him as a reasonable authority on the subject is risible.
So, too, is the notion put forward by Eshman and Haaretz that it is important for Jews and others who care about the U.S.-Israel relationship and the Middle East to read him and fully absorb the Palestinian narrative he puts forward.
Of course, it’s important for supporters of Israel to know what the other side is thinking and why they believe as they do. Yet the idea that American Jews and, as Khalidi also insists, Israelis are ignorant about the Palestinian narrative of the conflict and how their ongoing angst about the nakba (the “catastrophe” of 1948 and the founding of the modern-day State of Israel) influences their actions is nonsense.
It’s a theme the Jewish left never tires of sounding. They contend that American Jews are raised in utter ignorance of anything but the Zionist narrative about Israel and that Israelis are equally lacking in such knowledge. But this is untrue.
Do we need more Palestinian propaganda?
First, most American Jews know very little about the history of the conflict from any point of view. Due to assimilation, intermarriage and the rapid growth of the category that demographers label “Jews of no religion,” increasingly fewer of those with at least one Jewish parent get any form of Jewish education, even the most superficial form that leads to a bar mitzvah ceremony. Even the small minority of Jewish kids who get the most comprehensive form of Jewish education at day schools are often not taught all that much about modern Israeli history or Zionism.
The vast majority of Jewish youngsters arrive in college with scant grounding in the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle or an understanding of the justice of Israel’s cause. There, they are confronted with a new orthodoxy rooted in toxic neo-Marxist ideas like critical race theory and intersectionality, and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that excludes any consideration of Jewish rights. Influenced by the beliefs of academics like Said and Khalidi, this dominant secular religion has indoctrinated a generation of students in the myth that Israel is an illegitimate “settler-colonial” state that practices “apartheid.”
They hear little about it being the sole democracy in the Middle East. And they know even less about it being the sole Jewish state on the planet or about the long history of Palestinian-Arab refusals to accept its legitimacy, no matter where its borders are drawn.
And outside of a few conservative secular outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and JNS, the media gives them a steady diet of pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas and anti-Israel propaganda thinly disguised as objective news coverage.
That’s why, in contrast to Israelis, most American Jews still tell pollsters that they support a two-state solution, supported the efforts by Biden and former President Barack Obama to appease the terrorist-supporting Islamist regime in Iran and don’t think much of Israel’s democratically elected government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Even in Israel, the long-discredited arguments for trading “land for peace” tend to dominate the discussion in that country’s leftist-dominated media outlets. Peace education and the requirement to study Arabic has long been a staple of Israeli public education. Khalidi told Haaretz that Israelis are living in a bubble that leaves them unable to understand why the world takes sides against them. But since most in the Jewish state are cognizant of the history of the last 30 years of attempts to advance peace by various Israeli governments and their abysmal failure, they are far from ignorant about the cause. They understand that Palestinian national identity is inextricably tied to their century-old war to expel the Jews. They and informed American Jews also have caught onto the fact that hatred for Israel is merely the modern iteration of traditional antisemitism, a point that has been made obvious by the surge in hate against Jews since Oct. 7, 2023.
The idea that Jews or anyone else need to have more of Khalidi’s teachings—or the moral equivalent produced by a generation of numerous other anti-Zionist voices that he has helped foster—stuffed into their brains is ridiculous.
Jews must join the war on woke
For too long, most Americans have been unaware of the damage being done to U.S. education by those who have embraced woke doctrines and are waging a war on the Western canon and American history. Though some of us have been sounding the alarm about this for years, it was only after the terrorist assault on Oct. 7—and the surge in American antisemitism fueled by these false doctrines, which included a blind belief in the distorted Palestinian narrative about Israel’s illegitimacy—that most Jews and their leading organizations have begun to take the threat seriously.
Needed now are not further efforts to spread Khalidi’s ideas but a comprehensive campaign to refute them. Liberal American Jews fear the impact of this rising tide of left-wing antisemitism. Nevertheless, they cling loyally to a Democratic Party that tolerates and helps mainstream the beliefs of its intersectional activist base that hates Israel. Though hard for them to accept, the only way to roll back the wave of post-Oct. 7 Jew-hatred is to support efforts of the incoming Trump administration to do away with DEI and to punish those educational institutions that tolerate this scourge by defunding and stripping them of their accreditation.
So, while no one should waste time worrying about what Joe Biden is reading, those who care about the fight for Western civilization and the survival of Israel should pay attention to the fact that Khalidi’s book is treated as an authoritative source of information about the Middle East. The time for treating the Orientalism and nakba narratives as anything other than fraudulent attempts to distort the truth is long past.
1 comment:
I didn't know his brain still functioned well enough to allow him to read.
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