Joe Biden spotted with The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine book

Author Rashid Khalidi delves into occupation and settler-colonial conflict

US President Joe Biden outside the bookstore in Massachusetts. AP Photo

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US President Joe Biden was spotted with a book outlining the bloodied history of Palestine's occupation and colonialism.

On Friday, he was photographed outside a bookstore in Nantucket, Massachusetts, with The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi.

The author, a historian and expert on Middle Eastern affairs, is known for his critical stance on US policies regarding Israel and Palestine and reportedly commented that Biden's interest in the book was "four years too late".

Khalidi's book delves into the history of the Palestinian struggle, drawing on a wealth of archival materials, personal letters and multigenerational accounts to document the challenges Palestinians face under occupation.

One highlight is a letter from 1899 written by the author’s great-great-uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, who was then the mayor of Jerusalem. In the letter, al-Khalidi addressed Theodor Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, expressing his concerns over Zionist calls to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

“There is a lot of family and history, a lot of accounts from people who were involved within my own family and things that I witnessed or was involved in,” Khalidi told The National in an interview in 2020 when the book was released.

“It was very hard to decide what voice to use and where to go into the personal and not to. Historians use other people’s memoirs all the time. But I was talking about my aunt, my uncle, materials from people in my own family, about whom I knew a great deal; so it wasn’t like just taking a book off the shelf by a woman who wrote about her experiences as a kid in Beirut and then in Palestine later on – she was my aunt, she talked to me about stuff and sometimes I’m relating those things. That was very different than anything I’d ever done before and very hard.”

It was not immediately clear if Biden purchased the book himself or if it was given to him while in the shop. He and his son Hunter Biden dined with other family members at a nearby restaurant ahead of the island’s annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

Biden, who has repeatedly referred to himself as a Zionist, has long supported the movement that led to Jewish immigration to the Holy Land and the establishment of Israel in 1948.

“You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. I’m a Zionist,” Biden told visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog during a meeting in the Oval Office last year.