Biden’s Radical Reading

Excerpt

A photo of outgoing President Joe Biden made the rounds over the Thanksgiving holiday. The octogenarian lame-duck president was spotted leaving a Nantucket bookstore carrying a copy of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, a book released in 2020 by Columbia University professor emeritus Rashid Khalidi.

Khalidi was once best known in academic circles for his 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. In it, Khalidi largely refrained from the vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric for which he later became well-known.

Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. Follow him on X @JSchanzer.