Much has been made of Biden’s purchase of Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which argues Israel is a settler colonialist enterprise.  The Forward, a liberal Jewish newspaper, claims that its “abiding relevance is just one reason why American Jews and Israel supporters should … read Khalidi’s book, now.”  It quotes Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund, who wrote, “There is no better or more important introduction to this history from the Palestinian perspective than Khalidi’s book.”

As to the two million Arab citizens and Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, he has nothing useful to say.
Not surprisingly, Khalidi’s narratives most often ignore unpleasant facts.  He suggests that the Arabs who populated what became Palestine had long lived there while Jews were recent immigrants. He neglects to mention that a large share of these Arabs were themselves nineteenth century refugees from Egypt, Russia, and other areas in the Ottoman Empire. (READ MORE from Robert Cherry: Progressives Don’t Want to Learn From Their Mistakes)
He neglects to mention that it was the Crusades that decimated the Jewish population, which nonetheless rebuilt their numbers so that well before European immigration, they were a plurality of Jerusalem residents.  Moreover, Khalidi neglects to mention the large internal migration of Arabs from the West Bank to the coastal areas during the mandate period.  These migrants married women from their West Bank home villages and often went there to help harvest crops. Thus, the notion that 1948 Palestinian refugees were displaced from their ancestral homelands is a very problematic narrative.
Khalidi minimizes the harmful role of the Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Khalidi never mentions the pogroms he led in 1921 and 1929, his antisemitic actions while in Iraq, nor why, given his activities in support of Hitler, the Mufti was given a hero’s welcome when he found his way to Egypt after the war.  Moreover, Khalidi substantially ...