President Joe Biden was spotted leaving a Nantucket bookstore on Black Friday with a book that describes Israel's founding as “colonialism,” the New York Post reported on Saturday.
Biden, 82, departed Nantucket Bookworks holding a copy of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017” by Columbia University professor emeritus Rashid Khalidi. The author told the outlet that the president picking up a copy of the book came “four years too late.”
Khaldi, a historian and expert on Middle Eastern affairs, is known for his opposition to U.S. policies on Palestine and Israel. He has referred to President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration as a “mouthpiece” for Israel and has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of leading “the most extreme government” in his country’s history.
Drawing on archival sources, personal accounts and primary sources like letters, Khalidi’s 2020 work details Israel’s foundation as "a settler-colonial conquest" at the expense of native Palestinians. "[T]he modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will," Khalidi writes in the book.
Khalid’s son Ismail, responded in harsher terms than his father posting on X, “Hey, @Joe Biden, get my father’s book out of your blood soaked hands, you genocidal maniac.”
Biden has described himself as a Zionist and a firm supporter of Israel. “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. I’m a Zionist,” Biden told visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Nov. 12 in the Oval Office. He has defended his administration’s position on supplying Israel with weapons and pushed back against the claims of “genocide.” At a Jewish American Heritage Month event at the White House in May Biden said, “What's happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that.”
It was not clear if Biden’s choice of literature was given to him or if he purchased it himself. He was seen later eating at the Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant with first son Hunter Biden, 54, and first daughter Ashley Biden prior to the island’s annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.
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