Biden buys a book by contemptible lying Palestinian BDS propagandist Rashid Khalidi, who falsely asserts that Jews and Arabs had no conflict before Zionism

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden was seen having purchased a book by professor Rashid Khalidi called " "The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017" 

Khalidi has been called the most significant Palestinian intellectual of his generation, the successor to Edward Said, and the preeminent living historian of Palestine. He recently retired as a professor at Columbia University. This year he was a leader of the anti-Israel protests there.

Khalidi is not a good historian. He is a propagandist. I've pointed out his lies many times in the past.

The very title of his book is sophisticated propaganda. Khalidi, like most anti-Israel activists, frames the conflict as something that is a century old, a conflict that was started by Jews and Western colonialists against the native Palestinian Arabs. His response to October 7 is saying that the Jews started the war, not the peaceful Palestinians.

By coincidence, this weekend also saw Haaretz publish a lengthy interview with Khalidi where he emphasized that very point: "You have to pretend that history started on October 7 or on June 7, 1967, or on May 15, 1948. But that's not the way history works." 

To Khalidi, history begins with the Balfour Declaration. But, as he says, that's not the way history works.

At the end of the interview, Khalidi unloads the biggest lie in the anti-Israel propaganda arsenal:

What do you wish Israelis understood better about the conflict?

"They need to understand something that's very hard for them to grasp: how the Palestinians and the rest of the world see the situation. It's seen from the beginning as an attempt to create a Jewish state in an Arab country. This is not some innocent bunch of refugees arriving in their ancestral homeland and suddenly being attacked by wild men and women. They arrive and do things that generate everything that follows; their very arrival and the structures with which they arrive create the conflict.

"Was there ever a Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in the 18th century, 17th century, 19th century, 15th century, 12th century? No. This is not a conflict that's been going on from time immemorial. You have to put that self-justifying version of history aside.

Khalidi is not ignorant. He is a liar. He knows as well as anyone that the Arabs and Muslims of Palestine treated the Jews horribly before Zionism. he just doesn't want you to know that.

I have catalogued a number of examples from primary sources in the 19th century and before the Balfour Declaration - the sort of thing a historian is supposed to do and that Khalidi refuses to do when the facts do not support his propaganda. Here is a summary of several examples I put together last year:

W. B. Lewis, 1824:

The Jews at Jerusalem, (I speak even of European Jews) are liable to be stopped by the lowest of the country, who, if he pleases, may demand money of them as a right due to the mussulman ; and this extortion may be practised on the same poor Jew over and over again in the space of ten minutes.

The Jews are fond of frequenting the tombs of their forefathers, especially on particular days, to read their prayers of remembrance of the dead. Here advantage is taken of them again. They are rudely accosted and pilfered, and if resistance is made, they are beat almost to death, and this not by common highwaymen or Bedouin Arabs, but by men they may have been in the habit of seeing and talking with every day. 

The book "Stirring Times: Or, Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856" by James Finn, British consul to Jerusalem, describes the financial extortion Muslims practiced on Jews:

In times gone by these native Jews had their full share of suffering from the general tyrannical conduct of the Moslems, and, having no resources for maintenance in the Holy Land, they were sustained, though barely, by contributions from synagogues all over the world. This mode of supply being understood by the Moslems, they were subjected to exactions and plunder on its account from generation to generation (individuals among them, however, holding occasionally lucrative offices for a tune). This oppression proved one of the causes which have entailed on the community a frightful incubus of debt, the payment of interest on which is a heavy charge upon the income derived from abroad.

…Notwithstanding these glimpses of honorary distinction the Jews are humiliated by the payment, through the Chief Rabbi, of pensions to Moslem local exactors, for instance the sum of 300£. a year to the Effendi whose house adjoins the ' wailing place,' or fragment of the western wall of the Temple enclosure, for permission to pray there; 100£. a year to the villagers of Siloam for not disturbing the graves on the slope of the Mount of Olives ; 50£ a year to the Ta'amra Arabs for not injuring the Sepulchre of Rachel near Bethlehem, and about 10£ a year to Sheikh Abu Gosh for not molesting their people on the high road to Jaffa...

From Remarks on the present condition and future prospects of the Jews in Palestine, by Arthur George Harper Hollingsworth, 1852:

This Jewish population is poor beyond any adequate word ; it is degraded in its social and political condition, to a state of misery, so great, that it possesses no rights. It can shew no wealth even if possessed of it, because to display riches would secure robbery from the Mahometan population, the Turkish officials, or the Bedouin Arab. ... He creeps along that soil, where his forefathers proudly strode in the fulness of a wonderful prosperity, as an alien, an outcast, a creature less than a dog, and below the oppressed Christian beggar in his own ancestral plains and cities. No harvest ripens for his hand, for he cannot tell whether he will be permitted to gather it. Land occupied by a Jew is exposed to robbery and waste. A most peevish jealousy exists against the landed prosperity, or commercial wealth, or trading advancement of the Jew. Hindrances exist to the settlement of a British Christian in that country, but a thousand petty obstructions are created to prevent the establishment of a Jew on waste land, or to the purchase and rental of land by a Jew. “

...What security exists, that a Jewish  emigrant settling in Palestine, could receive a fair remuneration for his capital and labour? None whatever. He might toil, but his harvests would be reaped by others; the Arab robber can rush in and carry off his flocks and herds. If he appeals for redress to the nearest Pasha, the taint of his Jewish blood fills the air, and darkens the brows of his oppressors ; if he turns to his neighbour Christian, he encounters prejudice and spite ; if he claims a Turkish guard, he is insolently repulsed and scorned. 

,,,Now, how is this poor, despised, and powerless child of Abraham to obtain redress, or make his voice heard at the Sublime Porte? The more numerous the cases of oppression, (and they are many), the more clamorous their appeals for justice, the more unwillingly will the government of the Sultan,—partly from inherent and increasing weakness, partly from disinclination,—act on the side of the Jew. They despise them as an execrated race ; they hate them as the literal descendants of the original possessors of the country. ...

From "Sir Moses Montefiore's Report to the Board of Deputies of British Jews," 1867:

On Saturday, April 14th [1866], after the morning service, I took a walk round the garden, and was much pleased with the improvement of the place since my last visit to Jerusalem.

I regret, however, not being able to report the same of the land at Jaffa, which has been unfortunately let to persons who, being unable to resist the threatened attacks of the neighboring Arabs, deserted the place altogether. The consequence is, that the houses are completely demolished and the trees destroyed.

From the book The Rob Roy on the Jordan, Nile, Red sea, & Gennesareth, published in 1870 by John MacGregor:

From Narrative of a Modern Pilgrimage Through Palestine on Horseback, and with Tents By Alfred Charles Smith, 1871:

The Jews at Jerusalem were singularly forbearing with strangers, and—considering their general antipathy to all Gentiles—were almost civil and obliging. This unnatural good-will might perhaps be due in part to my escort, the well-known Yakoob ; perhaps, too, in part to their own despised condition, for, scarcely tolerated and often persecuted as they are by their Muslim rulers, they dare not show an illiberal spirit, or display any tokens of religious hostility or rancour through fear of retaliation

I list other examples of attacks on Jews, including pogroms, here.

The American Jewish Yearbook of 1914-1915 describes all these incidents in Palestine:

August. Bedouins attack colony of Rehobot, killing one colonist and wounding several others. --Rehobot vineyards penetrated by villagers from Zernuka, who kill Jewish student.

November. At colony of Kinneret two Jewish watchmen murdered by Arabs.

December. Near Tiberias, two colonists killed and several injured by Arabs.

January. At Hebron, Jewish storekeepers are boycotted by Mohammedan women.

April. Minister of Interior removes Governor of Tiberias on complaint of Chief Rabbi of his laxity in protecting the Jews against Arab attacks.

May. Minister of Interior orders officiais in Palestine to repress all anti-Jewish manifestations.—Chief Rabbi waits on Minister of Interior and reads to him two violent articles in Arab journal Palestine, and warns him that any disorders that might result therefrom would create bad impression abroad.

Many more listed here, including in 1911: September 23: Arabs assault about sixty worshippers at religious service on Rosh Hashanah at Wailing Wall.

Khalidi cannot be ignorant of these facts. He just doesn't want you to know them. 

Indeed, as I showed here, 19th century Palestinian Arabs started respecting Jews only when world powers started showing interest in the region by placing Jews under their protection. When the Jews of Jerusalem and elsewhere had no legal recourse before the mid-1800s, the Arabs mercilessly abused them - extorting, stealing, beating them, and even murdering them with impunity. Only when the Jews gained some political power and outside powers pressured the Muslim Ottoman Empire to punish their attackers did the Arabs start to back off and even some started treating some Jews with respect. 

In short, the Arabs respected Jewish power. But they never, ever, respected Jews, in any century.

In the wake of October 7, Khalidi's book that Biden purchased went back to the top of the New York Times bestseller lists for 39 weeks. The liars like Khalidi have spent decades honing their arguments. Even though anyone with access to Google Books and 19th century newspaper archives can demonstrate that these people are lying, the media and most academics simply do not want to see their heroes exposed as the liars they are. 

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