It will be interesting to learn who put President Joe Biden up to buying a book—any book (hard to believe this man even reads books)—by the “Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies” at Columbia University, Dr. Rashid Khalidi. Ph.D. This matters because the book’s contents are entirely false, as is the useful life story of Edward Said, the man whose shoes Khalidi filled. I know this for a fact, because I knew Said before he was a “Palestinian.”
The book Biden bought is entitled The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, and it is surely as much of a concatenation of lies about Jews as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Dr. Khalidi’s previous book was called Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. That book lacked even one sentence containing any content to this “national consciousness,” e.g., examples of a distinctive “Palestinian” culture, language, religion, folklore, or wars that Palestinians fought in defense of their allegedly ancient homeland, etc.
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An “in memoriam” poster of Edward Said in the West Bank. Photo by Justin McIntosh. CC BY 2.0.
Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity was a record of his effort to nail down the moment in time when the Arabs in the Jews’ Promised Land—land that his Arab forebears never called Filistin—started calling themselves “Palestinians.” He failed to find anything before the emergence of the Zionist movement.
On the contrary, the historical record contains copious and angry statements by Arabs in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, who denied there ever was such a country with that name. Historically, only Christians and Jews called it Palestine. The Arabs never knew such a geography with that name and, to this day, can’t even pronounce it properly because their non-Palestinian Arabic language contains no “p.”
For over a thousand years, Arabs called the territory of today’s states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel undifferentiated “Syria.” For decades, Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (1895-1974), murderously fought the League of Nations’ 1922 creation of a geographical jurisdiction called Palestine, an entity that the Muslims had never known, including its “historical connection of the Jewish people.”
Khalidi’s previous book was evidence that his “Palestinian identity” is nothing but a verbal hologram: that is, something that looks like it is there but really is not. Now, he has done it again, seeing in Israel a “colonial settler” enterprise, a position that only exposes the distinguished doctor as an ignoramus for using a word he plainly does not understand. A colony was an outpost of a distant country with the money and scientific know-how to travel the world and discover distant lands containing natural resources that the locals were ignoring or underutilizing and then to take those resources to send back to the home country for that country’s profit.
By contrast, the Zionist resurrection of the barren Land of Israel was not carried out by agents of a distant empire. Instead, idealistic, often middle-class Jews came to a land with no natural resources. With nothing but the labor of their hands and the sweat of their brows, the Zionists volunteered to plant millions of trees, dig ditches, build roads, drain swamps, and die from malaria—and not one of them was on a foreign power’s payroll.
Unlike the history of colonies where, truth be told, the locals were abused, the Zionists returning to their ancestral sod encountered a desolate, mostly uninhabited wasteland; there was no nation in it to abuse. In the descriptions of 19th century visitors Herman Melville and Mark Twain, the Holy Land was a “caked, depopulated Hell” and draped in “sack cloth and ashes.”
None of the few permanent residents were driven from their homes by the Zionists because that was not necessary. Judea and Samaria, home today to a half-million Jewish “settlers” in over one hundred “settlements,” were undeveloped, uninhabited real estate when Israel reclaimed the land in 1967. No putatively Paleolithic “Palestinian” was ejected from his allegedly ancestral homestead.
It is fitting that Khalidi, with his false narrative, is the “Edward Said Professor” because Said’s entire public persona was also a lie. He was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, but there was nothing “Palestinian” about him, and he was never a war refugee. He was born there, but his boyhood home was Cairo.
The most polished of English speakers for the “Palestinian cause,” Said was the inventor of the couplet “the Palestinian narrative,” a.k.a. the “Palestinian” version of history. For the contemporary, diseased liberal mind, every people is entitled to its version of history. Thus, all versions of history must be respected, even though Said’s “Palestinian narrative” is nothing but a fairy tale worthy of A Thousand and One Nights or the Koran’s midnight ride across the sky from Mecca to Jerusalem by Muhammad on a winged horse, a miracle witnessed by no one.
Edward Said was an imposter, and I say this with certainty because I knew him before he became a “Palestinian refugee.” In the spring of 1966, when I was a Columbia College student majoring in English, I took a survey course in 18th-century English Lit. with a then-unknown assistant professor who told his students that, while he was born in Jerusalem, he was a Lebanese Christian, and, as we later learned, his real home was Egypt where he grew up. There was nothing “Palestinian” about the man.
It was only the next year, after the Six-Day War, that Said morphed into a victimized “Palestinian refugee” instead of, in truth, having grown up a rich kid in Zamalek, the most upscale of Cairo neighborhoods, where his father owned a successful stationary store and a second one in Alexandria. The family had a car and driver, and for high school, Edward was shipped off to the tony Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts. This is all in Said’s autobiography Out of Place published three years before he died.
Eerily, Said entitled his Harvard Ph.D. on Joseph Conrad, a Pole who aspired to be an Englishman, The Fiction of Autobiography. The same could be said for Said’s own masquerade as a “Palestinian refugee.” His lies about the Zionists percolate to this day in the rotten hearts of antisemitic mobsters barking “From the River to the Sea!” and “Free Palestine!” on the Columbia and other campuses.
The historical record is perfectly empty of any people in the Bible’s Promised Land who called themselves “Palestinians” and were called that by others. In the United Nations’ hundreds of resolutions on Israel and the Arabs between 1945 and 1970, there was not one referring to any “Palestinians” as a party to the endless violence against Israel. The “Palestinian” hologram was the foul afterbirth of the antinomian 1960s.
It is to Columbia University’s shame that it continued to employ Said after he began pontificating on Middle East history, a subject in which he had no academic credentials. Worse, they glorified him as a “University Professor” licensed to teach a course on anything he wanted.
After his death, the university appointed Rashid Khalidi to continue in Said’s name this delusional conception of a “Palestinian” nation victimized by Nazi-like Jews, the post-Holocaust generation’s successor to antisemitism and the historic Christian deicide calumny. In truth, the historical record affirms that there never were any “Palestinians,” and the Zionists stole nothing.
It is no coincidence that Columbia, having employed the late Said and fellow anti-Jew professors Khalidi and Joseph Massad, is now a major cancerous node of mobs screaming for the destruction of the world’s only tiny Jewish state. It was Columbia’s shameless choice to become a haven for brainless haters who smear the Jews with being Nazi-like perpetrators of genocide.
As I write this, the Columbia campus remains on lockdown.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
