Last Friday, a photographer captured President Joe Biden leaving a Nantucket, Mass., bookstore holding a copy of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, a controversial book by the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, an anti-Israel academic who recently retired from Columbia University. 

The Black Friday purchase drew immediate ire from pro-Israel advocates certain that Biden was either trying to telegraph a political shift or to reflect his true beliefs — something akin to Khalidi’s perspective that Israel is a racist, apartheid state committing genocide in Gaza. 

But the image of Biden holding the book sparked fury among anti-Israel activists as well. In a post on the social media site X, Khalidi’s son, Ismail, weighed in: “Hey @JoeBiden, get my father’s book out of your blood soaked hands, you genocidal maniac.” 

Khalidi did not seem pleased, either. “My reaction is that this is four years too late,” he told The New York Post. 

What’s not clear is how the book found its way into the hands of Biden, who has often described himself as a Zionist. Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, Washington bureau chief of the Saudi-owned network Al Arabiya, described the book as “the most famous book narrating the Palestinian Nakkba,” referring to the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” which many Arabs use to describe the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were displaced.

A Nantucket Bookworks employee who answered the phone on Monday declined to say if Biden picked up the book himself or if someone — a family member, an employee or someone else — suggested it to him. “We don’t comment on anything, we just respect his privacy and his coming into the store,” the employee said before hanging up. The book is now out of stock at the bookstore, according to another employee reached by phone.

With Biden in the store were First Lady Jill Biden; their daughter Ashley; and their son Hunter, his wife Melissa Cohen Biden and their son, Beau.

John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, said Biden’s purchase of the book reflects only an interest in reading and learning about history. 

“It doesn’t surprise me that he would go into a bookstore and get a book of history, particularly about the Middle East, to try to keep learning. He really does believe in speaking, learning and thinking broadly, and that’s what that tells me,” Kirby told reporters on Monday, noting that he had not spoken to Biden about the purchase. 

A White House spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment about why Biden picked up the book. 

Displays of books about Palestinian history have become commonplace at bookstores, particularly those in liberal communities, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks sparked the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Described as a “history of settler colonialism and resistance from 1917 to 2017,” Khalidi’s book spent 39 weeks on the bestseller list after last Oct. 7, despite being first released in 2020. 

The incident marks something of a coda to the Obama-Biden era before it formally draws to a close on Jan. 20. The final days of the 2008 presidential campaign saw Barack Obama face scrutiny for his ties to Khalidi, with whom he had once been close when they both lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. 

A Los Angeles Times story that year spotlighted Obama’s friendship with Khalidi, reporting that at Khalidi’s 2003 goodbye party as he prepared to move to New York, Obama offered a toast: His dinners with the scholar had provided “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases,” Obama said, and he pledged to “continue that conversation, a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table … [but around] this entire world.”