This is another special episode of Long Reads about Israel’s war on Gaza. Dan spoke to Rashid Khalidi, one of the leading historians of modern Palestine, on Monday, October 30th.

Last week, Joe Biden used a press conference at the White House to cast doubt on the casualty figures from Gaza. Neither Biden nor the White House offered any evidence to justify their alleged skepticism. An article in the Huffington Post showed that the State Department had been perfectly willing to rely on casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry in the last few weeks. The UN and other international bodies have also found those figures to be reliable. In response to Biden, Gaza's health ministry published a list of almost 7,000 people whose bodies had been identified up to that point. Reporters from the Interceptshowed that the list was a credible source of information. They looked in particular at a single Palestinian family that had lost more than forty people since the Israeli offensive began.

In the context of what Israel has been doing over the past few weeks, the comments from Joe Biden were a green light for more violence against Palestinian civilians. The Israeli military received the message loud and clear: Yesterday it carried out a major attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing dozens of people. Israel bombed the refugee camp again today.

Find a lightly edited transcript of this interview here: https://jacobin.com/2023/10/rashid-khalidi-biden-netanyahu-palestine-israeli-occupation-hamas-war

And for more on the historical background, see Rashid's book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.

Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by features editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.