Walid Khalidi
وليد الخالدي
Born: Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine
Domain: Academia & Thought
Recognition: GLOBAL
Biography
Walid Khalidi was born in Jerusalem in 1925 into one of the city's most distinguished families; his father, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, was dean of the Arab College of Jerusalem. Educated at the University of London and Oxford, Khalidi began his academic career at Oxford but resigned his post in 1956 in protest at the British invasion of Suez, a gesture that signaled the moral seriousness that would define his life's work. He went on to teach political studies at the American University of Beirut for more than two decades. In December 1963 Khalidi co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) in Beirut, the first independent research institution devoted entirely to the Palestine question and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He served as its general secretary until 2016 and built it into the preeminent scholarly body documenting Palestinian history, publishing the influential Journal of Palestine Studies and an enormous archive of research that gave the Palestinian narrative a rigorous documentary foundation. Khalidi's scholarship transformed the historiography of 1948. His monumental edited volume All That Remains (1992) reconstructed in encyclopedic detail the more than four hundred Palestinian villages depopulated and destroyed during the Nakba, while Before Their Diaspora (1984) assembled a photographic record of Palestinian society before 1948. These works converted collective memory into documented history, making it impossible to treat Palestinian dispossession as a footnote. He also wrote sharp analytical studies on the diplomacy of the conflict, including work on the 1948 war and on the feasibility of partition and statehood, and after 1982 he became a research fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. His authority as a historian was matched by his role as an adviser and public advocate, and he was widely described as "the historian of the Palestinian cause." Khalidi lived to the age of one hundred, dying in 2026, having shaped the field for more than half a century. Through the Institute for Palestine Studies and his own scholarship he established the documentary infrastructure on which generations of historians of Palestine continue to build.
Why This Person Matters
Khalidi co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies and documented in encyclopedic detail the villages destroyed in 1948, building the documentary foundation of modern Palestinian history.