Professor Walid Khalidi, leading Palestinian historian, dies aged 100

Professor Walid Khalidi, one of the most important Palestinian historians of the modern era, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 March 2026 at the age of 100. Born in Jerusalem on 16 July 1925, he built a long and distinguished career as one of the foremost Palestinian scholars of his generation.

Khalidi came from a prominent Jerusalem family of jurists, scholars, political figures and educators whose roots in the city stretched back centuries. That background shaped a life marked not only by scholarship, but by a strong sense of public duty and responsibility to Palestine.

Khalidi studied at the University of London, where he received a BA in philosophy in 1945, and went on to Oxford, where he earned an M.Litt. in Islamic Studies in 1951. In the same year, he began lecturing in Islamic studies at Oxford while continuing his research on Islamic philosophy. 

Even at that early stage, Khalidi showed the sense of principle that would define much of his life. In 1956, he resigned from Oxford in protest at Britain’s role in the invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis.

In 1957, he joined the American University of Beirut, where he taught political studies until 1982 and helped shape generations of Arab scholars, diplomats and public thinkers. 

During those years he also held appointments abroad, including a research fellowship at Princeton, time at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, and later work at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies after moving permanently to Cambridge in 1982. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and later received an honorary doctorate from AUB.

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Khalidi’s impact extended well beyond the classroom. In 1963, he co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, an independent research and publishing centre. Under his long stewardship, it became one of the most important institutions for serious work on the Palestine question, building archives, publications and a record of history that might otherwise have been lost.

Khalidi understood early on that the struggle over Palestine was also a struggle over history and narrative. He was among the first scholars to challenge the claim that Palestinians left their homeland voluntarily in 1948. 

In work such as Plan Dalet: The Zionist Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine (1961), Jerusalem: Facts and Fiction (1968), From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 (ed. 1971) and Thinking the Unthinkable (1978) destroyed Israeli myths about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 when over 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes. 

Much later, parts of that analysis were echoed by Israel’s so-called new historians, but Khalidi had already made the case at a time when Palestinian history was widely marginalised.

Among his most enduring contributions were two major books. Before Their Diaspora offered a photographic history of Palestinian life before 1948, showing a society too often reduced in Western discourse to the moment of its destruction. 

All That Remains documented in detail the villages occupied and depopulated in 1948, combining research, maps, photographs and narrative history in what remains one of the key reference works on the Nakba. 

Together, these books preserved the memory, history and lived presence of a people subjected to erasure by Israel.

Khalidi’s scholarship did not exist in isolation from public life. He advised Arab and Palestinian officials at key moments, worked with the Iraqi delegation to the United Nations after 1967, served on the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, and helped draft major speeches, including Yasser Arafat’s 1974 address to the UN.

Professor Walid Khalidi spent a lifetime safeguarding Palestine’s history as a living national inheritance. He documented what was destroyed, challenged falsehoods that justified Israel’s dispossession, and insisted that the Palestinian people could not be written out of their land or out of history. His death marks the end of an extraordinary life of scholarship and service. His legacy will endure wherever Palestine is studied, remembered and defended.

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