Walid Khalidi, the venerated Palestinian historian whose research helped document the Nakba and shaped generations of scholarship on Palestine, has died aged 100.<\/p>\n
Khalidi, dubbed \u201cthe historian of the Palestinian cause\u201d, passed away on Sunday in Massachusetts in the United States, according to an obituary issued by the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) \u2013 the research centre that he co-founded in 1963.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Following the news, tributes from scholars, diplomats and Palestinian officials flooded social media, with Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, calling Khalidi \u201ca national treasure, a guardian of memory, and a mentor to generations\u201d in a post on X.<\/p>\n Born in Jerusalem in 1925 into a prominent intellectual family, Khalidi received his early education in Ramallah before attending St George\u2019s School in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n He later graduated from the University of Oxford in 1951 and went on to enjoy an illustrious academic career, teaching political studies at the American University of Beirut until 1982, before becoming a research fellow at Harvard University\u2019s Center for International Affairs.<\/p>\n Khalidi was perhaps best known for his meticulous documentation of the destruction of Palestinian villages during the Nakba (\u201ccatastrophe\u201d), the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias in 1948.<\/p>\n His landmark book All That Remains, published in 1992, catalogued how more than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or depopulated during the first Arab-Israeli war and combined historical research, maps and testimonies to reconstruct the lives of communities that had disappeared.<\/p>\n The IPS described Khalidi as a \u201cpioneer in uncovering many long-concealed features that explained how the Zionist movement succeeded in occupying Palestine in 1948\u201d, adding that in the 1960s, he was the first to reveal \u201cits master plan for the occupation of Palestine and the expulsion of its people, known as \u2018Plan Dalet\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n Another major work by Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora, used archival photographs to document Palestinian society before 1948, offering a rare visual record of daily life in cities and villages across the country.<\/p>\n After a period teaching at Oxford, Khalidi spent decades at the American University of Beirut, and co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies, which grew into one of the leading research organisations dedicated to Palestinian history, politics, and society.<\/p>\n Khalidi later served as a research fellow at Harvard\u2019s Center for International Affairs, lectured at institutions including Princeton University in the US, and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.<\/p>\n Beyond academia, he also played a role in Palestinian diplomacy.<\/p>\n After the 1967 war, which later became known as the Naksa, in which Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt\u2019s Sinai Peninsula, Khalidi moved towards diplomacy.<\/p>\n He served as an adviser to the Iraqi delegation to the United Nations, later joined an Arab Summit delegation to the British government in 1983, and, in the mid-1980s, served as a special adviser to the Arab League secretary-general.<\/p>\n He was also part of the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference.<\/p>\n Khalidi was a proponent of a two-state solution, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1988 that a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in \u201cpeaceful coexistence alongside Israel\u201d was \u201cthe only conceptual candidate for a historical compromise of this century-old conflict\u201d.<\/p>\n Tributes from Palestinian officials and scholars highlighted Khalidi\u2019s role in shaping the historical understanding of Palestine.<\/p>\n Khalil Jahshan, the executive director of the Arab Center Washington DC, said in a post on X \u00a0that Khalidi\u2019s name was \u201csynonymous with his beloved homeland, Palestine\u201d as he offered \u00a0\u201cheartfelt condolences to his family, to the people of Palestine, and to all who knew him\u201d.<\/p>\n The Institute for Palestine Studies described Khalidi as one of the most prominent historians of Palestine and said his work helped build the foundation for modern scholarship on Palestine.<\/p>\n Jehad Abusalim, policy analyst and author of Light in Gaza, wrote on X that Khalidi had \u201cdedicated his life to preserving Palestinian history\u201d, adding that \u201chis scholarship and research are a foundation that generations will continue to build on\u201d.<\/p>\n For many historians, Khalidi\u2019s legacy lies not only in his own scholarship, but also in the institutions he helped build and the generations of students and researchers he mentored.<\/p>\n At a time when much of Palestine\u2019s historical record risked being scattered or lost, Khalidi devoted his career to documenting it.<\/p>\n His work ensured that the history of Palestinian society before and after 1948 would remain part of the global historical record.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Walid Khalidi, the venerated Palestinian historian whose research helped document the Nakba and shaped generations of scholarship on Palestine, has died aged 100. Khalidi, dubbed \u201cthe historian of the Palestinian cause\u201d, passed away on Sunday in Massachusetts in the United States, according to an obituary issued by the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) \u2013 the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
Chronicling the Nakba<\/h2>\n
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Academic and diplomatic roles<\/h2>\n
Khalidi is \u2018synonymous with his beloved homeland\u2019<\/h2>\n
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