Walid Khalidi

Walid Khalidi was born in Jerusalem in 1925 into a family of scholars, and educated at the University of London and Oxford. He taught at Oxford and then, from 1957 to 1982, at the American University of Beirut, before spending his later career as a senior research associate at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In 1963 he co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut — the first independent research institute of its kind in the Arab world — and remained its honorary general secretary.

Writing from the 1950s onward, long before Israeli archives were opened, Khalidi documented the depopulation of Palestine in 1948, including his early study of Plan Dalet. His edited volume All That Remains (1992) recorded, village by village, the more than four hundred Palestinian communities occupied and depopulated that year. He died in March 2026, aged one hundred.

Key works

• From Haven to Conquest (editor, 1971)
• Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876–1948 (1984)
• All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (editor, 1992)

Sources

• Walid Khalidi — American University of Beirut honorary doctorate
• Walid Ahmad Khalidi — American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Professor Walid Khalidi: A Reflection — Harvard CMES