While the world’s attention was focused on the Israeli-American bombardment of Iran and Iran’s retaliatory bombardment of the Gulf Arab countries, last Sunday, one of the greatest Arab historians and intellectuals of his generation – Prof Walid Khalidi – passed away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, having lived to over 100 years of age.
His impact on the perceptions and narratives of modern Arab, and above all Palestinian, history, and therefore politics, cannot be overstated. He was a pivotal figure in almost every important way, and his loss is enormous.
Hailing from one of the great Palestinian families of Jerusalem – possessors of the renowned Khalidi Library of historical Arabic manuscripts – he was a precocious scholar at a young age. In his youth, he worked between 1945-1946 in Jerusalem for the “Arab Office”, which had been established by the Arab League to make the international diplomatic case for Palestinian independence from Britain and against Zionist aspirations to establish a Jewish state in the still overwhelmingly majority-Arab mandatory territory.
His pursuit of higher education later led him to Britain where he earned an MLitt from Oxford University and began lecturing on Islamic studies there. He resigned in 1956 in protest of British collusion with France and Israel in the Suez Crisis of that year.
That led him to Lebanon, and the American University of Beirut, where, in 1957, he joined a stellar generation of faculty at the Political Science and Public Administration Department, where he taught for the next 25 years. This was the era in which he made his most decisive contribution to history and Palestinian consciousness, as well as playing a leading role as a major Arab public intellectual.
He was instrumental in founding the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in 1963, and its scholarly quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies. It was in that quarterly that his seminal 1961 essay, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine”, landed like a thunderbolt on Middle East studies.
What he outlined was nothing less than the framework for all Israeli military activities between March 1948 and the end of the war in 1949. He demonstrated that it had the ethnic cleansing of much of the Palestinian population in the targeted areas essentially hardwired into its implicit logic. The expulsion was no inadvertent happenstance or collateral damage of warfare. It was part of a deliberate plan, and he was the first to demonstrate that conclusively.
Khalidi’s historiography on this point was based on solid archival research, and while it was heavily denounced and rejected by Israeli apologists at the time, it is now widely accepted as both fundamentally correct and well ahead of its time, anticipating the work of the Israeli “new historians” by at least two decades.
He went on to produce several crucial books, including the invaluable collection of primary source materials he edited, From Haven to Conquest (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), almost a thousand pages of documents, many either forgotten or unknown to the public about the origins of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Zionist colonial project. His two other major works were Before their Diaspora (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984), a photographic history of Palestinians before the Nakba, and All that Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), a history of Palestinian villages depopulated and destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948. All of this reinforced a truthful narrative of the deliberate expulsion, displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians by Israel.
While he was instrumental in reviving Palestinian national consciousness and its political manifestations after the catastrophe, he had the wisdom never to get involved in politics and never held a position in the Palestine Liberation Organisation or any party. Instead, he let history speak for itself, which in many ways made him more effective than some of his more famous contemporaries, including Edward Said.
As a professor, he did not produce a cadre of graduate students to carry on any particular methodology. Unlike many leading academics, this was not his intellectual project. He was primarily a scholar of the contemporary Palestinian experience and the disaster of its encounter with Zionism.
Nonetheless, he was profoundly influential on several generations of Arab intellectuals, both as a teacher and as an exemplar. His command of both English and Arabic was strikingly impeccable, and his scholarship meticulous. Quietly and fastidiously, he showed exactly how fine scholarship could and should be crucial as instruments in the interests of a noble political cause: the re-assertion of the experience of a people threatened with practical extinction in their identity, and the preservation of their lived experience through historiography.
Khalidi and my father, Yusuf, maintained a close alliance at the political science department at AUB for more than two decades, with my father protecting him from often-bitter anti-Palestinian Lebanese sentiments and Khalidi crucially supporting my father in remaining chair of the department for rather longer than he was technically eligible. This congenial relationship came to an end for both in 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when both relocated to the US. This led Khalidi to Harvard and Cambridge, where he eventually took his final breath last weekend.
His influence on contemporary Palestinian and broader Arab intellectual and political thinking cannot be overstated. He was an ardent champion of his people, yet he remained, to the end, a staunch supporter of a two-state solution, maintaining quite sensibly that it was the only plausible means for Palestinians to liberate themselves from occupation and restore some measure of sovereignty in their country.
As with most other things, he was absolutely correct about that. Whether or not it remains achievable, it is hardly more far-fetched than any other acceptable scenario. It is still the only one that offers Palestinians some measure of liberation and justice, and it could end a desperately brutal confrontation with Israel that has only grown more catastrophic and blood-soaked in recent years – particularly given the war in Gaza and activities in the West Bank.
To the end, Khalidi was circulating passionate, erudite messages to email recipients (including this author) regarding the Gaza war and US policy complicit with Israeli actions. At 100 years old, he remained an intellectual force of nature.
He was an irreplaceable contemporary Arab giant and treasure, and he will be sorely missed.
