The eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi (1925-2026), whose death was announced on Wednesday, 8 March, was born into one of the oldest Palestinian families in Jerusalem.
Over the centuries, the Khalidi family produced countless Muslim ‘ulama, jurists and judges. Like many other ‘ayan (notable) families in the period after Ottoman modernisation, increasing numbers of young Khalidis turned towards modern education.
Ahmad Samih al-Khalidi (d. 1951), Walid’s father, was educated in Istanbul and at the American University of Beirut. After the Britishoccupation, Ahmad Samih became dean of the Arab College in Jerusalem, the principal teacher-training institution in Mandatory Palestine, from which many of the most prominent Palestinian intellectuals and scholars graduated.
Walid received his early education in Jerusalem. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of London in 1945 and a master’s degree from the University of Oxford in 1951.
He worked as a lecturer at Oxford’s Institute of Oriental Studies, but resigned from his position in protest against the British attack on Egyptin 1956. In the decades that followed, he taught at Princeton, Harvard University and the American University of Beirut.
Walid is regarded as the founding father of modern Palestinian historiography and as a faithful guardian of Palestinian memory and heritage.
This article, “Tribute to Walid Khalidi: History is Written by Historians”, appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies (no. 96, autumn 2013, pp. 441-447), honouring the professor as he approached his 90th year.
Early lessons
I was taking my initial steps towards my doctorate, with a great deal of concern and a loss of direction, when I went to meet professor Albert Hourani to seek his advice.
He asked about a number of the references in my reading list and posed two specific questions: the first concerned what I imagined were the reasons behind Britain’s adoption of the project of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine; the second concerned the reasons that led to the emigration of the majority of Palestinians from their cities and towns in 1948, and the subsequent success of the Zionist movement in establishing a large Jewish-majority state in Palestine.
The works of Professor Walid Khalidi, who did not teach me directly and whom I never met personally, would stay with me over the years
My answers to both questions resembled those of an amateur historian. In responding to the first, I cited the widely-known story of the influence of Weizmann and other Zionist leaders over British politicians during the First World War.
Regarding the second, I referred to the deeply felt sense of honour in Palestinian Muslim society, on the one hand, and the role played by Arab armies and regimes, on the other.
Professor Hourani did not comment much on my answers. However, he advised me to research the periodicals and read articles by the Israeli historian Meir Verete and the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi.
Although my research later took a different course – moving away from First World War diplomacy in the Arab-Islamic East and concluding in the 1940s without addressing the Nakba of 1948 and its repercussions – the lesson was profound: history is made by historians; there is no final version of history; and history itself is a continuous process.
Verete’s essays on the origins of the British interest in Palestine were published posthumously in a book. However, the works of Walid, who did not teach me directly and whom I never met personally, would stay with me over the years.
Writing history
It has become almost cliche to describe the Palestinian question as the longest-running national liberation struggle since the birth of the modern state and the emergence of the idea of self-determination.
This has made the history of the conflict over Palestine a subject of great interest to historians of international relations, modern history and Middle Eastern history, as well as to political scientists across languages and disciplines.
Yet Walid occupies a distinct place among them.
With remarkable skill, patience and fortitude, he stood – often alone – confronting dominant narratives about Palestine. Who are the Palestinians? What has befallen Palestine and its people?
Walid published his study on the fall of Haifa in 1959. Four decades later, in 1999, he returned to examine the massacre of Deir Yassin.
In between, in 1961, he published a major article on Plan Dalet, several years before the emergence of the group later known as the New Historians.
Yet the works by Walid, the Palestinian son of a notable Jerusalemite family, did not stir up the same noise as the writings of the Israeli new historians, for there was not supposed to be a Palestinian narrative of history.
This, in effect, was what Walid sought to do in these three works of his, as well as in other and perhaps no less important works: offering a Palestinian narrative of the history of what really happened, a narrative armed with the tools of the historian and his persistent doubts about the prevailing paradigm.
Recovering memory
In the Four Quartets, TS Eliot wrote: “The way forward is the way back.” Amid the world’s preoccupation with this protracted issue, it is no longer easy, or possible, or even sensible, to search for an exit without going back.
It has become possible today to discuss the systematic violence and the planned and widespread ethnic cleansing practised by Zionist armed groups, which accompanied and prepared the ground for the emergence of the state of Israel. Decades ago, such discussions were not simply prohibited; they were absent from recognised history altogether.
History is made by historians, and Walid became one of the principal makers of the history of that transformative moment in Palestine and the Arab world: the year 1948.
Walid did not stop at the Nakba and the birth of the state of Israel. In his study of the Jewish-Ottoman Land Company, he traced the history of one of the first Jewish colonial settlement projects in Palestine.
In two other major works, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 (1987) and Lest We Forget: Palestinian Villages Destroyed by Israel in 1948 and the Names of Their Martyrs (1997), both published by the Institute for Palestine Studies, he endeavoured to restore to history the existence of the Palestinian people and place.
In these works, the historian’s craft is unmistakable: a narrative that is coherent, rigorous and grounded in evidence.
Most importantly, for those who study Palestine and for those who belong to it, such work allows us, in WH Auden’s words, to “share our bread with those who have passed on”.
Three-quarters of a century before the declaration of the state of Israel, and more than 20 years before the first Zionist Congress, there was a people in this land – a people of peasants and nobles, rural and urban dwellers, men, women and children, craftsmen and traders.
We see them in their clothing and ornaments; we hear their voices as they emerge from Ottoman modernisation and enter the 20th century, when they face the shock of foreign occupation and the greatest upheaval a people could face in modern times.
We see them again – outside their land, uprooted from their villages, stripped of both place and identity. Villages acquire new names, new histories and new inhabitants.
Regional dimensions
Walid understood from the beginning that the conflict over Palestine is not just a conflict over a piece of land, but a conflict over the entire Arab Levant, and that it affects the life and fate of all the societies of the region.
There is no doubt that Walid held Arab nationalist convictions, but it is unnecessary to search for those convictions to explain his constant awareness of the Arab context of the Palestine question. A historian who lived through the conflict from its early decades does not need to be an Arab nationalist to see its Arab dimensions. This is what led him to dedicate a large part of his career to following the affairs and transformations of the Palestine question as an Arab-Israeli conflict.
In his 1974 bibliography, Walid focused on the rise of Palestinian nationalism. A few years later, in 1983, he published his book on the Lebanese Civil War, which, in one of its main aspects, was a manifestation of the repercussions of the Palestinian question.
In 1991, he published an insightful study on the First Gulf War, which was engendered by Iraq‘s invasion of Kuwait, on the one hand, and by fears of a potential imbalance of power involving Israel, on the other.In fact, Walid’s approach to the Arab dimensions of the conflict over Palestine began very early in his academic career, when he drew closer to the Nasserite experience and explored its prospects.
On 22 October 2012, as the Arab world was awash with revolutionary forces, Walid delivered a speech at the Middle East Institute in Washington in which he addressed the Palestinian situation and elaborated on his observations regarding the Arab condition.
Perhaps the following passage from the speech best summarises his view of the Arab situation over the preceding half-century:
Since Nasser’s departure, there has been no longer a moral or political center of gravity in the Arab world, no guiding star, no compass, no rudder. Moreover, the Arab state, which possesses immense, authentic spiritual energies, in addition to its overflowing material wealth, has not risen, nor does it seem likely to rise, to the level of the challenges. In the Fertile Crescent, the system of states that post- First World War System created is collapsing in and of itself, and is being replaced by a regression from urban centers to sectarian, and ethnic components of these states’ societies, with all the grave dangers that this entails.
This trajectory continues to unfold in Syria before our very eyes, fraught with the horrors it holds within. At the same time, there are Arab leaders who lack any sense of responsibility, and they relentlessly fan the flames of a horrific and utterly unjustified Sunni-Shia conflict, which constitutes the most explosive and destructive division in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Concurrently with this constantly shifting situation, two regional phenomena are emerging: First, the continued decline of secular Arab nationalism, which is rapidly approaching, and perhaps has already reached, its death throes; and second, the continued and powerful rise of political Islam in the wake of the decline of Arab nationalism. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no admirers of Arab nationalism in the Western world because of its hostility towards Israel and Western colonialism. But what the West forgets is the crucial role that secular Arab nationalism played in confronting the communist tide and preventing its spread in the Middle East, and from there to Africa. The Arab regimes that dealt with the Soviet Union, especially in the field of armament, brutally crushed the communist parties in their countries.
The failure of Arab nationalism can be attributed to several reasons. One reason, which I believe we haven’t given enough attention to, lies at the theoretical and organizational level. For example, when the Egyptian-Syrian union collapsed in 1961, there were absolutely no serious writings or studies in Arabic addressing the topic of unity or federalism—nothing, not even a single book. I still vividly remember how shocked we were when the union collapsed, and how we began asking ourselves: Why did this happen? Suddenly, we realized that there was nothing in the Arabic library, anywhere, that even remotely resembled The Federalist Papers.
How do we interpret this pessimistic view of the Arab world, two years after the outbreak of the Arab Spring? Is the historian perhaps still nostalgic for an era that, as the Arab world experiences a series of socio-political upheavals, now seems more certain and reassuring? Or does Walid feel a certain alienation in an Arab environment that had been witnessing the rapid rise of political Islam?
Perhaps all of this is true. Walid grew up in a family closely connected to the Arab-Islamic reformists whose vision of an inclusive Arabism and an Islam compatible with the modern world dominated Arab culture in the interwar period.
Although the Nasserite experiment, which Khalidi saw as a unifying force for the Arab world, was also born from the womb of Arab-Islamic reformism, the internal Egyptian divisions following the July 1952 revolution distanced the Nasserite project from its Arab-reformist roots.
But a crucial element remained alive and active in Arab politics and culture throughout most of the 20th century: the escalating dangers of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the tensions of the Cold War. Like the Arab-Islamist reformers and many other Nasserites, Walid recognised the close link between the collapse of the Ottoman League, the fragmentation of the Arab Levant under the Sykes-Picot system, and the birth of the Palestinian question. He believed that an all-embracing Arab league was the only possible alternative to the Ottoman league and the path to salvation for both the Arab peoples and the Palestinians.
It was not the rise of Islamists that defeated the Nasserite project; yet its decline paved the way for the rise of the Islamists. This was followed by a steady decline in the ability of the Arab nation-state to respond to internal and external challenges. Ultimately, the two forces – the disintegrating state and political Islam – were bound to clash, as has been the case since the outbreak of the Arab Spring in December 2010.
The question Walid sought to answer, and which the Arabs seemed close to answering in the 1950s and 60s, is whether post-revolutionary Arabs are capable of rebuilding a viable regional Arab order, and whether they can contain the ethnic and sectarian explosions triggered by the weakening of state power and the rise of political Islam.
Institutional legacy
In 1963, Walid co-founded the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut – the first specialised research centre dedicated to Palestinian affairs, and possibly the first of its kind in the Arab world. Despite subsequent attempts in this field, none of the centres established after it were able to surpass it in either the quality or quantity of their research output.
The institute, which began its work in Arabic, soon expanded into two further centres: one in Washington publishing in English, and one in Paris publishing in French.
Its leading publication, the Journal of Palestine Studies, in its English and Arabic editions, remains one of the most important specialised journals on Palestinian affairs worldwide.
Five decades on, the institute stands as a testament to the intellectual awakening of the Palestinian people and to Walid’s unwavering academic dedication. From the outset, the struggle over Palestine was a struggle over history itself, and like Walid, the institute has been engaged in the battle for history, grounded in the most rigorous traditions of scholarship.
There is now a significant number of Palestinian historians studying and researching various areas within the field, but they are all, in one way or another, indebted to Walid Khalidi
Surprisingly, however, the institute, despite its transformation into one of the most prominent bastions of Palestinian thought, has neither been able to nor even attempted to explore alternative strategic horizons for the Palestinian question.
In 1988, Walid published his article “Toward Peace in the Holy Land” in the American journal Foreign Affairs, in which he concluded that establishing a Palestinian state on the territories occupied since 1967 is the only possible vision for achieving peace, and that without it the conflict would continue indefinitely.
This, of course, was the official Palestinian national programme – the Arafat programme, if you will – with which the late Yasser Arafat pulled the rug out from under all other Palestinian forces that were unable to present a practical vision for the national struggle.
But even if this wasn’t the case, it is clear today that the second part of Walid’s conclusion is now the most likely to materialise: open conflict. This raises the important question of whether there is another strategic framework for the Palestinian struggle.
Walid was not the first Palestinian historian of the modern era, and he certainly wasn’t the last. Among his predecessors and contemporaries were George Antonius (1891-1941), Arif al-Arif (1891-1973), and Muhammad Izzat Darwaza (1887-1984), as well as specialists, such as Abd al-Latif al-Taybawi (1910-1981) and Nicola Ziadeh (1907-2006).
However, none of them matched Khalidi’s combination of methodological rigour, profound specialised knowledge of Palestinian history, and lifelong dedication to serving that history. Walid was that historian, and as such, he is the legitimate father of the Palestinian school of history.
The vast majority of second- and third-generation Palestinian historians have read Walid’s works and became familiar with his research methodology, even if these works were not essential to their specific fields. Despite the decline in historical studies in the Arab world and the limited opportunities available in western academia, there is now a significant number of Palestinian historians studying and researching various areas within the field, but they are all, in one way or another, indebted to Walid Khalidi.
His work endures not only as scholarship but as a sustained intervention in the battle over history itself.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author.