Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Walid Ahmad Sameh Al-Khalidi was born in the occupied city of Jerusalem on July 17, 1925. He studied the primary stage at the Ramallah Friends School in Ramallah, and the secondary stage at the Evangelical School in Jerusalem, from which he obtained his high school diploma. He received a bachelor’s degree in Greek and Roman history and Latin from the University of London in 1945, and a master’s degree in literature from the University of Oxford in Britain in 1951.
He was appointed as a teacher at Al-Ummah College in Jerusalem before 1945, and worked at the Arab Bureau in Jerusalem. He prepared the Palestinian case papers that were presented to the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry in 1946. He worked as a lecturer at Al-Maqasid College in Beirut, and as a lecturer at the School of Oriental Studies at Oxford University until 1956, when he resigned in protest against the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt. He then worked as a professor of political studies at the American University of Beirut until 1982, during which time he was promoted to the rank of professor. He then worked as a lecturer in history at Harvard University in the United States, and as a researcher at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, and as a lecturer at Princeton University in the United States, and as a research associate at the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University between (1982-1996).
Al-Khalidi participated in writing Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations in 1974, and was among the first to publicly call for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, publishing an article in 1978 entitled “An Independent and Sovereign Palestinian State.” He was a member of the joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation to the Middle East peace talks that began at the Madrid Conference in 1991.
Al-Khalidi was active in institutional scientific work in service of the Palestinian cause. He co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies in 1963 with Constantine Zurayk and Burhan Dajani, and served as its Director General until 2016. This institute is considered one of the first institutions that worked to enrich the Palestinian, Arab, and international libraries with literature on the Palestinian cause and its issues. It was a haven for researchers on Palestinian affairs, and its library is one of the largest specialized libraries on Palestine's history and cause. He also participated in the founding of the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan in 1968, and in the founding of the Cooperation Foundation in 1982, which worked in the field of cultural and social development for the Palestinian people in the diaspora and under occupation. He also participated in the founding of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and the Friends of the Khalidi Library Association, both based in the United States. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Al-Khalidi edited a number of manuscripts and wrote a number of studies and research papers on the Palestinian issue in Arabic and English. He was interested in the 1948 war, its political, social and cultural consequences, the destroyed villages, the refugee issue, the settlement process, and the city of Jerusalem. Among his published books are: Islam, the West and Jerusalem (1996), Lest We Forget: Palestinian Villages Destroyed by Israel During the 1948 War (Editor-in-Chief, 1997), Fifty Years Since the Partition of Palestine (1998), Deir Yassin: Friday, April 9, 1948 (1999), Ownership of the Site of the American Embassy in Jerusalem (2000), The Khalidi Library in Jerusalem 1720-2001 (2002), The Diaspora: A Pictorial History of the Palestinian People 1876-1948 (2006), and The Partition of Palestine: From the Great Revolt 1937-1939 to the Nakba 1937-1949 (2021).
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