Walid Khalidi, a scholar of Middle Eastern history whose deep family roots in Jerusalem, encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s politics and extensive work behind the diplomatic scenes of the Arab world earned him a reputation as the father of Palestinian studies, died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 100.
His son, Ahmed, confirmed the death.
Mr. Khalidi, who came from a widely respected family of academics and politicians, spent much of his career in Beirut, at the Institute for Palestine Studies, which he helped found in 1963, and at Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
He had been an eyewitness to much of the Palestinian experience during the 20th century. He grew up under the British Mandate; watched as the creation of Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including his own family, from their homes; and participated in the decades of complex politics and diplomacy that followed.
His long life and career gave him first-hand insight into some of the region’s most enduring and complicated questions: What are the continued consequences of European domination of Arab lands in the 19th and 20th centuries? What have been the successes and failures of diplomacy in the Arab world? And, above all, what does it mean to be Palestinian, a stateless people, nearly 80 years after the founding of Israel?
Beginning in the 1950s, he played a central role in creating the intellectual architecture of the Palestinian community — identifying a people with a particular history, culture and politics — and ensuring that the fate of Palestinians remained at the top of the Pan-Arab political agenda.
He centered his early work on pushing back against the received interpretation of events surrounding the 1948 founding of Israel. At the time, the consensus held that Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to flee the territory claimed by the new Israeli state.
Through extensive work in publicly accessible Israeli archives, Mr. Khalidi showed that such orders never went out, and that many Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to stay. Further, he uncovered documents that outlined a plan by Jewish forces to expel Palestinians from their lands.
“He was the first scholar to dismantle the narrative that said Israel was completely blameless in the Nakbah,” the Arabic term for the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel, Rashid Khalidi, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and a cousin of Mr. Khalidi, said in an interview. “He showed there was ethnic cleansing.”
The Institute for Palestine Studies, an independent organization, became the center point for his efforts. It provided a platform for scholarship, an incubator for young researchers and a clearinghouse for information; one institute service translated Israeli government documents and news media into Arabic.
Through a wide network of political contacts, Mr. Khalidi connected nationalist leaders from across the Arab world and ensured that Palestinian officials had a seat at the table of any Pan-Arab conversation.
Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria, Mr. Khalidi and other Palestinian leaders began to worry that the Arabs would reach a long-term settlement with Israel that did not include Palestinian input.
In the war’s aftermath, he and others, including Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, began to talk about reviving the idea of a grand settlement grounded in a two-state solution, with shared control of Jerusalem and limits placed on a future Palestinian military.
Mr. Khalidi outlined the idea of an independent but militarily constrained Palestine to Western readers in a 1978 article in Foreign Affairs, entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State.”
“The cornerstone is the concept of Palestinian sovereignty,” he wrote. “But there is no reason why the concept of Palestinian sovereignty should not accommodate provisions designed to allay legitimate fears of neighbors on a reasonable and preferably reciprocal basis.”
Mr. Khalidi’s framework helped form the basis for subsequent decades of peace talks, with Mr. Arafat and the Palestinians at the center. Mr. Khalidi was a member of the Arab delegation at a landmark multilateral conference in Madrid in 1991, which set the stage for the 1993 Oslo Accords and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty of 1994.
The Foreign Affairs article was, in retrospect, quite moderate. But it and its author were frequently criticized over the ensuing decade for their ties to Mr. Arafat, whom many in Israel and the West considered a terrorist for his years linked to guerrilla warfare.
Mr. Khalidi never joined the P.L.O., and, while he occasionally advised Mr. Arafat, he insisted on keeping some distance from the Palestinian leader. “I’m not anyone’s close adviser,” he told the columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times in 1983. “I’m myself. He has asked my opinion sometimes, but I wish he had taken my advice more often.”
Walid Ahmad Khalidi was born on July 16, 1925, in Jerusalem. His father, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, was a historian and the dean of the Arab College of Jerusalem, a government-funded school for teachers. Walid was a child when his mother, Ihsan Aql, died. His father later married Anbara Salam, a leading Lebanese writer and feminist.
Walid grew up surrounded by the intellectual elite of Arab-speaking Jerusalem. He went to Britain for his university education, receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of London in 1945 and a master’s in Islamic studies from the University of Oxford in 1951.
In between his degrees, he returned to Jerusalem to work for the Arab League. In 1948, he and his family were forced to flee, and they settled in Beirut.
He later took up a lectureship at Oxford but quit in protest in 1956 following Britain’s participation in the seizure of the Suez Canal in Egypt along with France and Israel. He joined the faculty at the American University of Beirut, where he remained until 1982. He then moved to Cambridge full time, seven years after starting his fellowship position at Harvard.
He was married to Rasha (Salam) Khalidi from 1945 until her death in 2004. In addition to their son, he is survived by their daughter, Karma Khalidi; a half brother, Tarif Khalidi, who is also a historian; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Khalidi was a nationalist and no friend of Israel. But he was also a moderate who insisted that the only solution to the conflict in the Middle East was a negotiated settlement between Palestinians and Israel — even if such a settlement seemed then, and later, a distant prospect.
“It is singularly appropriate for Palestinians and Israelis to talk directly to one another,” he wrote in a guest essay in The Times in 1984. “Unless these two peoples can themselves move toward conciliation, no third party can significantly contribute to a negotiated settlement of their conflict.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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