Walid Ahmad Khalidi

Walid Khalidi was a prominent and influential Palestinian intellectual of the modern era. An expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he produced ground-breaking work on the fall of Haifa and Deir Yassin. His best known works are Before Their Diaspora, a photographic essay on Palestinian society prior to 1948, and All That Remains, the encyclopedic collection of village histories which he edited. From 1982 until his retirement in 1996, he was a Senior Research Associate at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He served as professor of political science at the American University of Beirut from 1957 to 1982. During Khalidi's time in Beirut, he co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies, a fully independent research organization devoted to the documentation and study of Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Also, he served as the Chairman and President of the Institute for Palestine Studies USA (based in Washington, DC). Through the IPS, Khalidi edited a massive photographic history of the Palestinians prior to 1948 and oversaw a project to research, map, and photograph Palestinian villages destroyed during and after 1948. Other non-profit groups that Khalidi helped found include the Royal Scientific Society in Amman, The Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut, the Palestinian Welfare Organization, and the Center for Christian and Muslim Understanding at Georgetown University. Khalidi was honored with numerous prizes and awards from such institutions as the Palestinian Heritage Foundation, the Arab Culture Club of Beirut, Birzeit University, and the Palestinian National Authority; The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has awarded him the Order of Al Istiqlal (First Class). He received the B.A. degree (1945) in philosophy from the University of London and the M.Lit. (1951) in Islamic Studies from Oxford University.