Khalidi’s bestselling omissions about Holy Land
In summer 2025, I worked for a Palestinian Christian-run reconciliation organization in Beit Sahour, a town near Bethlehem. There I met Palestinian scientist Mazin Qumsiyeh, who was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
I asked him how long his family had lived in Beit Sahour. He replied, “Thousands of years.”
I was skeptical. Later, I found that Beit Sahour’s records date his family’s arrival to the late 18th century. Before then, his ancestors lived in Wadi Musa, in what is now Jordan.
Prominent Palestinian figures have long lied about their personal histories to strengthen their political authority. Yasser Arafat claimed Jerusalem as his birthplace, though he was born in Cairo. Edward Said’s account of his childhood connection to Jerusalem obscured how much of his upbringing took place in Cairo.
Personal stories give political arguments the authority of lived experience, so subtler distortions deserve scrutiny, too. Rashid Khalidi offers an important case. Khalidi is a Columbia University professor emeritus and a member of a notable Jerusalemite family. His bestselling book, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” recounts the conflict through his own experiences and those of his relatives.
But the parts of his family’s history that undermine the book’s narrative are missing.
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Journalist Oren Kessler, author of “Palestine 1936,” said recently, “There are actually indications that the whole idea of partition came from the Khalidi family.”
Khalidi characterizes early partition plans as colonial endeavors that treated Palestinians “as if they had no national existence and no collective rights.” He criticizes the 1937 Peel Commission for threatening to expel more than “200,000 Arabs.” The commission recommended a Jewish state in roughly 17% of Mandatory Palestine, moving about 225,000 Arabs out of that state and 1,250 Jews out of the proposed Arab state.
Yet documents cited in Kessler’s book show that members of the Khalidi family urged the British to divide the land and transfer its inhabitants.
Commission member Reginald Coupland said the idea of partition had “come from an Arab source.” His statement followed a meeting with Ahmad Khalidi, principal of the Arab College in Jerusalem and one of Rashid Khalidi’s uncles.
An earlier document shows that in 1934, Ahmad was the first Palestinian to propose cantonization — dividing the territory into administrative areas — as a “final solution” to the conflict. The Zionists would receive “the best lands of Palestine,” while their continued presence would depend on “economic success.” He added that the “transfer of property and population is bound to take place.”
So Khalidi’s uncle advocated partition and population transfer before the Peel Commission did. Readers who see these ideas as colonial impositions deserve to know that Palestinians helped create them.
Another uncle’s position was more disturbing. Lewis Andrews, the British district commissioner for the Galilee, recalled that Hussein Khalidi, then Jerusalem’s mayor, was privately open to partition partly because he viewed Jews as “a cancer in the body and the only way to make the body healthy is to cut the cancer out.”
On campus, misinformation has consequences. Students like me use history to decide whom to support, whom to condemn and what to demand. Khalidi himself gave a widely circulated speech likening Columbia protesters to students who opposed the Vietnam War. A history that obscures Palestinian choices can radicalize students, leading them to treat exclusive Israeli responsibility as fact.
Richard McDaniel, a political science undergraduate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, is a 2026-27 CAMERA Fellow.
