Rashid Khalidi is perhaps the leading academic on Palestine in the US. He is the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 2003, and ran the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, where he met and befriended Barack Obama, then a young professor. Khalidi was born in New York, from where he spoke to the New Statesman on 6 November over video link, but he and his family have deep roots in Palestinian society.
His most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), tells a history of the Israel-Palestine conflict that doubles as a history of his own family and of his life. (He was born in 1948, the year in which Israel was founded.) He was living and teaching in Lebanon during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war, and was affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in press reports at the time. He advised the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid Conference of 1991, in the years leading up to the Oslo Accords.
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