‘Palestine: A Short History’ Book Review: Rashid Khalidi’s Century Seen from the Ground

Book Title: Palestine: A Short History
Author: Rashid Khalidi
Publisher: Profile Books
Number of Pages: 208
ISBN: 1806490706
Date Published: Sept. 3, 2026

Book Review

In “Palestine“, author Rashid Khalidi offers a compact, lucid history that refuses the familiar frame of two equal sides locked in an ancient feud. Instead, he treats the last century as a colonial war waged against an indigenous population, first by the Zionist movement and then by Israel, with decisive backing from Britain and the United States. The narrative is organised around six “declarations of war,” beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and moving through the 1947 partition, the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 occupation, the Oslo era, and into the present.

What is interesting in the book is Rashid’s willingness to braid the macro with the intimate. He draws on family archives—letters from his great‑great‑uncle Yusuf Diya al‑Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, to reports from generations of diplomats, judges and journalists—to restore Palestinian agency to a story often told as passive suffering. The prose is plainspoken and steady, more witness than polemic, and it keeps returning to a simple question: what did these policies feel like to the people who had to live through them?

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Readers seeking a neutral “both sides” balance may be unsettled; Rashid’s thesis is explicit and unapologetic. Yet the book’s strength lies in its clarity and its refusal to treat dispossession as fate. By the final pages, the past century reads less like an intractable tragedy than as a sequence of choices—some cruel, some careless, some courageous—whose consequences still demand reckoning.

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About the Author

Rashid Khalidi is a distinguished historian and scholar of the Middle East, known for his extensive research and writing on the region’s history and politics. He is the author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Beacon Press, 2013), along with six other books, including Sowing Crisis, The Iron Cage, Resurrecting Empire, Origins of Arab Nationalism, Under Siege, and the award-winning Palestinian Identity.

He holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University and serves as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. His scholarly contributions extend across more than eighty articles on Middle Eastern history and politics, published in academic journals and leading newspapers such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago Tribune.

Khalidi’s academic work has been supported by several prestigious fellowships and research grants, including those from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has also received a Fulbright research award.

Beyond academia, Khalidi has frequently contributed to public discussions on Middle Eastern affairs through radio and television appearances. His interviews and commentary have featured on programmes such as All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.