(Oct. 6, 2026 \/ JNS)\n <\/p>\n
In summer 2025, I worked for a Palestinian Christian-run reconciliation organization and lived in Beit Sahour, a town near Bethlehem. While there, I met Palestinian scientist Mazin Qumsiyeh, who was nominated<\/a> for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.<\/p>\n I asked him: \u201cHow long has your family lived here [in Beit Sahour]?\u201d He replied that his family had resided there for \u201cthousands of years.\u201d<\/p>\n I was initially skeptical but didn\u2019t investigate further. Later, I found that Beit Sahour\u2019s records<\/a> date his family\u2019s arrival in the town to the late 18th century. Before then, the ancestors of his family lived in Wadi Musa, Jordan.<\/p>\n Prominent Palestinian figures have long lied about their personal history to strengthen political authority. PLO chief Yasser Arafat claimed<\/a> to have been born in Jerusalem, although he was born in Cairo. Similarly, the scholar Edward Said\u2019s account of his childhood connection to Jerusalem obscured<\/a> how much of his upbringing took place in Cairo.<\/p>\n Personal stories give political arguments the authority of lived experience. That makes the less obvious distortions worth examining, too. Prof. Rashid Khalidi offers an important case. Khalidi is a Columbia University professor emeritus, a former PLO spokesman<\/a> and a member of a notable Jerusalemite family<\/a>. His book, The Hundred Years\u2019 War on Palestine, recounts the conflict through his own experiences and those of his relatives. It spent more than 30 weeks on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.<\/p>\n But the parts of his family\u2019s history that undermine the book\u2019s narrative are missing.<\/p>\n Journalist Oren Kessler shared a little-known historical fact from his book Palestine 1936 in a recent interview. \u201cThere are actually indications that the whole idea of partition came from the Khalidi family,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In The Hundred Years\u2019 War, Khalidi characterized early partition plans as colonial, oppressive endeavors that treated Palestinians \u201cas if they had no national existence and no collective rights.\u201d For example, Khalidi criticized the 1937 Peel Commission<\/a>, which recommended creating a Jewish state in roughly 17 percent of Mandatory Palestine, moving approximately 225,000 Arabs out of that state, and transferring 1,250 Jews out of the proposed Arab state, for threatening to expel more than \u201c200,000 Arabs\u201d and denying their \u201cgoal of self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet overlooked documents<\/a> contained in Kessler\u2019s book illustrate that the Khalidi family implored the British to divide the land and transfer its inhabitants.<\/p>\n Reginald Coupland, a member of the Commission, explained that the idea of partition had \u201ccome from an Arab source.\u201d His statement followed a meeting with Ahmad Khalidi, principal of the Arab College and one of Rashid Khalidi\u2019s uncles.<\/p>\n An earlier document<\/a> adds substance to that connection. In 1934, Ahmad was the first Palestinian to propose cantonization, dividing the territory into separate administrative areas, as a \u201cfinal solution\u201d to the conflict. The Zionists would receive \u201cthe best lands of Palestine,\u201d while their continued presence would depend on \u201ceconomic success.\u201d Ahmad also explained that the \u201ctransfer of property and population is bound to take place.\u201d<\/p>\n Kessler\u2019s book illustrates that the Khalidi family implored the British to divide the land and transfer its inhabitants.<\/p>\n In other words, a prominent member of Khalidi\u2019s family advocated for territorial division and population transfer before Peel recommended them. Readers judging these ideas as colonial impositions deserve to know that Palestinian leaders helped create them.<\/p>\n Another relative\u2019s position was more disturbing. Galilee District Commissioner Lewis Andrews recalled discussing partition with Hussein Khalidi, Jerusalem\u2019s mayor and another of Rashid Khalidi\u2019s uncles. According to Andrews, Hussein\u2019s private openness to partition partly reflected his description of Jews as \u201ca cancer in the body and the only way to make the body healthy is to cut the cancer out.\u201d<\/p>\n Another omission in Khalidi\u2019s book concerns Hussein\u2019s role in the reporting on the battle of Deir Yassin. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and Lehi, two dissident Zionist paramilitary forces, attacked the village outside Jerusalem, looted it and killed<\/a> more than 100 inhabitants, including combatants and noncombatants. Reports quickly spread across Palestine. As Khalidi explained, people \u201cfled as news spread of massacres like that \u2026 in the village of Dayr Yasin.\u201d<\/p>\n While both Arab reporting and statements by the attacking forces inflated the death toll, Hussein gave orders<\/a> to publicize rape allegations that survivors had denied. These false atrocity claims intensified fear, which also hastened flight. Since reports of Deir Yassin helped drive the Palestinian exodus, Hussein\u2019s role belongs in the explanation of it. <\/p>\n Curiously, Ahmad and Hussein both appear in The Hundred Years\u2019 War, but these facts above were neglected and remain mostly unexamined by researchers. While not responsible for the deeds of his ancestors, Khalidi is answerable for how he presents relatives whose experiences give his book authority. <\/p>\n Together, the omissions point in a consistent direction: British and Zionist decisions explain Palestinian suffering, while Palestinian decisions that contributed to the conflict are largely excluded. That\u2019s the broader problem connecting selective accounts like Khalidi\u2019s with misleading claims about personal origins and dispossession. Selective history and misleading personal narratives serve a similar political purpose: The story becomes more useful as inconvenient details disappear.<\/p>\n On campus, that has consequences. Students like me use history to decide whom to support, whom to condemn and what demands to make. Khalidi himself delivered a widely circulated speech<\/a> supporting protesters at Columbia and comparing them with students who opposed the Vietnam War. A history that obscures Palestinian choices radicalizes students and prompts them to treat the charge of exclusive Israeli responsibility as a fact. It\u2019s not a coincidence that many protesters quote or mention<\/a> prominent Palestinians such as Said.<\/p>\n I went to Beit Sahour because I wanted to hear out and help Palestinians firsthand. But if Palestinian thought leaders continue to lie, omit and help radicalize my peers, peace in the Holy Land will never happen. Only when most Palestinians and their acolytes gaze inward and analyze their sins with a degree of honesty will this long and arduous conflict finally end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Oct. 6, 2026 \/ JNS) In summer 2025, I worked for a Palestinian Christian-run reconciliation organization and lived…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638708,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-638707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}