Yasir Arafat

This is the seventeenth in Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Arab America contributing writer, John Mason, highlights our seventeenth pathbreaker, Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian-American and leading historian and analyst of the Middle East. Born in New York City, he is the son of Ismail Khalidi, a Saudi citizen of Palestinian birth in Jerusalem and his Lebanese-American mother. Khalidi is passionate about Palestine, where his distinguished family has deep roots in Jerusalem from Ottoman and British periods of rule. In this renewed time of war in the Middle East, Khalidi’s analyses are all the more important.