The book provides a solid history of Palestine from 1920 through 2000, skipping over the best known events [the wars] as sufficiently covered elsewhere. The history leading up to the 1920s is covered more lightly, with little detail prior to 1900.
Khalidi writes relatively evenhandedly, though mostly from a Palestinian perspective. (As he points out, that’s somewhat difficult to do, given the lack of a “national archive” or anything similar.) His “just the facts” presentation, particularly for the British Mandate period, proves persuasive. There’s a lot of interesting detail about internal power struggles and illuminating comparisons to the other Arab states of the period.
While it’s not a weighty tome, repetition makes the book drag. The book sounds like a lecture transcribed– many things are repeated two or three times in a few pages, without a lot of variation in presentation. I strongly suspect it’s better written than academic papers on the subject, but it doesn’t rise to the level of charmingly told history.