Walid Khalidi, who has died aged 100, was the first professional historian to demonstrate how 750,000 Arab refugees had fled or been forced from their homes in what is now Israel in the wars of 1947 and 1948, in the face of advancing Jewish military forces. This overturned a founding Israeli myth, namely that most Palestinians left in the Nakba (disaster) because they were ordered to do so by Arab leaders.
As a scholar and resolutely independent-minded public intellectual of wide and deep erudition, with a distinguished academic career in Lebanon, the US and Britain, Khalidi was also active in politics and diplomacy for much of his life. He played a pivotal and pioneering role in the Palestinian national movement’s acceptance – and the eventual international espousal – of a two-state solution to the conflict.
