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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.

Among Khalidi’s 40-plus books and many more articles, Before Their Diaspora (1984), a photographically illustrated account of Palestinian life from 1876 to 1948, and All That Remains (1992), an exhaustively documented account of 400 villages destroyed or depopulated in 1948, are still two of the most widely read texts on the history of his people and the roots of the still unfulfilled struggle for Palestinian national rights.

In 1963, he co-founded the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut, which continues to be a leading and independent research centre for analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was its general secretary until 2016. The institute’s Journal of Palestinian Studies, founded in 1971, remains the major academic publication in its field.

In more than two decades as a university professor in Beirut – punctuated by spells at Harvard and Princeton – he influenced generations of students, many of whom became leaders in public life across the Arab world. With a lively sense of humour and a commanding, if sometimes stern, presence, he was a notable raconteur, as at ease with Arab and western leaders as he was with his students.

Instinctively a pan-Arabist who believed that Arab states could have a vital role in furthering the Palestinian cause, Khalidi had achieved a rapport with Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser when he met him in the late 1950s. But he was also an early interlocutor with prominent Israelis ranging from the former general Matti Peled to Abba Eban. An early believer that US pressure on Israel was key, he sought in the 70s and 80s to open channels between the US and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) through his contact with leading American figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Shultz.

Khalidi was one of five siblings, born in Jerusalem into one of the city’s oldest, leading and best-connected families – dating back to pre-Crusader times. His father, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, a dedicated educationist, was the principal of the Arab College, the leading Palestinian educational institution during the British mandate, to which he strove to recruit bright students from poorer rural families as well as more prosperous urban ones. Walid’s mother, Ihsan Aql, died during his early childhood. His cultivated and upper-class stepmother, Anbara Salam, whom his father married in 1929, was a leading Lebanese feminist who had caused a sensation – which temporarily forced her into hiding – as the first woman in Beirut to unveil herself in public while lecturing on women’s rights in 1927.

Growing up in a highly cultured home that was a meeting place for leading Palestinians, Jews and westerners, Khalidi was tutored in English by Jerome Farrell, the British mandate’s director of education. His lifelong fluent English and perfect classical Arabic were reflected in bedtime reading ranging from Abbasid poetry to PG Wodehouse. A pupil at St George’s school in Jerusalem, he then graduated with an external degree in classics from London University in 1945. In the same year he married Rasha Salam, the much younger sister of his father’s second wife.

In 1951, he took an MLitt at Oxford University with a dissertation on religious life in 17th and 18th-century Syria. But before that he was caught up in political ferment, culminating in his direct experience of the Arab defeat by Israel in 1948. Working in the Arab League’s Jerusalem office, he helped the academic Albert Hourani to prepare the Palestinian case to the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry set up in a vain effort to prevent the mounting Arab-Jewish confrontation in Palestine.

After gaining his master’s, Khalidi taught Arabic in what was then the faculty of oriental studies at Oxford. But in 1956 he resigned, outraged by the doomed UK-Israeli-French assault on Egypt in the Suez crisis, and left for Beirut. Appointed to the American University in Beirut, he soon became a political science professor – while embroiled in Lebanon’s internal politics, advising his brother-in-law, the Arab nationalist politician (and later prime minister) Saeb Salam. During the 1958 civil conflict in Beirut he was lightly wounded when Salam’s house came under attack.

In 1959, Khalidi began to publish his seminal articles on the exodus of 1948, including Why Did the Palestinians Leave?, first published in Middle East Forum, which exposed the absence of any order by Arab leaders to civilians to abandon their homes. He was the first scholar to highlight “Plan D”, a scheme by the Zionist paramilitary organisation Haganah (later the IDF) to seize Palestinian cities and destroy villages outside as well as inside the territory assigned to the Jewish state by the 1947 UN partition plan. The argument that the vast majority of Palestinians who fled did so because the Zionist military offensive compelled them to do so, foundational in establishing the Palestinian narrative, has not since been seriously challenged, and was later reinforced by the “new” Israeli historians.

In Beirut Khalidi maintained relations with several Palestinian factions, but after Israel’s victory over Jordan, Syria and Egypt in the 1967 six-day war, he became close to Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah, the dominant component of the PLO, which, after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, started to contemplate compromising on its founding goal of an Arab state on the whole of mandatory Palestine.

In this Khalidi played a decisive part, when in 1978 he published in Foreign Affairs – courageously, given the adverse reaction of more rejectionist Palestinian leaders, though with the private blessing of Arafat – an article entitled Thinking the Unthinkable. It made the first detailed case for a Palestinian state on Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, side by side with Israel. This helped to pave the way – after back-channel discussions in which Khalidi was active – for the historic 1988 PLO decision to endorse such a state and for the US finally to recognise the PLO as the representative Palestinian body.

In 1979 Khalidi took a permanent post at Harvard, where he published much of his most important work. There he and Rasha maintained, as they had in Beirut, a salon for politicians, diplomats, academics and journalists. And he continued in both private and public diplomatic roles. Khalidi took a notably independent stand against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

At the US-convened 1991 Madrid conference, which appeared to offer hope of a just resolution to the conflict but from which the PLO was excluded, Khalidi joined the Jordanian delegation and participated in the subsequent first round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Washington, which were then eclipsed by the secret talks between the PLO and Israel that led to the Oslo accords in 1993 and 1995.

Despite the concerted and conscious efforts to prevent a two-state solution by the governments of Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he described in 2014 as the “the most dangerous political leader in the world today”, Khalidi continued to argue for and believe in two states until his death.

Rasha died in 2004. Khalidi is survived by his son, Ahmad, and daughter, Karma, and by his half-brother Tarif.

• Walid Ahmad Samih Khalidi, political scientist, historian and adviser, born 16 July 1925; died 8 March 2026