Walid Khalidi may be remembered as the diplomatic gentleman-scholar who became one of Palestine’s greatest historians. But he was also a teacher, a leader, and a pioneer whose life was entirely devoted to and consumed by the question of Palestine.

Lis Harris, author of the superb new book, “In Jerusalem,” spent years trying to learn why Israel has become such an illiberal society. “I don’t believe the problem was started in ‘67 or ‘48 but from the beginning in the Not thinking of the people who were there and what you were doing to them, and what their rights were. It wasn’t always necessarily malign. But it was arrogant.”