Nur Masalha
نور مصالحة
Historian and professor
Palestinian historian whose work on memory, the Nakba, and the long history of Palestine challenges the erasure of the country's indigenous past.
Nur Masalha was born in 1957 in the Galilee and grew up as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned his doctorate from SOAS, University of London, where he has been a member of the Centre for Palestine Studies; he also taught for many years at St Mary’s University, London. He edits the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies.
Masalha’s first book, Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992), used Israeli and British archives to trace the concept of “transfer” in Zionist political thought. In Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018) he reached further back, following the name Palestine from ancient Egyptian and Assyrian sources to the present — an argument for the deep historical rootedness of the land and its indigenous people, and against the claim that Palestinian identity is a modern invention.
Key works
- Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (1992)
- The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (2003)
- The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (2012)
- Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.