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The Voice

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Portrait of Nur Masalha
Arab World Books, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Source file on Wikimedia Commons for “Portrait of Nur Masalha”
Historian1957–· 1 min read

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.

historyNakbamemorySOAS

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.

bloomsbury.com — nur masalha(opens in a new tab)https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/nur-masalha/

Continue exploring

  1. Adel MannaHistorian of Ottoman Palestine and of the Palestinians who remained
  2. Aref al-ArefHistorian of the Nakba
  3. Avi ShlaimHistorian and emeritus professor of international relations

Connected in the archive

19 connected records

19 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

names this person — 8 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • InfiltratorGlossary

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Nur Masalha, working from the Israeli record, cites Zalman Lifschitz's report to Ben-Gurion of 13 September 1948 giving the numbers who had reached neighbouring states — some 75,000 to Transjordan, 5,000 to…

  • Plan DaletGlossary

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Israeli military archives, resists calling it a master plan while conceding that it gave commanders authority to empty villages and that expulsions followed; Nur Masalha situates it at the end of half a century of Zionist "transfer" thinking, from Herzl's diaries through the Jewish Agency's Transfer Committees.…

  • Plan Dalet was a defensive contingency plan, not a blueprint for expulsionArguments

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Historians differ on how to characterise the plan's intent — Morris resists calling it a master plan for expulsion while documenting the expulsions it authorised; Ilan Pappé treats it as the operational instrument of an ethnic-cleansing design; Nur Masalha traces the "transfer" thinking that preceded it through the Jewish Agency's own committees.

  • Settler ColonialismGlossary

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The category is descriptive rather than pejorative, and it is what makes certain otherwise puzzling patterns legible: the Jewish National Fund's land-purchase and inalienability rules, the "transfer" literature documented by Nur Masalha, the demolition of villages so that returnees would have nothing to return to, the settlement of Area C.

  • The refugees could have gone home after the war; nobody stopped themArguments

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Nur Masalha, working from the Israeli record, notes that by September 1948 only a minority had crossed into neighbouring states — Zalman Lifschitz reported to Ben-Gurion on 13 September 1948 figures of 75,000 to…

  • There is no real evidence for the Nakba — it is a Palestinian narrative, not documented historyArguments

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Alongside the state archives sit the private papers: Herzl's diaries, Ben-Gurion's diaries and letters, and Yosef Weitz's unedited diaries in the Central Zionist Archives, the source base Nur Masalha used for Expulsion of the Palestinians.

  • and 2 more

named in this record — 3 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948Library

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Masalha's first book, Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992), used Israeli and British archives to trace the concept of "transfer" in Zionist political thought.

  • JerusalemالقدسPlacesJerusalem Governorate

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.

  • Palestine: A Four Thousand Year HistoryLibrary

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.

on a related subject — 8 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.

Chicago
“Nur Masalha.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/figures/nur-masalha.
MLA
“Nur Masalha.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/figures/nur-masalha. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-nur-masalha, title = {Nur Masalha}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/figures/nur-masalha}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }