Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History

Most argument about Palestine is conducted inside the last hundred years. Nur Masalha starts four thousand years earlier and asks a narrower question than the shouting suggests: where does the name come from, and what did it refer to?

He follows it from the earliest surviving references in Egyptian and Assyrian texts through the Bronze Age, classical Palestine and Byzantine Palaestina, the Islamic centuries and the Ottoman period, using the archaeological record and the successive administrative and cartographic uses of the name. Two things fall out of that. First, Palestine’s past is multicultural and layered, and has been flattened by biblical lore into a single story that the ground itself does not support. Second — the point that carries into the present — the concept of Palestine is not a modern construction assembled in opposition to Israel; it is attested continuously and long before there was anything to oppose.

The book earns its place on this shelf by refusing the trap it could easily have fallen into. Masalha does not answer one foundation myth with another; his claim is not that today’s Palestinians descend unbroken from a single ancient people, but that Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of a country whose name and continuity the record carries. The archaeologist Hamdan Taha, formerly the Palestinian Authority’s deputy minister for tourism and antiquities, called it a restoration of the history of ancient Palestine.

It is a synthesis on an enormous scale, and reviewers have divided over it — the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies both carried assessments, and critics have questioned how far the evidence stretches across four millennia. Read it for what it documents, not as a last word.

About the author

Nur Masalha, born in the Galilee in 1957, is a Palestinian historian, formerly director of the Centre for Religion and History at St Mary’s University, London, and a member of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, University of London. He edits the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. His Expulsion of the Palestinians is also in this library.

Details

• Zed Books, 2018 — 448 pages
• ISBN 9781786992727

Where to find it

• In print from Zed Books, now an imprint of Bloomsbury; stocked by Palestinian and solidarity booksellers, among them Shop Palestine and Middle East Books and More.
• Widely held by public and university libraries.