Nur Masalha

Masalha is a Palestinian historian who has spent a career on the documentary record of population transfer, and Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History is his attempt at the long view. He traces the name Palestine through Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman usage, then Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman administration, to argue that it names a continuous place and people rather than a modern invention. He is explicit that the book is a corrective to accounts he considers erasures, so it is a position paper as much as a history, and Israeli historians dispute both the continuity claim and his reading of the sources. His method is documentary, working from archives, minutes and diaries rather than polemic, which is why the transfer argument has been harder to dismiss than its critics would like. It is also why the book is strongest on the twentieth century and most speculative on the ancient material, where four thousand years of usage rests on a much thinner record. He taught at SOAS in London.