Nur Masalha

نور مصالحة

Born: Galilee, Israel

Domain: Academia & Thought

Recognition: REGIONAL

Biography

Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and academic born in the Galilee, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who later built his scholarly career in the United Kingdom. He has held positions including professor of religion and politics and director of the Centre for Religion and History at St Mary's University, and has been a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is editor of the journal Holy Land Studies. Masalha is best known for his pioneering archival study of the concept of "transfer" in Zionist thought. His 1992 book Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 drew on extensive primary sources to argue that the removal of the Palestinian population was not an accidental byproduct of the 1948 war but a long-standing strategic objective embedded in mainstream Zionist planning from the movement's earliest decades. He extended this analysis in subsequent works, including A Land Without a People and The Politics of Denial, examining Israeli policy toward refugees and the ideological frameworks that shaped dispossession. His scholarship has been central to the historiographical debate over the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem and is widely cited alongside the work of the Israeli "new historians." In his later work Masalha turned to questions of memory, identity, and the longue durée of Palestinian history. His 2012 book The Palestine Nakba developed the idea of "memoricide," the deliberate erasure of Palestinian collective memory, while his ambitious 2018 study Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History sought to recover the deep, continuous history of the land and its peoples against nationalist erasures. Through rigorous archival research and a sustained focus on dispossession, denial, and memory, Masalha has become one of the most influential contemporary historians of Palestine, shaping both academic scholarship and wider public understanding of the roots and meaning of the Nakba.

Why This Person Matters

Masalha's archival work proved that population "transfer" was central to Zionist thought, and his concept of "memoricide" reshaped scholarship on the Nakba and Palestinian memory.