Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (Nur Masalha)

Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha ambitiously traces, as the name suggests, four thousand years of Palestinian history, from the beginning of recorded history to the modern Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Masalha is a professor of Palestinian history, former Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and editor of “The Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies,” published by Edinburgh University Press. He studies, among other things, memory, social activism, and decolonizing methodologies.

For decades, Israel has dismissed the idea of “Palestine” as a modern invention while simultaneously attempting to trace their own nation’s history to ancient times. However, Masalha quite effectively demonstrates how “Palestine” (derived from the biblical Philistine) has a rich and well-documented history that even predates the history of the holy land in the Old Testament. He shows how the Hebraization of place names by Israel is an attempt to erase Palestinian history and “justify” the colonial occupation. Masalha does not argue, despite what zionists keep telling me, that Jews do not also have a long and complicated history of living in the holy land. He does, however, demonstrate how the modern Israeli state is a colonial invention. 

So, why are zionists threatened by the idea that Palestinians have a right to live free in their homeland? A free Palestine is not a threat to the safety of Israeli citizens or Jews worldwide; it is merely a threat to Israeli nationalism, which claims not only their right to exist as a political entity but also their right to unilaterally control and exploit the land. Despite the best efforts of colonial revisionism to create the illusion that modern Israelis are indigenous, the foundation of Israel remains colonial, and the occupation of Palestinian land remains illegal. No destruction of Palestinian villages, burning of Palestinian olive trees, renaming of historical landmarks, or changing of surnames is going to change that fact. So, Israel doesn’t use facts; it uses propaganda. And the only way to combat propaganda is education. A good rule of thumb I’ve picked up over the past couple of years of decolonizing my outlook on life is that any institution or ideology that sees knowledge as a threat is full of shit. 

The most common criticisms of Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History I have seen from other reviews are 1) that Nur Masalha does not accept unsubstantiated religious documents as fact on par with archeological and documentary evidence, and 2) that he is long-winded. My response to the former is that religious freedom is the right to practice your faith, not the right to erase other cultures to fit your narrative. Unless you can find peer-reviewed scripture, “God told me in this book” is not an accepted citation. My response to the latter is that neither historians nor human history in general are known to be succinct. Having read this book thoroughly, I can conclusively say that if you think the breadth of this work is unnecessary, you should give it another look because you clearly did not understand it all the first time. 

As I am writing this amid Israel committing genocide, I find it important to stress the point that irrespective of the history of the land or the people who have lived there; there is NO justification for ethnic cleansing. If I am wrong (I’m not, but imagine for a moment), if Professor Nur Masalha is wrong, if every Palestinian man, woman, and child wrongly believes themselves to have culture and history, genocide is still indefensible. There is still no justification for dead children. Collective punishment is still a war crime. What Israel is doing right now is still unequivocally evil, and the US’s defense of Netanyahu is still aiding and abetting war crimes. No academic squabbling is ever going to change that. In the coming decades and centuries, when historians are writing the next chapters of Palestinian history, the inaction of the majority of Americans in the face of genocide will be rightly condemned as unambiguous cowardice.