Book Review: Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, by Nur Masalha
A Palestinian point of view where history seems to stop at 1948
Zed Books, Ltd., 2018, 304 pages
This rich and magisterial work traces Palestine's millennia-old heritage, uncovering cultures and societies of astounding depth and complexity that stretch back to the very beginnings of recorded history.
Starting with the earliest references in Egyptian and Assyrian texts, Nur Masalha explores how Palestine and its Palestinian identity have evolved over thousands of years, from the Bronze Age to the present day. Drawing on a rich body of sources and the latest archaeological evidence, Masalha shows how Palestine's multicultural past has been distorted and mythologized by Biblical lore and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
In the process, Masalha reveals that the concept of Palestine, contrary to accepted belief, is not a modern invention or one constructed in opposition to Israel, but rooted firmly in ancient past. Palestine represents the authoritative account of the country's history.
Having finished Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, by Daniel Gordis, which I thought was a very good if not completely unbiased history, I wanted to get the Palestinian take. Nur Masalha is an academic who has taught at St. Mary's University and the University of London, and Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History promised to be a dense and comprehensive work telling the story from "the other side."
I should probably not be disappointed that this book wasn't really what I was looking for, which was a Palestinian perspective on modern Palestine and its relations with Israel. Because Palestine is about that, but Masalha takes an academic's circuitous and indirect route and constructs a careful argument that Palestine is real and Israel is fake while rarely addressing concrete realities on the ground. Palestine opens with an introduction laden with post-modernist jargon like "subaltern identities" and Wittgenstein and Edward Said citations and the phrase "settler colonialist" repeated about a hundred times, and proceeds to describe a thorough, meticulous history of Palestine going all the way back to the Bronze Age, and progressing century by century in dense detail, until 1948... when history apparently stopped.
To be sure, Masalha mentions the Nakba ("catastrophe") in which 750K Palestinians were expelled from what had been Palestine following the First Arab-Israeli War, over and over. He repeatedly describes the "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinians and the havoc wreaked by the "Zionist settler colonialist project." (If you made a drinking game out of certain phrases in this book, you'd become comatose quickly. It is rare that "Israeli" occurs in the text without being preceded by some combination of "Zionist settler colonialist.") But while there is a single chapter that mentions Yasser Arafat and the PLO a few times, references to "Palestinian resistance" are vague and completely lacking in the sort of chronological and geographical detail that characterized every single notable person who ever set foot in or even mentioned Palestine from the time of Egypt's Old Kingdom until the early 20th century. If this book were your only history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, one would come away with the impression that following the Zionists' unprovoked and inexplicable decision to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1948, Palestinians have been resisting ever since by publishing scathing academic refutations of Zionist toponymic appropriation. ("Hebraization" and "Judaization" are also terms Masalha uses over and over). Is there at least a defense to be offered for violent resistance, even - dare I say it? - terrorism? If there is, Masalha doesn't try, as you will find no mention of rocket attacks, suicide bombings, Black September, the Lebanese Civil War, or the Intifadas. (Hamas gets mentioned a couple of times as a "Palestinian resistance movement.") Like, come on, my man - I am willing to hear out your arguments for why the tactics of the PLO and Hamas were justified, or at least understandable, but Masalha doesn't even touch them. He spends chapter after chapter talking about Palestine's impact on Mediterranean trade in the Roman era and its cultural significance before, during, and after the Muslim conquest (with of course a few swipes at the brutal Crusaders, as opposed to the Muslims who apparently arrived like Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on doors and asking if you'd like to hear about the Quran), but once we get to 1948 and the founding of Israel... well, Palestinians have been suffering ever since from Zionist colonialist settlers, but there are literally no details about the nature of that suffering or anything else that has happened since.
So if you're really into ethnographies going back to the Bronze Age, Palestine has you covered. (Fun fact: Palestine was probably first referred to as "Peleset" in ancient Egypt, and they may be the infamous and mysterious Sea Peoples who ravaged much of the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age.) But if you were hoping for some insight on the Palestinian version of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, well, other than the obvious fact that Israel is bad and Palestine is good, you will not find it here except by reading into what Masalha argues. Which is, essentially, that Israel, Zionism, and indeed, Judaism, are all fake.
Conventional wisdoms are often articulated by powerful elites; they are not always based on facts. The conventional wisdom is that Palestine never in its history experienced self-government, political or cultural autonomy, not to mention practical sovereignty and actual statehood. Nothing could be further from the truth. As we shall amply demonstrate in this work, over three millennia from the late Bronze Age and until the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Palestine enjoyed a great deal of social, political and economic autonomy and also experienced statehood through six distinct, though not mutually exclusive, ways - ways which had a profound impact on the evolution of the ideas of Palestine across the millennia:
So there is an important point here which is raised and argued by both Israeli and Palestinian academics: names are important, and whether or not there has ever been such a country as "Palestine" is also important. Israelis will point out that Palestine has never been a country, and go further to claim that "Palestinian," as an ethnic and cultural identity, is a modern invention.
Masalha argues otherwise, and much of his book is essentially to stake out Palestine as a distinct geographical, cultural, ethnic, and autonomous polity that has been recognized since ancient times.
His challenge, of course, is that it is literally true that Palestine has never been a "country" in the way historically or contemporaneously recognized. (The State of Palestine today has been recognized by a majority of UN member nations, but notably not either Israel or the US.) Prior to the modern era, Palestine has always been a region, a clearly-identified place on maps, but just that: to argue that Palestine has ever enjoyed "autonomy," from the Egyptians to the Romans to the Byzantines to the Islamic Caliphates to the Ottomans to British rule of Mandatory Palestine, is stretching things. For example, Masalha spends a lot of time talking about Zahir Al-Umar, who was a pretty interesting guy who ruled most of northern Palestine, which was nominally under Ottoman control but under Al-Umar it was essentially autonomous. Interesting bit of history, but it hardly establishes "Palestine" as its own country even during a brief period in the 18th century.
By Masalha's own admission, Palestinian nationalism only arose in response to Zionism. Before that, the people of Palestine might have called themselves "Palestinian" but they weren't harkening back to any ancient ideas of Palestinian statehood or ethnic or cultural identity.
Masalha's other argument goes in the opposite direction: he outright refutes the Zionist narrative that Israel was the ancient homeland of the Jews. Not only does he deny that Jews ever existed in Palestine at all, except perhaps in very small numbers, but he outright claims that the entire Old Testament narrative is fictional mythology that Jews just use to defend their fake claim to Israel.
Now, speaking as a secularist, I agree that the Old Testament should not be treated as literal history (even omitting God and the supernatural stuff), but Masalha claims that there never was any Kingdom of Israel or Judea at all - that all ancient history described in the Old Testament is completely fictitious. I am not a Biblical history scholar, but I found Masalha's claims for no archeological evidence for a Jewish presence before the Roman times to be suspect, and I also could not help noticing that he barely mentions the Roman era at all - which is when the Jewish presence, and indeed the Romans' destruction of the Jewish kingdoms there - is pretty well-documented. Apparently the Jews just showed up there for a few centuries before the Romans drove them out, and all the Jews who returned to Israel afterwards were actually European- sorry, Zionist settler colonialists.
(The theory that modern Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descended from European converts to Judaism, and not from the original Semitic peoples of Israel/Palestine, has been popular for a while, but my understanding is that recent genetic research has called that into question, and at the very least, it's an exaggeration to say that Jews were never in Israel at all.)
I also found Masalha's rather disparaging treatment of Judaism (and to a lesser extent, Christianity) revealing, since he takes a very academic attitude and doesn't explicitly argue for or against the spiritual truth of any religion, but outright accuses Judaism and Christianity of making up bullshit to justify Zionist settler colonialist narratives (take another drink...). Whereas while he's a bit cagey about Islam, he makes statements like:
The Quran and the theological traditions of Islam offered an inclusive, multi-religious representation of the shared heritage of Jerusalem.
Hmm.
Following the end of history in 1948, rather than talking in any but the vaguest of terms about what's been going on since then, Masalha then spends an entire chapter complaining about how Jews renamed everything, including themselves. Seriously, several pages just documenting all the famous early Israelis who "Hebraized" their names. He particularly highlights David Ben-Gurion (first Prime Minister of Israel) who was born David Grün and adopted the "predatory" (Masalha's wording) name of Ben-Gurion, which means "Son of the Lion."
Masalha also spends a lot of time talking about how Hebrew is a fake language that was basically made up in the 19th century and stole most of its vocabulary from Arabic. (It is true that until the founding of Israel, Hebrew was a mostly dead language that was learned by pious religious Jews but spoken by no one as a native tongue, but I was a bit surprised to read a screed about how the Jews not only made up their language, but stole it from the Arabs too!)
While I cannot fault the depth and detail of Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, there were so many glaring blind spots and ideologically-motivated arguments that I found myself doubting even the more interesting and apolitical historical details (which, after all, were not apolitical because everything was serving the agenda of arguing that Palestine has totally always been a country and a people). I was disappointed to find almost no discussion about anything that has happened since 1948, and ultimately I cannot recommend this book except as a thorough but somewhat suspect history of the premodern region called Palestine.
My complete list of book reviews.
Zed Books, Ltd., 2018, 304 pages
This rich and magisterial work traces Palestine's millennia-old heritage, uncovering cultures and societies of astounding depth and complexity that stretch back to the very beginnings of recorded history.
Starting with the earliest references in Egyptian and Assyrian texts, Nur Masalha explores how Palestine and its Palestinian identity have evolved over thousands of years, from the Bronze Age to the present day. Drawing on a rich body of sources and the latest archaeological evidence, Masalha shows how Palestine's multicultural past has been distorted and mythologized by Biblical lore and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
In the process, Masalha reveals that the concept of Palestine, contrary to accepted belief, is not a modern invention or one constructed in opposition to Israel, but rooted firmly in ancient past. Palestine represents the authoritative account of the country's history.
Having finished Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, by Daniel Gordis, which I thought was a very good if not completely unbiased history, I wanted to get the Palestinian take. Nur Masalha is an academic who has taught at St. Mary's University and the University of London, and Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History promised to be a dense and comprehensive work telling the story from "the other side."
I should probably not be disappointed that this book wasn't really what I was looking for, which was a Palestinian perspective on modern Palestine and its relations with Israel. Because Palestine is about that, but Masalha takes an academic's circuitous and indirect route and constructs a careful argument that Palestine is real and Israel is fake while rarely addressing concrete realities on the ground. Palestine opens with an introduction laden with post-modernist jargon like "subaltern identities" and Wittgenstein and Edward Said citations and the phrase "settler colonialist" repeated about a hundred times, and proceeds to describe a thorough, meticulous history of Palestine going all the way back to the Bronze Age, and progressing century by century in dense detail, until 1948... when history apparently stopped.
To be sure, Masalha mentions the Nakba ("catastrophe") in which 750K Palestinians were expelled from what had been Palestine following the First Arab-Israeli War, over and over. He repeatedly describes the "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinians and the havoc wreaked by the "Zionist settler colonialist project." (If you made a drinking game out of certain phrases in this book, you'd become comatose quickly. It is rare that "Israeli" occurs in the text without being preceded by some combination of "Zionist settler colonialist.") But while there is a single chapter that mentions Yasser Arafat and the PLO a few times, references to "Palestinian resistance" are vague and completely lacking in the sort of chronological and geographical detail that characterized every single notable person who ever set foot in or even mentioned Palestine from the time of Egypt's Old Kingdom until the early 20th century. If this book were your only history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, one would come away with the impression that following the Zionists' unprovoked and inexplicable decision to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1948, Palestinians have been resisting ever since by publishing scathing academic refutations of Zionist toponymic appropriation. ("Hebraization" and "Judaization" are also terms Masalha uses over and over). Is there at least a defense to be offered for violent resistance, even - dare I say it? - terrorism? If there is, Masalha doesn't try, as you will find no mention of rocket attacks, suicide bombings, Black September, the Lebanese Civil War, or the Intifadas. (Hamas gets mentioned a couple of times as a "Palestinian resistance movement.") Like, come on, my man - I am willing to hear out your arguments for why the tactics of the PLO and Hamas were justified, or at least understandable, but Masalha doesn't even touch them. He spends chapter after chapter talking about Palestine's impact on Mediterranean trade in the Roman era and its cultural significance before, during, and after the Muslim conquest (with of course a few swipes at the brutal Crusaders, as opposed to the Muslims who apparently arrived like Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on doors and asking if you'd like to hear about the Quran), but once we get to 1948 and the founding of Israel... well, Palestinians have been suffering ever since from Zionist colonialist settlers, but there are literally no details about the nature of that suffering or anything else that has happened since.
So if you're really into ethnographies going back to the Bronze Age, Palestine has you covered. (Fun fact: Palestine was probably first referred to as "Peleset" in ancient Egypt, and they may be the infamous and mysterious Sea Peoples who ravaged much of the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age.) But if you were hoping for some insight on the Palestinian version of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, well, other than the obvious fact that Israel is bad and Palestine is good, you will not find it here except by reading into what Masalha argues. Which is, essentially, that Israel, Zionism, and indeed, Judaism, are all fake.
Conventional wisdoms are often articulated by powerful elites; they are not always based on facts. The conventional wisdom is that Palestine never in its history experienced self-government, political or cultural autonomy, not to mention practical sovereignty and actual statehood. Nothing could be further from the truth. As we shall amply demonstrate in this work, over three millennia from the late Bronze Age and until the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Palestine enjoyed a great deal of social, political and economic autonomy and also experienced statehood through six distinct, though not mutually exclusive, ways - ways which had a profound impact on the evolution of the ideas of Palestine across the millennia:
So there is an important point here which is raised and argued by both Israeli and Palestinian academics: names are important, and whether or not there has ever been such a country as "Palestine" is also important. Israelis will point out that Palestine has never been a country, and go further to claim that "Palestinian," as an ethnic and cultural identity, is a modern invention.
Masalha argues otherwise, and much of his book is essentially to stake out Palestine as a distinct geographical, cultural, ethnic, and autonomous polity that has been recognized since ancient times.
His challenge, of course, is that it is literally true that Palestine has never been a "country" in the way historically or contemporaneously recognized. (The State of Palestine today has been recognized by a majority of UN member nations, but notably not either Israel or the US.) Prior to the modern era, Palestine has always been a region, a clearly-identified place on maps, but just that: to argue that Palestine has ever enjoyed "autonomy," from the Egyptians to the Romans to the Byzantines to the Islamic Caliphates to the Ottomans to British rule of Mandatory Palestine, is stretching things. For example, Masalha spends a lot of time talking about Zahir Al-Umar, who was a pretty interesting guy who ruled most of northern Palestine, which was nominally under Ottoman control but under Al-Umar it was essentially autonomous. Interesting bit of history, but it hardly establishes "Palestine" as its own country even during a brief period in the 18th century.
By Masalha's own admission, Palestinian nationalism only arose in response to Zionism. Before that, the people of Palestine might have called themselves "Palestinian" but they weren't harkening back to any ancient ideas of Palestinian statehood or ethnic or cultural identity.
Masalha's other argument goes in the opposite direction: he outright refutes the Zionist narrative that Israel was the ancient homeland of the Jews. Not only does he deny that Jews ever existed in Palestine at all, except perhaps in very small numbers, but he outright claims that the entire Old Testament narrative is fictional mythology that Jews just use to defend their fake claim to Israel.
Now, speaking as a secularist, I agree that the Old Testament should not be treated as literal history (even omitting God and the supernatural stuff), but Masalha claims that there never was any Kingdom of Israel or Judea at all - that all ancient history described in the Old Testament is completely fictitious. I am not a Biblical history scholar, but I found Masalha's claims for no archeological evidence for a Jewish presence before the Roman times to be suspect, and I also could not help noticing that he barely mentions the Roman era at all - which is when the Jewish presence, and indeed the Romans' destruction of the Jewish kingdoms there - is pretty well-documented. Apparently the Jews just showed up there for a few centuries before the Romans drove them out, and all the Jews who returned to Israel afterwards were actually European- sorry, Zionist settler colonialists.
(The theory that modern Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descended from European converts to Judaism, and not from the original Semitic peoples of Israel/Palestine, has been popular for a while, but my understanding is that recent genetic research has called that into question, and at the very least, it's an exaggeration to say that Jews were never in Israel at all.)
I also found Masalha's rather disparaging treatment of Judaism (and to a lesser extent, Christianity) revealing, since he takes a very academic attitude and doesn't explicitly argue for or against the spiritual truth of any religion, but outright accuses Judaism and Christianity of making up bullshit to justify Zionist settler colonialist narratives (take another drink...). Whereas while he's a bit cagey about Islam, he makes statements like:
The Quran and the theological traditions of Islam offered an inclusive, multi-religious representation of the shared heritage of Jerusalem.
Hmm.
Following the end of history in 1948, rather than talking in any but the vaguest of terms about what's been going on since then, Masalha then spends an entire chapter complaining about how Jews renamed everything, including themselves. Seriously, several pages just documenting all the famous early Israelis who "Hebraized" their names. He particularly highlights David Ben-Gurion (first Prime Minister of Israel) who was born David Grün and adopted the "predatory" (Masalha's wording) name of Ben-Gurion, which means "Son of the Lion."
Masalha also spends a lot of time talking about how Hebrew is a fake language that was basically made up in the 19th century and stole most of its vocabulary from Arabic. (It is true that until the founding of Israel, Hebrew was a mostly dead language that was learned by pious religious Jews but spoken by no one as a native tongue, but I was a bit surprised to read a screed about how the Jews not only made up their language, but stole it from the Arabs too!)
While I cannot fault the depth and detail of Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, there were so many glaring blind spots and ideologically-motivated arguments that I found myself doubting even the more interesting and apolitical historical details (which, after all, were not apolitical because everything was serving the agenda of arguing that Palestine has totally always been a country and a people). I was disappointed to find almost no discussion about anything that has happened since 1948, and ultimately I cannot recommend this book except as a thorough but somewhat suspect history of the premodern region called Palestine.
My complete list of book reviews.