Mustafa Kabha

Mustafa Daoud Kabha (; ) is a Palestinian historian and professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the Open University of Israel. His scholarship encompasses the political, social, cultural and intellectual history of the Palestinians, with particular emphasis on the Palestinian national movement, the history of the Arabic press, mass communications, oral history, collective memory and Palestinian toponymy. He is widely recognized for his work on Palestinian historiography, journalism and memory studies, and has been described as one of the leading Palestinian scholars in these fields.

Kabha has served as president of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Israel since 2021. In 2025, the Arabic service of the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation identified him as both president of the Academy and head of Middle Eastern history at the Open University.

Education and academic career Kabha studied at Tel Aviv University, receiving a BA in Middle Eastern history and Arabic literature in 1984 and an MA in history in 1987. His master's thesis examined the War of Attrition through Egyptian sources. He completed his PhD in history at Tel Aviv University in 1996 under the supervision of Israel Gershoni. His dissertation examined the role of the press and journalistic discourse in the Palestinian Arab national struggle between 1929 and 1939.

Kabha's work associated with the Academy has included research on Palestinian place names and their linguistic, historical, geographic and social contexts.

The book examines the Palestinian press during the decade preceding the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, including the political affiliations of newspapers, their readership, their role in political mobilization and their engagement with questions of land, agriculture and social organization. It received reviews in the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin.

With media scholar Dan Caspi, Kabha co-authored The Palestinian Arab In/Outsiders: Media and Conflict in Israel (2011), a study of the development of Arabic-language media among Palestinian citizens of Israel and its relationship to state policy, political conflict and Palestinian identity.

Kabha continued this line of research in his chapter "The Arabic Palestinian Press between the Two World Wars", which analyzes newspapers as actors in Palestinian political, social and cultural life during the Mandate period.

His research has also addressed the representation of Palestinian citizens in Hebrew-language media. In a 2019 interview with The Seventh Eye, Kabha argued that Israeli media coverage of Arab citizens continued to reproduce patterns established during the early decades of the state, frequently treating Arab society as external to the political majority and approaching Arab public figures primarily through ethnic and national categories.

Palestinian history and historiography Kabha's work extends beyond media history to the political and social history of the Palestinians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His 2013 monograph The Palestinian People: Seeking Sovereignty and State traces Palestinian political history from the 1936–1939 revolt through the dispersion caused by the 1948 Palestine war, the development of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the First Intifada, the Oslo Accords and the subsequent political division between Fatah and Hamas.

The book also considers Palestinian communities in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and the wider diaspora. It was reviewed in Arab Studies Quarterly.

Kabha has also written on Palestinian historiography of the Nakba, the relationship between written documentation and oral testimony, Palestinian responses to fascism and Nazism, the history of Palestinian prisoners, internal refugees, collective memory and representations of the 1948 war.

Economic and social history With historian Nahum Karlinsky, Kabha published The Lost Orchard: The Palestinian-Arab Citrus Industry, 1850–1950 with Syracuse University Press in 2021. The book reconstructs the development of the Palestinian Arab citrus industry and its relationship with the Jewish citrus sector, treating citrus production as a field of modernization, social mobility, economic competition and Arab–Jewish cooperation before 1948.

In a 2023 review essay in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, historian Mark LeVine identified three principal arguments in the study: that citrus became Palestine's most profitable export industry during the Mandate period; that the Palestinian Arab citrus sector underwent substantial modernization; and that cooperation between Arab and Jewish producers increased in important areas despite intensifying national conflict. LeVine particularly noted the authors' discussion of the binational Citrus Control Board and their interpretation of Jaffa and citrus production as mechanisms of Palestinian social mobility and modernization.

Toponymy and local history Another major strand of Kabha's scholarship concerns Palestinian place names and their relationship to landscape, language, settlement history and collective memory. His Arabic-language works include التسميات الفلسطينية وعلاقتها بالحيّز المكاني: منطقة اللجون مثالًا (2013), a study of Palestinian place names in the Lajjun region, and the series لكل عين مشهد (For Every Eye a Landscape).

The first volume of لكل عين مشهد, published in 2017, examines the place names of the western part of the former Tulkarm subdistrict in their linguistic, geographic, historical and social contexts. A second volume, published in 2024, applies the same approach to the former Haifa subdistrict. His work on toponymy has been closely associated with his activities in the Academy of the Arabic Language and its place-names committee.

Kabha has also produced local histories and oral-history collections concerning Palestinian communities, including studies of Kafr Qara, Wadi Ara and other localities.

Public engagement Alongside his academic work, Kabha has appeared in Arabic- and Hebrew-language media as a commentator on Palestinian history, Arab society in Israel, mass communications and contemporary Middle Eastern affairs.

In 2025, Makan interviewed him concerning the emergency Arab summit in Cairo and regional proposals concerning the future of the Gaza Strip. His public commentary has also addressed representation of Palestinian citizens in Israeli media and the relationship between historical scholarship, public memory and contemporary political discourse.

Selected publications

Books in English

Books in Arabic

Selected articles and chapters