Mustafa Kabha

Mustafa Kabha was born in 1962 in Umm al-Qutuf

Mustafa Kabha was born on November 28, 1962, in the village of Umm al-Qutuf in the Triangle region, at the western edge of Wadi Ara. The whole village belongs to his family, the Kabha clan. He went to the Yemma agricultural high school.

He studied at Tel Aviv University, earning a BA in Middle Eastern history and Arabic literature in 1984 and an MA in history in 1987. His master's thesis looked at the War of Attrition through Egyptian sources. He finished his PhD in 1996 under Israel Gershoni, with a dissertation on the Palestinian Arab press in the national struggle of 1929 to 1939.

He began working at the Open University in 1992 and also taught at several other colleges and universities. He became a lecturer there in 2004, an associate professor in 2010 and a full professor in 2019. From 2012 to 2015 he chaired the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies.

His research covers the Palestinian press, the Palestinian national movement, oral history and Palestinian place names. He also co-wrote a study of Arabic media in Israel with Dan Caspi. In 2021, after the death of Mahmoud Ghanayim, he was chosen as president of the Academy of the Arabic Language, and in 2020 he received the Palestine Award for Social Studies and Humanities.