Elias H. Tuma (1928–2016)

Elias H. Tuma was born in Kafr Yasif, in the Galilee area, during the British Mandate of Palestine. There he witnessed tremendous violence and hardship in the years leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel. He dropped out of school at age 14, and went to work in various jobs as an office boy, assistant storekeeper, and accounting clerk. He became a schoolteacher and then a certified social worker, until obtaining a scholarship to the University of Redlands in California, where he earned his B.A. in 1957. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California Berkeley in 1963. He taught at San Fernando State College and the University of Saskatchewan before joining the faculty of the University of California Davis, where he stayed for nearly 30 years. He specialized in economic history and economics of the Middle East and served as a consultant to the United Nations and several universities. He was the author of 11 books, including Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform (1965); Peacemaking and the Immoral War: Arabs and Jews in the Middle East (1972); The Economic Case for Palestine, co-written with Haim Darin-Drabkin (1978); Economic and Political Change in the Middle East (1987); and The Persistence of Economic Discrimination (1995).