Interred in Auschwitz, one of the largest Nazi death camps, Primo Levi records that his most overriding impulse was to tell the world of the brutal perversities meted out within the Lager, to bear witness to acts that were beyond the representational capacity of language. As a survivor after the war, Levi reflects in his first book, If This is a Man, which is counted amongst the earliest testimonies of the Shoah, on the need to write with precision and dispassionate rational objectivity of the unspeakable terrors to which he and millions of other Jews had been subjected. More than any other Holocaust survivor, Levi spoke again and again to warn the world against its recurrence. In The Drowned and the Saved, he says:
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone… . It happened; therefore, it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
It is both these impulses: to alert the world and to bear witness to the unimaginable devastation that has been visited upon the Palestinians, ironically (and how puny is the power of this word to signify the enormity of the paradox) by the same victims of Nazi bestiality, that power Jean-Pierre Filiu’s attempt to record truthfully the reality of a people and landscape destroyed beyond human recognition. A Historian in Gaza forcefully brings back Levi’s words quoted above: ‘It happened; therefore, it can happen again…and it can happen everywhere.’
French historian Filiu, the author of Gaza: A History, one of the authoritative works on this contested strip of land, is Professor of Middle East Studies at a leading French University, and a well-known columnist. He has visited Gaza multiple times through the decades and knows the land, its history and its inhabitants intimately. However, Filiu undertook this clandestine and imperilled visit after the most recent and savage war to see for himself the site of his study; to check if anything at all remained of the civilization. Though Israel forbids foreign scholars or journalists to enter Gaza, Filiu managed to cross the border as member of an NGO convoy on the night of December 19, 2024 for a month-long visit to witness first-hand the death, the devastation and a society under siege.
A Historian in Gaza is a result of the work of witnessing; it is a methodical record of the stripping away of every vestige of normalcy from Gaza. It is a document that opens a window to the world to look in on the devastation, and it will tell future generations of how a people were deliberately and ruthlessly unmade. Organized into short chapters with pared down one-word titles, the book guides the horrified reader through the bombed ruins. Each chapter is like a capsule of gut-wrenching first-hand information on a specific aspect of life, such as it is in Gaza today. Bringing to bear Filiu’s historical understanding on a given subject, the chapters are narrated with detached restraint and operate within an economy of precision.
While the book is written with Levi-like unemotional objectivity, Filiu permits himself a small token of despairing grief indicated in the refrain ‘Nothing’ in the very first chapter, which also serves as its title. Nothing, he notes, had prepared him for what he was seeing before his eyes: not his years of academic study, his fieldwork and research, not the loyalties, friendships formed over the years, and not even the familiarity with war zones from Ukraine to Syria. The Gaza with which he was so familiar had ceased to be:
I had to see and experience it for myself, because Israel has banned foreign journalists from Gaza despite repeated protests, and in Jerusalem, petitions to the Supreme Court, while dozens of Palestinian journalists were being killed in Gaza, sometimes in targeted strikes…. I had to see and experience it for myself, to retrieve not only the meaning of words in Gaza, but also the simple values of our shared humanity. Yet nothing had prepared me for what I saw and experienced in Gaza between 19 December 2024 and 21 January 2025.
The subsequent chapter ‘Coordination’ gives a vivid picture of crossing the border into Gaza at night, and details the bureaucratic structure that Israel has imposed upon the movement of people and goods since 1967, thereby turning the Strip into an open-air prison. Filiu shows unsparingly the depredations of both the IDF and the Hamas that have together contributed to the making of the hell that is Gaza. In short paragraphs he describes Israel’s regulatory controls that have suffocated everyday life in Gaza for decades.
Travelling through Rafah, Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, Filiu documents the ravaged sites that meet his eyes and singles out individual figures, stories and incidents for the reader’s attention. Filiu’s description of the coastal strip of Al-Mawasi: a densely packed stretch of improvised plastic tents, meagre, tacky belongings scattered in makeshift arrangements, and hastily dug latrines, all huddled together in the attempt to shelter against the elements is panoptic. It deliberately casts irony on the designation of the place as a ‘humanitarian zone’.
Chapters titled ‘Hospitals’, ‘Water’, ‘Witnesses’ and ‘Death’ are some of the most harrowing sections of the book. Filiu records the relentless destruction of hospitals such as Kamal Adwan and Al-Shifa in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Through his eyes we note the scant medical facilities amidst the immensity of their need, of medical staff using the same abdominal gauze multiple times, of the words Dr Mahmoud Abou Nujaila wrote on the board of his operation theatre in Al-Awda Hospital before he was killed: ‘We did what we could. Remember us.’ A recent image that has gone viral on the internet of a little child dragging a jerry can almost his own size is echoed in the chapter on water. Filiu reminds us that historically Gaza was an oasis, known for its fertile productivity and salubrious climate. But once Israel had control over its water resources, it was increasingly dependent on the mercy of its colonizer. After October 2023, the lack of water and the concurrent effect on hygiene have impacted women the most, leading to infections of the skin, intestine and urinary tract on an epidemic scale.
In ‘Witnesses’, Filiu details the courage of Palestinian journalists who have been murderously targeted. He narrates to us the story of Sirraj of Ain Media enterprise who carried on reporting alone after his friends were killed. In the Gulf for an interview when the events of October 2023 unfolded, he returned to Gaza with his wife and baby daughter in order to report and bear witness, only to be killed trying to protect his family. We meet Aila, his wife, who is now carrying on the work despite all the horrors that the family has undergone. Palestinian journalists have earned worldwide recognition for their heroism and selfless dedication. However, Filiu also acknowledges the non-responsiveness of the world from whom they hoped so much, terming it Gaza’s descent into hell. When the bombing of the schools and hospitals elicits only ‘carefully calibrated statements of indignation’ without corresponding action, he says the suffering people of Gaza may well ask the camera to go away and the reporter to shut up, because, ‘the victim’s words only ring true when presented by a Western reporter’.
Filiu journals the wreckage, and the brutalization of the population that has escalated violent behaviour in the cramped and congested refugee camps. He also details the resistance to the dehumanization seen in the rough classrooms set by teachers in the rubble, grown-ups dressed as clowns going from one hospital to another trying to amuse sick and wounded children, the small ingenuous improvizations that are seen everywhere in the camps, even as he refuses to romanticize these acts.
The book makes available a 360-degree view of what its author terms as the ‘inhumanitarian war’ that Israel has waged on Gaza. Though Filiu stops short of describing it as ‘genocide’, he feels justified in using the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ for the methodical destruction of almost 90% of homes, medical and other infrastructure, and the resulting loss of life. More significantly, he mourns the destruction of the legal and moral order. ‘Gaza is a laboratory for a world emptied of international norms,’ he writes. Clear-eyed and candid, Filiu apportions blame to all parties involved: Israel’s ruthless irredentism, Hamas’s violent suppression of its own population as well as the 23 October attack, the US’s total backing and support to Israel, the callous disregard of the Arab states and the capitulation of international press. Even as these powerful forces try to minimize and silence the enormity of the tragedy being perpetrated in Gaza, Filiu’s act of witnessing is the earliest documentation yet of the scale of Israel’s brutality. Without doubt, A Historian in Gaza is one of the most important books to have been published in recent times.
Rohini Mokashi-Punekar teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. She is the editor of On the Threshold: Songs of Chokhamela (Altamira Press 2005 and The Book Review Literary Trust 2002), Untouchable Saints: An Indian Phenomenon (Manohar 2005) which she co-edited with Eleanor Zelliot, Vikram Seth: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2008) and The Third Eye and Other Works: Mahatma Phule’s Writings on Education (Orient BlackSwan 2023).