Why does the history of the Gaza Strip matter? One may find umpteen reasons for writing and reading the history of the Strip, but the author places the contemporary context, in which an abundance of misinformation is being circulated, as the prime rationale for such an endeavour. The situation, according to the author, makes understanding this history more essential in a state of ‘infodemic’.
This work brilliantly sketches out the transformation of the Strip, from an ancient maritime trade emporium to the biggest refugee camp in the region, to an unbreakable fortress of rebellion, to the largest ‘open prison’ in the world and finally to a place synonymous with complete isolation and inaccessibility.
Although there is an excess of works on the Gaza Strip, its past and present, we seem to witness the lack of works that have critical vigour in understanding the operation of colonialism in the course of history; the British colonialism first and the ‘settler colonialism’ of Israel in the end. Right from the beginning, Gaza marked its presence in world history as a theatre of power struggles between an array of empires and forces including Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Fatimids, Crusaders, Ayyubis, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, French, British and finally Americans. The maritime world of the Strip also was profoundly diverse, consisting of traders, seafarers, agents, sufis, soldiers, explorers and refugees who passed through the seaport, settled at its coasts or remained constantly on the move.
Each of these powers dealt with the land of Gaza (entire Palestine too) from a colonial perspective. This was more evident with the British; they remained essentially Eurocentric while administering Gaza as the mandate power. This ‘orientalist’ gaze was carried forward further by the Zionists, who regarded themselves as the agents of European culture with the mission of ‘civilizing’ Palestine. The Zionists described Palestine as an ‘empty land’, and a ‘land of wilderness’ and justified ‘settler colonialism’ as a means to bring the light of ‘modernity’ to such a socially and culturally deprived place.
The contemporary fame of the Strip, however, is associated with Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Arab racism, de-development, displacements, land seizure, expulsion and forced exiles. This work becomes very significant as our understanding fails to address the layered and entangled nature of the history of the Strip, largely left untouched by the local and international scholarship.
The author identifies six important junctures in the Gaza Strip’s modern history; each episode stands pivotal to this tiny territory’s evolution as an important site in the contemporary history of the Middle East. The contemporary history of Gaza, as the author narrates, starts with its metamorphosis as the biggest Palestinian refugee camp as a result of Naqba (catastrophe), massive displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, marking the establishment of the State of Israel. The author traces the origin of the modern-day Gaza Strip to the events in 1948.
The author argues that the history of Gaza demonstrates how fulfilment of a community’s long cherished dream to establish a ‘national homeland’ resulted in another community’s dispossession from their own land. Gaza absorbed the highest number of refugees and almost after eight years it became the Israeli state’s first site of military occupation. Having received refugees from across Palestine, the Strip by the end of the 1940s became something of a ‘microcosm’ of Palestine. Since 1948, Gaza remains central to Palestinian politics, being pivotal to Palestinian national activism. After the Six Day War in 1967, with the further expulsion of refugees, Gaza has invited wider attention as the world’s most populated refugee camps.
Towards the 1980s, Gaza emerged as the fulcrum of Palestinian resistance and in 1987, the first Palestinian Intifada started here. In 1994, the Palestinian Authority (PA) established its first headquarters in the Strip. From the beginning of the 21st century, Gaza’s politics of resilience underwent a fathomable transformation with the advent of political Islam which later overpowered Arab and Palestinian nationalisms, as the popular political ideology. Consequently in 2006-7, Hamas came to power and established its first government based on Islamic political activism. In the course of history, Gaza turned out to be a site of densely packed refugee camps, overcrowded, inhuman living conditions and insufficient supplies. Its economy suffered severe damages as a series of blockades and the presence of partition walls made the residents unable to trade with the outside world. Its population remained isolated, dispossessed, regimented and traumatized most of the time. Widespread malnutrition made matters even worse.
Currently, Gaza’s eminence comes chiefly from the renewed popularity of Palestinian resistance and massive evacuation of Arabs from the Palestinian land by the Israeli Government. A frame-to-frame account of the history of the Strip helps readers of this work understand how the Strip became a new catastrophe of the 2020s. The author succinctly illustrates how the current developments create an echo of the incidents of 1948 with forced expulsion of Palestinians, making much of Gaza uninhabitable.
This work breaks two widely held views: blaming Hamas for sufferings in the Strip and violence, expulsions and human rights abuses all started with the attack of Hamas on Israeli civilians on 7 November 2023. Hamas came to power only in 2006-7 and history neatly shows that the closure of Gaza started much earlier than Hamas’s ascendance to power. So is the case with collective punishment of Palestinians, which has a long history dating back to the establishment of the Israeli state and consequent encroachment of Palestinian land by the Israeli administration. This work blames, first the British administration which saw the Palestinian Arabs as the socially inferior ‘other’, then the Israeli administration for its policies of discrimination, de-development and destruction.
This work also problematizes an oversimplified history of the Strip, the past and present of which in the media reports and popular accounts have often been depicted in a highly reductionist manner, as a land of fanaticism, violence, poverty and deep humanitarian crises. The most significant contribution of this work is its attempt to liberate the history of Gaza from different shades of history writing, colonial, national, Marxist and liberal.
Anne Irfan presents a radical re-examination of the history of the Strip and offers an alternative version, from a postcolonial perspective, giving attention to the voices of people, which were completely or partly unheard. With regard to the sources, an attempt has been made to draw focus to the narratives of Palestinians, which often have the potential to offer ‘substitutes’ for the ‘standard history’ of the region. The bibliography is highly impressive, and includes certain works which were locally published and circulated, therefore, hitherto unexplored by international scholarship. Also, an emphasis has been given to the public discourse, being manifested mainly through newspaper stories, television discussions and discussions on social networking sites, in both Palestine and Israel.
By narrating the past and present in a more exhaustive way, covering almost all relevant aspects, this work provides certain significant clues to the future, pointing to how history is going to unfold in the coming days. In terms of the novelty of the theme and approach, this is truly an unconventional work and highly recommendable for a wide range of readers, from beginners to the scholars in the field.
MH Ilias is Professor, School of Gandhian Thought and Development Studies, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala.