Gaza, A History
by Jean-Pierre Filiu
Hurst, £18.99

JEAN PIERRE FILIU was a career diplomat representing France in Jordan, Syria and Tunisia and later held various advisory roles in the French government.

In 2006 he joined Sciences Po as a professor of Middle East studies.

This is the second edition of Filiu’s book. It won the 2015 Palestine Book Award and covers Gaza from 1500 BC to 2012. It has been updated with an additional 20-page afterword penned in March 2024.

Events have been relentless: Israel has expanded its war to Lebanon and Iran, the first-tier leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah have been assassinated and presently a major genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaign is under way in north Gaza with scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust.

The Gaza that Filiu describes until 2012 is being wiped out almost as fast as you can turn the pages describing it. The book is also limited by sticking resolutely to Gaza itself rather than examining the whole Palestine question.

Gaza’s strategic geography has shaped its history. Situated between empires from Egypt and the Middle East, it served as a commercial and military hub on key trade routes. Its timeline is marked by conquest and change: the pharaohs, Alexander the Great, Crusaders, Mongols, Ottomans and the British each left their mark. By 1948, as Israel declared statehood, Gaza’s fate turned bleak.

The zionist era is a collection of catastrophes for the Palestinian people. In the first Nakba 200,000 refugees were corralled into Gaza, some of them in sight of their homes that had been taken over by Israeli settlers. The refugee camps became permanent, and the Gaza “Strip” — literally because it is a strip of land of 140 square miles in size — entered the condition we now know well.

Filiu describes in great detail of the political and military machinations between various Israeli and Palestinian factions over the next 70 years. The account covers the rise and fall of the Fedayin, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Fatah, the role of Yasser Arafat, and the birth and development of Hamas.

Significant attention is paid to the various Palestinian organisations which sprung up in resistance, including the nationalist, communist and Islamist forms. Occasionally they worked together, often they were at each other’s throats and sometimes it came close to civil war. Some wanted to compromise, others saw that as surrender, and some were collaborating.

The bisection of the Palestinian state into Gaza and the West Bank did much to cause breakdown, with different conditions pertaining in each territory and making unity harder.

Throughout, Filiu is studiously neutral and descriptive, but even with this ambivalence its clear that Israel actively deceived, provoked and supported various factions in order to maintain the disorder.

Militarily, the present genocide is different only in scale to what the residents of Gaza have experienced since the 1950s. Israeli tactics have always included attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.

As a historical account of who, when and what it would be difficult to surpass the scholarship and for this reason the work is commendable with an impressive command of detail. However, it is somewhat weaker on the “why,” and this is also a limitation of focusing on only one piece of the jigsaw.

While its clear that the conflict is totally asymmetric in Israel’s favour, the role that Israel plays for its Western backers is not explored. Indeed, in the narrative, US presidents only materialise as “peacemakers” then dematerialise as their plans fail.

The intentions of the Palestinians are clear: freedom from occupation, apartheid and murder. But the intention of Israel is condensed into only “security,” and to be fair his afterword does discuss this in some detail. Israeli policy is condemned as a stupid policy, but it is not questioned as Israeli policy.

However, the actual pronouncements of Israeli officials both before and since 2023, the glorification of destruction published by its soldiers, and the views expressed in Israeli public opinion polls, it would seem that their actual policy is what we see in the course of material reality now: to erase Palestine completely.

Filiu seems to think the policy of security was a failure because it failed to achieve peace. But was the policy truly aimed at peace through security, or was it, in reality, a peace solely for Israelis through extermination?

One way or another, the present history in Palestine means that many specialists are going to have to reassess Israeli intentions.