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A short history of the Gaza Strip takes a long view of today’s conflict

  • Written by Martin Kear, Sessional Lecturer, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney
The Conversation

A Short History of the Gaza Strip, by historian Anne Irfan, is a timely addition to an important corpus of literature taking a historical and contextual view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

Review: A Short History of the Gaza Strip – Anne Irfan (Simon & Schuster)

By telling the story of the Gaza Strip, Irfan, a lecturer in race, gender and postcolonial studies at University College London, is telling the story of all Palestinians from 1948 to the present – from the catastrophe of the creation of the Israeli state, known to Palestinians as “al-naqbah” (the Nakba), to the catastrophe now engulfing Gazans in 2025.

It is a story of dispossession, colonialism, imperialism, resistance, samud, (Arabic for steadfastness/defiance), occupation, siege, destruction, death, hope, futility, ethnic cleansing and, more recently, alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While it is by definition a short history, one of the book’s most important contributions is that it gives the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, a voice. One of the many constant themes running through the book is how Palestinians are consistently denied agency; what the influential Palestinian academic Edward Said terms “their permission to narrate”. As a colonised and marginalised people, Palestinians have been routinely and deliberately denied their ability to define their own struggle and to tell their own stories.

Perhaps what is surprising here is that this suppression comes not only from previous colonial powers and Israel, but from a succession of Arab and Muslim leaders who routinely use resolving “the Palestinian Question” as a cause célèbre to promote their own geopolitical designs.

Irfan’s narrative shows that despite being robbed of their voice, Palestinians are not passive. Gazans have persistently responded to their dispossession and occupation through activism that ranges from collective action to civil disobedience to armed resistance that culminated in the horrific October 7 attacks on Israel.

The book moves away from depicting the Gaza Strip as simply a terrorist enclave devoted to the destruction of the Israeli state. The reader thus gains an appreciation of the context and history of the Palestinian question and why this sliver of land, less than half the size of Canberra, became the engine room of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

By placing events in historical context, the book highlights Israel’s own contribution to the radicalisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and by extension the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Pivotal moments

Irfan’s book identifies and examines six key junctures in Gaza’s modern history, each of which prove pivotal to its evolution. These are the 1956 temporary military occupation of Gaza; the 1967 expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, the First Intifada in 1987, the Palestinian Authority’s establishment of its first headquarters in Gaza in 1994, the evacuation of Israeli settlers in Gaza in 2005 and the establishment of a Hamas government there in 2007.

But before Irfan briefly examines these junctures, she devotes significant time to examining al-naqbah. As she notes,

to understand the history of a place you have to go back to the start. For the Gaza Strip that start is the naqbah. Nothing that happened subsequently – from the 1950s to the 2020s – can be understood without it.

The long-lasting effect of al-naqbah on Palestinians in general, and on Gazans in particular, cannot be understated. Irfan notes that Palestinians often speak about al-naqbah as an ongoing process rather than as a specific event. By the end of the 1947/48 war that created Israel, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes, villages, and cities to refugee camps around Gaza City, the West Bank, and in neighbouring Arab states – some willingly, many forcibly. Of these, approximately 200,000 refugees came to camps that sprang up around Gaza City alongside the existing 80,000 inhabitants in neighbouring towns and cities that would become known as the Gaza Strip. Population density rose from 500 people per square mile in 1944 to 2,300 people per square mile in 1948. The armistice line, or the Green Line as it became known, which forms the boundary of the Strip, “severed [it] from the towns and villages across Palestine with which Gazans had long traded and interacted.” Because of al-naqbah over 70% of Gaza’s population are refugees. To add import and cogency to her analysis, Irfan sprinkles her narrative with recollections from Palestinians detailing the violence and trauma inflicted by Israel’s military and paramilitary during and after al-naqbah. This would become a constant feature of life in the Gaza Strip, alongside activism, civil disobedience, defiance, samud and, quickly, armed resistance. It is through these recollections that Irfan gives Palestinians their voice. Of all the chapters in this book, this one perhaps has the most gravitas, because it provides an important foundation and touchstone for understanding the decades of Palestinian resistance, their yearning for an independent state and the rationale for the attacks of October 2023. The subsequent chapters are a brief examination of that resistance and equally of Israel’s effort to crush Palestinian resistance and to transform Mandatory Palestine, established by the League of Nations after World War I and governed by Britain, into the state of Israel. As Irfan describes in detail, in the intervening decades this involved the systematic destruction of many visible signs of Palestinian habitation, infrastructure, and culture, to be replaced by Israeli towns, cities and infrastructure, and the assertion of Jewish culture. The Six Day War Alongside 1948, 1967 is another seminal year examined by Irfan. The 1967 Six Day War saw Israel occupy the remaining territory of Mandatory Palestine in the form of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem, alongside Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. As Irfan details, the Six Day War is important in Palestinian history because it marks the beginning of nearly six decades of Israeli occupation. It also precipitated the formation of organised and Palestinian-controlled resistance in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), headed by the chairman of the Fatah political party, the charismatic Yasser Arafat. Debates conducted by the Israeli government of 1967 about what to do about Gaza, writes Irfan, mirror those being discussed by the Israeli government today, especially those exploring options to forcibly transfer Gazans out of the territory. Another key theme is that the way Israel views and deals with Gaza and Gazans today is nothing new – it has been going on since 1948. The chapter on the after-effects of the 1967 war also deals with the contentious issue of the establishment of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip that are in contravention of Section III of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel, writes Irfan, envisaged constructing the settlements to “shatter Gaza’s territorial contiguity by cutting it into five zones”. Throughout this, Irfan details the development of resistance from within Gaza that initially complements, but then competes with, the exogenous resistance conducted by the PLO. This competition has important ramifications for Palestinian and Israeli history because we see the evolution of Hamas – The Islamic Resistance Movement. As Irfan explains, the history of the Gaza Strip and of Palestinian resistance becomes inextricably intertwined with the history of Hamas. When Hamas was launched in 1987 its goals were twofold: to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine territory and challenge the PLO’s control of the Palestinian resistance. This competition is fought out in the intervening chapters. Irfan examines the First Intifada (Arabic for uprising) from 1987–1991, the 1994 Oslo Accords and establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas gaining control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Hamas It is perhaps the chapter on the rise of Hamas that will surprise those readers who are not familiar with the intricacies of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. As Irfan explains deftly, for Palestinians, Hamas is not an extremist movement solely bent on the destruction of Israel, as portrayed by many western politicians and media. It is a movement dedicated to resisting Israel’s occupation, both politically and militarily, and to advancing the cause of Palestinian statehood. Since its inception, Hamas has played a crucial part in Palestinian social and political life, especially in Gaza, providing a range of basic services like education and health care. It is also a political movement that won the first free, fair and open elections in the Arab world in 2006. Irfan details the response by Israel, the US and Fatah to Hamas’s election victory, with Israel beginning to blockade Gaza with the hope of causing Hamas’s new government to collapse. After a year of attempts to engineer the collapse of Hamas’s government, Hamas decided to assume control of Gaza from Fatah. In response, Israel upgraded its blockade to an outright siege, intended to prevent Hamas from participating in Palestinian politics and resistance. Irfan details the violent and non-violent actions of Gazans and Hamas in the intervening 18 years as they resist the deprivations of Israel’s siege, which has included five wars: 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023. Irfan closes her account by seeking to establish why Hamas felt it needed to launch such horrific attacks on Israel in October 2023. In no way does she seek to justify Hamas’s actions. But she attempts to establish why these attacks occurred; a discussion that moves away from the dominant narratives proffered by Israel and its supporters. Irfan emphasises the point that while atrocities were indeed inflicted upon Israelis, these attacks did not eventuate from nothing, they were a product of 1948 and decades of Israeli occupation. People marching with pictures of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
People attend a protest calling for the release of all hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip and to urge a ceasefire, Oct. 5, 2025. Ohad Zwigenberg/AAP

Overall, the book is excellently written, with Irfan providing a detailed and easily accessible history of Gaza’s foundational part in Palestinian resistance. It should be necessary reading for anyone seeking to gain an introductory understanding of some of the complex and contradictory issues that litter the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

Most importantly, it provides Gazans and Palestinians an opportunity to tell their own stories about their life under Israeli occupation.

Authors: Martin Kear, Sessional Lecturer, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

Read more https://theconversation.com/a-short-history-of-the-gaza-strip-takes-a-long-view-of-todays-conflict-266778

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