Over the past year, Gaza has become synonymous with historic catastrophe. But in ancient times, it was a place of prosperity, a strategic crossroads known as the “Way of the Philistines,” which linked ancient Egypt to the land of Canaan.
Gaza is mentioned in the inscriptions of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III (1481-1425 BCE) in connection with his first military campaign in Asia. About 2,700 years later, the famous Tangier traveler Ibn Battuta (1304-1368 CE) visited Gaza and wrote that “it is a place of great dimensions…there is no wall around it.”
In the 19th century, Gaza – under Egyptian and Ottoman rule – was not only an important trading center, but also famous for its agriculture. Historian Nabil Badran wrote that in the 1870s there were approximately 468 hectares (1,156 acres) of irrigated citrus plantations in the Gaza region. In his 1867 memoir, James Finn, former British consul in Jerusalem, recounts: “Another hour brought us to Asdood (Ashdod) of the Philistines, with Atnah and Bait Daras on our left. I don’t know where in all the Holy Land I have seen such excellent agriculture of cereals, olive trees and fruit orchards as here in Ashdod.
During the British Mandate, Gaza was one of the 16 districts of Palestine and also encompassed Isdood (Ashdod) – which in 1945 had 4,620 Palestinians and 290 Jews – Asqalan (Ashkelon) and parts of western Naqab. (Negev Desert).
When Gaza became a “strip”
The idea of a “Gaza Strip” is more recent. This is the result of the tragic history of the last 76 years, which can be summarized in one figure: about 70 percent of its inhabitants come from refugee families expelled by Zionist forces from Bait Daras, Simsim, Najd, Majdal , Huj, Abu. Sitta, and dozens of other villages before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The 1949 armistice agreement that officially ended this conflict demarcated the “Green Line” between the newly created State of Israel and what became the “Gaza Strip.”
Palestinians call the expulsions and destruction of 418 of their villages “al-Nakba” a catastrophe. It should be noted that the expression Nakba was not initially used by Palestinians. Although it is an Arabic word, it was first used in relation to Palestine in leaflets dropped by Israeli army planes on the town of At-Tira near Haifa in July 1948, in an attempt to persuade the Palestinians to surrender and leave. their homes and villages.
It was at this historic moment that Gaza became the main hub for Palestinian refugees.
In the words of Palestinian author Toufic Haddad, Gaza was “one of the few Palestinian cities to survive the 1948 Nakba…Gaza City became a city that was overflowing with all these refugees displaced from their lands, and subsequently it became the seat of the first attempt to form a pan-Palestinian national government after 1948.”
The demographic (im)balance of Gaza
In mid-October 1948, the Israeli army launched Operation Yoav, a counter-offensive against Egyptian forces in the Naqab. As a result, the refugee population in Gaza increased from 100,000 to 230,000.
Michael Gallant, father of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, participated in this operation. He named his son Yoav to celebrate the military campaign that, more than any other, changed the demographics of Gaza.
Today, Yoav Gallant, along with other Israeli officials, is attempting to close the circle of history, this time by “clearing up” the Palestinian population of Gaza. A document produced by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence and leaked to the press in late October last year described the forced and permanent transfer of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
This idea is hardly unprecedented.
In 1953, Egypt, the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), and the United States agreed to the resettlement of 12,000 Palestinian refugee families from the Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula.
After the 1948 war, Gaza remained under Egyptian control. Cairo feared that Palestinian resistance, which was growing day by day at the time, would draw it into a confrontation with Israel, which it was keen to avoid. That’s why he was willing to accept this plan, even at the expense of Palestinian rights, in the hope that it would help ease the pressure.
The resettlement, however, never took place. Massive protests broke out across the Gaza Strip, with Palestinians chanting slogans such as: “No settlement. No moving. Oh, you American agents.” The protests ultimately forced the Egyptian government to abandon the project.
However, the idea of resettling Palestinians outside Gaza persists. In 1956, Israel’s new foreign minister, Golda Meir, declared that “the Gaza Strip is an integral part of the land of Israel,” while Menachem Begin, then head of the Herut party, asserted that Gaza “belongs to right to Israel. “.
Then-Israeli Finance Minister Levi Eshkol allocated $500,000 to deport thousands of Palestinians to Sinai. This plan was entrusted to Ezra Danin, the same intelligence agent who in 1962 supported an operation to relocate Palestinians to West Germany, where there was a labor shortage.
After the 1967 war, during which Israel occupied Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Israeli forces intensified efforts to forcibly resettle Gaza’s refugee population. They opened “emigration offices” in Gaza, offering money to those who agreed to settle permanently. Israel’s transfer policies further intensified in the 1970s: 38,000 refugees were expelled from Gaza camps in 1971 alone, to both the Sinai and the West Bank.
At the same time, Israel has established illegal Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Between 1967 and 2005, a “protocolonial” situation prevailed in the Gaza Strip. A few thousand Israeli settlers controlled about 40 percent of the arable land and much of the water resources.
In 2004, Giora Eiland, who led Israel’s National Security Council between 2004 and 2006, proposed that Egypt host the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip in northern Sinai in exchange for Israeli territory that would allow a land connection to be established. built in Jordan.
Eiland’s proposal was not implemented, and in 2005, months before a stroke left him in a permanent coma, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expelled 7,000 Jewish settlers from occupied Gaza. and simultaneously installed tens of thousands more across the occupied West Bank.
As Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, explained in a 2014 article, Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza was “part of the same national security logic of unilateral solutions of which the settlements (are) a part – perpetuating and intensifying animosity and violence, rather than undoing them.”
The story to come
Despite the historic catastrophe currently unfolding in Gaza (and, mutatis mutandis, the West Bank) and the Israeli authorities’ attempts to bring history full circle, resistance to expulsions and relocations among average Palestinians is fiercer than ever. They know what “temporary” means and are aware that there is no “right of return” for them.
Israelis are also eager to stay, and that is yet another reason why anyone who cares about this land and its people should try to find a way to help these two people live side by side.
How to do it? Recognizing the enormous price that Palestinians have paid so that their counterparts’ goals could be achieved does not deny anyone’s rights and is a step in the right direction: a direction that strives to bend the arc of history from structural oppression and which takes into account the scars and rights of Palestinians and Israelis.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
