Before the poverty and human immiseration that defines it today, Gaza for centuries was a thriving Arab area — a crossroads for empires and a commercial marketplace, according to historian Jean-Pierre Filiu. Before it became the tiny Gaza Strip and a seedbed of Palestinian nationalism in 1949, it was home to 80,000 Arabs and of little interest to Zionist settlement.
But since the middle of the 20th century, Gaza’s Arab inhabitants — the great majority refugees from the violence that brought the independent state of Israel into being — have been more or less isolated from the greater region, denied a return to their ancestral homelands in what was once Palestine under British administration.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Filiu, an expert on Middle Eastern history at Sciences Po in Paris, explores the origins of today’s Israel-Hamas war and its continuities with the past. By his count, there have been 15 wars between Israel and the Arabs of Gaza since 1948 and Israel has prevailed militarily in every one. But over the past 75 years, each time Israeli leaders sought some kind of political solution to the problem of Gaza, they failed to fulfill Palestinian national aspirations. The result was a cycle of violence spanning generations.
“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu himself said very clearly that he wanted to reduce the density of the population of Gaza. But we always come back to the same question and to the same impossibility. Next to Gaza you have a desert, an Egyptian desert. If there was not a desert in 1948 the refugees would have crossed into Egypt… So they stayed in Gaza and will remain in Gaza,” Mr. Filiu said.
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