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
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.
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
