The Generation of Hope
Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History
Hurst, 424pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781849044011
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
Fuck Israel. Fuck Hamas. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNRWA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, Fatah, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community … History is repeating itself in its most cruel way and nobody seems to care. We are scared. Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we can’t even think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts. – ‘Manifesto for Gaza’s Youth’, December 2010.
Published online two years after Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’, in which over 1,000 died, and just seven months after the Israeli assault on the so-called Freedom Flotilla, a series of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip that saw the Mavi Marmara raided by Israeli troops, with nine deaths, the ‘Manifesto for Gaza’s Youth’ is an illustrative outburst from what Jean-Pierre Filiu, in his panoramic history of Gaza, terms the current ‘generation of hope’. Fearful of and enraged by the violence of the Israeli occupation, continuing despite a supposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, yet also impatient with the divisions within the Palestinian resistance movement itself, the manifesto aligns the particular concerns of the Gazans with those of others across the Arab world and beyond, with a shared concern for a new way of doing politics, one that transcends established political forces in order to reach out towards a future both more democratic, and infinitely less violent, than the present it inhabits.
Of course, the people of Gaza experience the violence of imperial modernity as perhaps few others today. Whilst it was to be the fate of most colonial possessions to formally earn their political independence in the three decades following the Second World War, in Gaza and the rest of Palestine the colonial project particular to that region was only intensifying its grip on all aspects of politics and society at this point. In such a context, history takes on a symbolic significance. Filiu’s account begins by recounting the difficulties of excavating the past in a region whose archival repositories, such as they were, have long since been obliterated, whose populous is subject to shortages of paper as a result of its being on a list of banned products largely unavailable to the everyday Gazan thanks to the Israeli blockade of the Strip, and whose history itself now has an ‘official’ version, courtesy of the Islamic-nationalist Hamas, the current political power-brokers in the Strip. Filiu’s achievement, in producing such a detailed historical reconstruction of the political wranglings, the military campaigns and counter-offensives, the rockets and resistance movements, the incursions and the massacres that have defined this most troubled of regions, is to open a space for further work, from within Gaza itself, that can both build on this historical reconstruction and turn it more directly towards the political campaign for an end to the Israeli occupation and for a future free from oppression for the Gazan people.
The preoccupations of the region were not always thus. Filiu begins his book by recounting the historic ‘fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture’, labelling Gaza the ‘last haven before the inhospitable [Negev] desert.’ In such circumstances Gaza had a strategic utility, and consequently passed between rival empires – Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine amongst others. Filiu tells us that Alexander of Macedon’s 100-day siege of Gaza in 332-333BC provides the first reference to the use of tunnels – so central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today – as a method of attack and counter-attack. Throughout its ancient history, Gaza developed both a commercial identity and a cosmopolitan society. The comings and goings of rival empires fostered a variety of cultures and economic systems, but it was under Roman rule that orchards, fields and vines were first comprehensively developed. By virtue of its commercial nature, Gaza developed a cosmopolitan feel with widespread commercial and mercantile connections making good use of available port facilities. As the Arab Geographer Al-Idrissi wrote in the 1100s, ‘Gaza is a modest city whose market is nevertheless renowned’.
In 1917, the British Empire took Gaza, along with the remainder of Palestine, from the Turkish-German alliance following a series of violent battles. From 1922 to 1948, the British ran Gaza in collaboration with a local elite as a League of Nations Mandate. During the 1940s, as Gaza City became a hub for allied troops in the region – troops with income to spend that enabled the local economy to flourish once again – the population of the city doubled in size. Yet during the 1930s Gaza had played its part in a wider Palestinian insurgency, with anti-colonial sentiment against the collective punishment imposed by the British more pronounced here than elsewhere in Palestine.
In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to pass Resolution 181, endorsing a plan to partition Palestine. Within a year, a military force comprised from nearby Arab states, with Egypt as the spearhead, began a campaign to oppose the partition, and fought running conflicts with the accumulated Zionist forces whose military hardware was at this point much weaker, but whose command structure and organisational apparatus were far superior to that of their Arab opponents. Gamel Abdel Nasser, who would later lead Egypt to independence, was stationed in Gaza during this conflict, and would go on to be amongst the foremost critics of his own country’s failure to coherently organise a military response to the partition of Palestine. However, by 1948 the Egyptians and high-ranking Palestinians had cohered a response to partition, and announced the formation of an All-Palestine Government, supported by the Arab League and with Gaza City as its designated seat. Despite this, no representatives from Gaza itself sat on what became the first government of the Palestinian portion of the newly-partitioned region. Yet the initiative soon degenerated into farce, amidst open hostility from Transjordan and some other regional powers, as well as Britain and the USA. When hostilities between Israel and Egypt resumed later in 1948, the members of the All-Palestine Government were forced to flee to Cairo where, as Filiu evokes it, the Government was to ‘vegetate’ for a short while, before collapsing amidst ‘Arab bad faith and nationalist impotence’.
The partition, formally completed in 1948, is known to the Palestinians as the nakba, or catastrophe, and it ushers in the first generation of modern Gazans in Filiu’s account, whom he terms the ‘generation of mourning’. Filiu is especially good on the demographic transitions wrought on Gaza by partition, which saw 200,000 Palestinians fleeing other parts of the country arrive to join the 80,000 already resident in Gaza. Gaza, one hundredth the size of Mandatory Palestine, now housed over a quarter of the Arab population. Unsurprisingly, living conditions deteriorated rapidly and the economy of the region collapsed, as the International Red Cross estimated that around 10 children a day were dying. Yet this generation of mourning also laid the seeds of later resistance, with unprecedented cooperation between communists and Islamists as well as the emergence in these years of the Palestinian fedayin, irregular fighters who gradually came to play a more direct role in military resistance.
In 1956, Israel collaborated with France and Britain to launch the military assault on Egypt that was to provoke the Suez Crisis. As part of the military operation, Gaza City was shelled and the Gaza Strip occupied. In November of 1956, the Israeli military combed Gaza City in search of fedayin and resistance fighters, shooting on sight anybody suspected of having borne arms; hundreds were massacred, and all men aged between 15 and 60 were subject to arrest. The Israelis searched homes, using children as human shields where they feared the presence of snipers, and both Israeli soldiers and nearby Jewish settlers ransacked shops. Amidst the general atmosphere of repression, on 12 November Israeli troops massacred at least 48 civilians at a refugee camp in Rafah, many of whom, in another example of history’s tragic repetition in Gaza, were sheltering in an UNWRA school building, just as were some of those killed in the most recent Israeli incursions into Gaza.
In the wake of the violence of 1956, the Gazan economy went through a short period of relative stability. The port of Gaza City opened out onto a network of trading links across the Sinai; Egyptian trading deals with Eastern Europe provided a market for Gaza’s citrus crop, and until 1967 Gaza underwent a period of relative stability, underwritten by Nasser’s paternalistic embrace. Yet in the aftermath of the 1956 Israeli occupation, over 40,000 refugees had fled Gaza, many into Jordan. A broad spectrum of armed resistance, centred on the Palestinian Liberation Army though excluding the Muslim Brotherhood, who had refused to join the anti-Israeli consensus, began to cohere, strengthened by the so-called Six Day War of June 1967, during which the Israeli’s shelled Gaza City and around which leading Israeli’s, including Prime Minister Eshkol and former leader David Ben Gurion talked openly of Israel annexing Gaza. Such circumstances confronted what Filiu sees as the second generation of modern Gazans, ‘the generation of dispossession’. In this era, civil and armed resistance in Gaza markedly increased, especially in the years after 1970. Yet it was at this time that Ariel Sharon took over as military commander of the southern Israeli region, with responsibility for Gaza. In the face of unrest in the Strip, Sharon exacted collective punishment on a monumental scale, whilst simultaneously reconfiguring Gaza’s urban infrastructure. Striking workers were arrested, fined and sanctioned, border police routinely attacked Gazans, and around 600 women and children were arrested and sent to the Abu Zeneima Camp in the Sinai. Sharon’s brutal methods had the desired effect, weakening the resistance movement, and before his removal from his post in 1972 he called for Israeli settlements to be established in Gaza.
The tenacity of the Palestinian resistance movement under such circumstances had been remarkable. Yet by the mid-1980s, the tensions between the different factions in Gaza reached boiling point as Islamists, nationalists and communists collapsed into open disagreement with and hostility to one another. Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organisation, centred around Fatah, did what they could to keep the groups united, but the Muslim Brotherhood became openly hostile to the nationalism of the other groups, especially Fatah. As a result, the Brotherhood were not involved when, at the funeral of Palestinians killed by an Israeli patrol in 1987 Hatem Sissi, a 15 year old boy, was shot through the heart by Israeli troops. When the Brotherhood finally joined the protests, they published a document that many see as a founding text for Hamas. Rioting quickly spread throughout the Strip, and then beyond throughout Palestine.
The first intifada, or uprising, had begun, and with it begins what Filiu terms ‘the generation of the intifadas’. Gaza’s centrality to the intifada illustrates one of Filiu’s central points – that it is in Gaza itself that the Palestinian nationalist struggle has in some ways been most concentrated. Civil disobedience raged in what was a genuinely grassroots popular protest, opposed by Israeli security forces carrying live ammunition. Out of the intifada emerged Hamas as a coherent political movement with an Islamist ideology and an authoritarian political culture, but the legacy of the intifada is much broader than this, taking its place in a panorama of Palestinian resistance, both violent and non-violent, against the loss of land, violations of rights and mass deaths experienced in the preceding three decades. In Gaza, arguably more so than anywhere else in Palestine, can the violence of the Israeli colonial project best be seen.
Filiu’s book goes over the political and diplomatic intrigues, the splits within and between the various factions of the resistance movement in Gaza (and even within particular organisations, in particular the gulf that often separated the internal Hamas operations within Gaza from its oversees representatives, including current figurehead Khaled Meshaal). His book routinely catalogues a history of great violence and subjugation, punctuated by bursts of resistance that themselves seem perpetually bound to ultimate failure, forever falling short of a united oppositional movement.
Filiu is surely correct to argue that the Gaza Strip, as ‘the womb of the fedayin and the cradle of the intifada, lies at the heart of the nation-building of contemporary Palestine.’ His book is undoubtedly the most detailed reconstruction of Gaza’s history to date, clearly written and with a chronological narrative arc that calmly and patiently builds up a catalogue of violence, oppression and resistance. Yet when it comes to his concluding political prescriptions for the future, Filiu seems to lose sight of the complex historical narrative he has built up. He looks to a ‘virtuous trio’ of events that might restore stability to Gaza and the wider region – the political opening-up of the territory, the development of the economy, and the demilitarisation of Palestinian society. Filiu suggests that such reforms could be ‘simpler than they look’; yet his entire historical undertaking prior to his concluding pages highlights just why this cannot be the case. The political forces aligned against such supposedly simple solutions, outside Gaza and within, are simply too significant at present. The most recent Israeli assault on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, is a case in point. Although the shifting logic of the assault was outwardly projected as being first about taking revenge for the death of Israeli youngsters, then halting rocket attacks, then finally destroying supply tunnels that run in and out of Gaza, behind the scenes lurked the spectre of growing collaboration between Fatah and Hamas. For Netanyahu such a prospect was unthinkable; launching an assault on Gaza, and then drawing attention to the resumption of rocket attacks, served a political goal of trying to sever the tense unity that had begun to grow between Palestine’s two foremost political groupings. In such a context, calls for the ‘demilitarisation of Palestinian society’ ring hollow.
Any attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis must reckon with the fact that over the past five years Israel has carried out three massacres in Gaza. During the latest round of violence, over 2,000 Gazans lost their lives. Simple attempts to perform a calculus of suffering – weighing Palestinian lives lost against those Israelis dying from Palestian rocket attacks – are doomed to failure, given that they accept this logic of violence as their very starting point. Would it be more tolerable if Israel killed fewer people than were dying from rocket attacks? Of course not. The everyday violence, the violence that is hidden behind the massacres, of everyday logistical and infrastructural colonialism in which borders are tightly managed, the free movement of people is non-existent, the availability of such basic human needs as water, electricity, and healthcare are precarious and subject to the whims of blockade, all of this must be the starting point for any analysis of the region.
Filiu does a superb job of cataloguing how all of this has impacted on the history of Gaza, and how its people have endured and resisted it. The ‘Manifesto for Gaza’s youth’ announced that ‘we will break free from … mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect.’ Filiu’s historical reconstruction should aid them in doing so, both for the remarkable attention to detail it pays to diplomatic wranglings between diverse State and non-State political attacks, and for the care it takes in cataloguing the regimes of violence that have been Gaza’s backdrop. It is from those brief moments of hopeful collaboration between Islamists, nationalists and radicals, recounted in full by Filiu, that Palestinians of today have most to learn; and it is through solidarity with the process of establishing such unity that those of us outside of Palestine can best contribute.
Published online two years after Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’, in which over 1,000 died, and just seven months after the Israeli assault on the so-called Freedom Flotilla, a series of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip that saw the Mavi Marmara raided by Israeli troops, with nine deaths, the ‘Manifesto for Gaza’s Youth’ is an illustrative outburst from what Jean-Pierre Filiu, in his panoramic history of Gaza, terms the current ‘generation of hope’. Fearful of and enraged by the violence of the Israeli occupation, continuing despite a supposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, yet also impatient with the divisions within the Palestinian resistance movement itself, the manifesto aligns the particular concerns of the Gazans with those of others across the Arab world and beyond, with a shared concern for a new way of doing politics, one that transcends established political forces in order to reach out towards a future both more democratic, and infinitely less violent, than the present it inhabits.
Of course, the people of Gaza experience the violence of imperial modernity as perhaps few others today. Whilst it was to be the fate of most colonial possessions to formally earn their political independence in the three decades following the Second World War, in Gaza and the rest of Palestine the colonial project particular to that region was only intensifying its grip on all aspects of politics and society at this point. In such a context, history takes on a symbolic significance. Filiu’s account begins by recounting the difficulties of excavating the past in a region whose archival repositories, such as they were, have long since been obliterated, whose populous is subject to shortages of paper as a result of its being on a list of banned products largely unavailable to the everyday Gazan thanks to the Israeli blockade of the Strip, and whose history itself now has an ‘official’ version, courtesy of the Islamic-nationalist Hamas, the current political power-brokers in the Strip. Filiu’s achievement, in producing such a detailed historical reconstruction of the political wranglings, the military campaigns and counter-offensives, the rockets and resistance movements, the incursions and the massacres that have defined this most troubled of regions, is to open a space for further work, from within Gaza itself, that can both build on this historical reconstruction and turn it more directly towards the political campaign for an end to the Israeli occupation and for a future free from oppression for the Gazan people.
The preoccupations of the region were not always thus. Filiu begins his book by recounting the historic ‘fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture’, labelling Gaza the ‘last haven before the inhospitable [Negev] desert.’ In such circumstances Gaza had a strategic utility, and consequently passed between rival empires – Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine amongst others. Filiu tells us that Alexander of Macedon’s 100-day siege of Gaza in 332-333BC provides the first reference to the use of tunnels – so central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today – as a method of attack and counter-attack. Throughout its ancient history, Gaza developed both a commercial identity and a cosmopolitan society. The comings and goings of rival empires fostered a variety of cultures and economic systems, but it was under Roman rule that orchards, fields and vines were first comprehensively developed. By virtue of its commercial nature, Gaza developed a cosmopolitan feel with widespread commercial and mercantile connections making good use of available port facilities. As the Arab Geographer Al-Idrissi wrote in the 1100s, ‘Gaza is a modest city whose market is nevertheless renowned’.
In 1917, the British Empire took Gaza, along with the remainder of Palestine, from the Turkish-German alliance following a series of violent battles. From 1922 to 1948, the British ran Gaza in collaboration with a local elite as a League of Nations Mandate. During the 1940s, as Gaza City became a hub for allied troops in the region – troops with income to spend that enabled the local economy to flourish once again – the population of the city doubled in size. Yet during the 1930s Gaza had played its part in a wider Palestinian insurgency, with anti-colonial sentiment against the collective punishment imposed by the British more pronounced here than elsewhere in Palestine.
In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to pass Resolution 181, endorsing a plan to partition Palestine. Within a year, a military force comprised from nearby Arab states, with Egypt as the spearhead, began a campaign to oppose the partition, and fought running conflicts with the accumulated Zionist forces whose military hardware was at this point much weaker, but whose command structure and organisational apparatus were far superior to that of their Arab opponents. Gamel Abdel Nasser, who would later lead Egypt to independence, was stationed in Gaza during this conflict, and would go on to be amongst the foremost critics of his own country’s failure to coherently organise a military response to the partition of Palestine. However, by 1948 the Egyptians and high-ranking Palestinians had cohered a response to partition, and announced the formation of an All-Palestine Government, supported by the Arab League and with Gaza City as its designated seat. Despite this, no representatives from Gaza itself sat on what became the first government of the Palestinian portion of the newly-partitioned region. Yet the initiative soon degenerated into farce, amidst open hostility from Transjordan and some other regional powers, as well as Britain and the USA. When hostilities between Israel and Egypt resumed later in 1948, the members of the All-Palestine Government were forced to flee to Cairo where, as Filiu evokes it, the Government was to ‘vegetate’ for a short while, before collapsing amidst ‘Arab bad faith and nationalist impotence’.
The partition, formally completed in 1948, is known to the Palestinians as the nakba, or catastrophe, and it ushers in the first generation of modern Gazans in Filiu’s account, whom he terms the ‘generation of mourning’. Filiu is especially good on the demographic transitions wrought on Gaza by partition, which saw 200,000 Palestinians fleeing other parts of the country arrive to join the 80,000 already resident in Gaza. Gaza, one hundredth the size of Mandatory Palestine, now housed over a quarter of the Arab population. Unsurprisingly, living conditions deteriorated rapidly and the economy of the region collapsed, as the International Red Cross estimated that around 10 children a day were dying. Yet this generation of mourning also laid the seeds of later resistance, with unprecedented cooperation between communists and Islamists as well as the emergence in these years of the Palestinian fedayin, irregular fighters who gradually came to play a more direct role in military resistance.
In 1956, Israel collaborated with France and Britain to launch the military assault on Egypt that was to provoke the Suez Crisis. As part of the military operation, Gaza City was shelled and the Gaza Strip occupied. In November of 1956, the Israeli military combed Gaza City in search of fedayin and resistance fighters, shooting on sight anybody suspected of having borne arms; hundreds were massacred, and all men aged between 15 and 60 were subject to arrest. The Israelis searched homes, using children as human shields where they feared the presence of snipers, and both Israeli soldiers and nearby Jewish settlers ransacked shops. Amidst the general atmosphere of repression, on 12 November Israeli troops massacred at least 48 civilians at a refugee camp in Rafah, many of whom, in another example of history’s tragic repetition in Gaza, were sheltering in an UNWRA school building, just as were some of those killed in the most recent Israeli incursions into Gaza.
In the wake of the violence of 1956, the Gazan economy went through a short period of relative stability. The port of Gaza City opened out onto a network of trading links across the Sinai; Egyptian trading deals with Eastern Europe provided a market for Gaza’s citrus crop, and until 1967 Gaza underwent a period of relative stability, underwritten by Nasser’s paternalistic embrace. Yet in the aftermath of the 1956 Israeli occupation, over 40,000 refugees had fled Gaza, many into Jordan. A broad spectrum of armed resistance, centred on the Palestinian Liberation Army though excluding the Muslim Brotherhood, who had refused to join the anti-Israeli consensus, began to cohere, strengthened by the so-called Six Day War of June 1967, during which the Israeli’s shelled Gaza City and around which leading Israeli’s, including Prime Minister Eshkol and former leader David Ben Gurion talked openly of Israel annexing Gaza. Such circumstances confronted what Filiu sees as the second generation of modern Gazans, ‘the generation of dispossession’. In this era, civil and armed resistance in Gaza markedly increased, especially in the years after 1970. Yet it was at this time that Ariel Sharon took over as military commander of the southern Israeli region, with responsibility for Gaza. In the face of unrest in the Strip, Sharon exacted collective punishment on a monumental scale, whilst simultaneously reconfiguring Gaza’s urban infrastructure. Striking workers were arrested, fined and sanctioned, border police routinely attacked Gazans, and around 600 women and children were arrested and sent to the Abu Zeneima Camp in the Sinai. Sharon’s brutal methods had the desired effect, weakening the resistance movement, and before his removal from his post in 1972 he called for Israeli settlements to be established in Gaza.
The tenacity of the Palestinian resistance movement under such circumstances had been remarkable. Yet by the mid-1980s, the tensions between the different factions in Gaza reached boiling point as Islamists, nationalists and communists collapsed into open disagreement with and hostility to one another. Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organisation, centred around Fatah, did what they could to keep the groups united, but the Muslim Brotherhood became openly hostile to the nationalism of the other groups, especially Fatah. As a result, the Brotherhood were not involved when, at the funeral of Palestinians killed by an Israeli patrol in 1987 Hatem Sissi, a 15 year old boy, was shot through the heart by Israeli troops. When the Brotherhood finally joined the protests, they published a document that many see as a founding text for Hamas. Rioting quickly spread throughout the Strip, and then beyond throughout Palestine.
The first intifada, or uprising, had begun, and with it begins what Filiu terms ‘the generation of the intifadas’. Gaza’s centrality to the intifada illustrates one of Filiu’s central points – that it is in Gaza itself that the Palestinian nationalist struggle has in some ways been most concentrated. Civil disobedience raged in what was a genuinely grassroots popular protest, opposed by Israeli security forces carrying live ammunition. Out of the intifada emerged Hamas as a coherent political movement with an Islamist ideology and an authoritarian political culture, but the legacy of the intifada is much broader than this, taking its place in a panorama of Palestinian resistance, both violent and non-violent, against the loss of land, violations of rights and mass deaths experienced in the preceding three decades. In Gaza, arguably more so than anywhere else in Palestine, can the violence of the Israeli colonial project best be seen.
Filiu’s book goes over the political and diplomatic intrigues, the splits within and between the various factions of the resistance movement in Gaza (and even within particular organisations, in particular the gulf that often separated the internal Hamas operations within Gaza from its oversees representatives, including current figurehead Khaled Meshaal). His book routinely catalogues a history of great violence and subjugation, punctuated by bursts of resistance that themselves seem perpetually bound to ultimate failure, forever falling short of a united oppositional movement.
Filiu is surely correct to argue that the Gaza Strip, as ‘the womb of the fedayin and the cradle of the intifada, lies at the heart of the nation-building of contemporary Palestine.’ His book is undoubtedly the most detailed reconstruction of Gaza’s history to date, clearly written and with a chronological narrative arc that calmly and patiently builds up a catalogue of violence, oppression and resistance. Yet when it comes to his concluding political prescriptions for the future, Filiu seems to lose sight of the complex historical narrative he has built up. He looks to a ‘virtuous trio’ of events that might restore stability to Gaza and the wider region – the political opening-up of the territory, the development of the economy, and the demilitarisation of Palestinian society. Filiu suggests that such reforms could be ‘simpler than they look’; yet his entire historical undertaking prior to his concluding pages highlights just why this cannot be the case. The political forces aligned against such supposedly simple solutions, outside Gaza and within, are simply too significant at present. The most recent Israeli assault on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, is a case in point. Although the shifting logic of the assault was outwardly projected as being first about taking revenge for the death of Israeli youngsters, then halting rocket attacks, then finally destroying supply tunnels that run in and out of Gaza, behind the scenes lurked the spectre of growing collaboration between Fatah and Hamas. For Netanyahu such a prospect was unthinkable; launching an assault on Gaza, and then drawing attention to the resumption of rocket attacks, served a political goal of trying to sever the tense unity that had begun to grow between Palestine’s two foremost political groupings. In such a context, calls for the ‘demilitarisation of Palestinian society’ ring hollow.
Any attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis must reckon with the fact that over the past five years Israel has carried out three massacres in Gaza. During the latest round of violence, over 2,000 Gazans lost their lives. Simple attempts to perform a calculus of suffering – weighing Palestinian lives lost against those Israelis dying from Palestian rocket attacks – are doomed to failure, given that they accept this logic of violence as their very starting point. Would it be more tolerable if Israel killed fewer people than were dying from rocket attacks? Of course not. The everyday violence, the violence that is hidden behind the massacres, of everyday logistical and infrastructural colonialism in which borders are tightly managed, the free movement of people is non-existent, the availability of such basic human needs as water, electricity, and healthcare are precarious and subject to the whims of blockade, all of this must be the starting point for any analysis of the region.
Filiu does a superb job of cataloguing how all of this has impacted on the history of Gaza, and how its people have endured and resisted it. The ‘Manifesto for Gaza’s youth’ announced that ‘we will break free from … mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect.’ Filiu’s historical reconstruction should aid them in doing so, both for the remarkable attention to detail it pays to diplomatic wranglings between diverse State and non-State political attacks, and for the care it takes in cataloguing the regimes of violence that have been Gaza’s backdrop. It is from those brief moments of hopeful collaboration between Islamists, nationalists and radicals, recounted in full by Filiu, that Palestinians of today have most to learn; and it is through solidarity with the process of establishing such unity that those of us outside of Palestine can best contribute.