Gaza City, under Israeli fire. (Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Where does the story of Gaza begin? In this region, history — or histories, given that here there is no such thing as a singular history — is serially and violently contested. “Anyone who tells a story knows that most of the work of the telling is done in the choice of where the story begins,” my old professor Ian Lustick, author of several books about Israel, wrote recently. His point was that if your story begins on 7 October 2023, it is a straightforward tale, in which barbarians slaughter the innocents before the latter, flying the flag of the civilised world, launch their counterstrike, mete out retribution and defeat the aggressors.
Start the story at a different moment in time — 1948, say, when the grandparents of today’s Gazans were living in the area, now southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists committed their atrocities — and the crystalline certainties of the scenario above take on a different light.
But there are more than two options. We could begin our story much earlier than 1948, perhaps when the name Gaza was recorded for the first time: during the reign of the mighty, empire-building Thutmose III, 1,479–1,425 BC. By this time, Gaza had already been under the rule of the Pharaohs for several decades. The long view quickly reveals that contest is a constant in Gaza’s history. Wars surge up at intervals in great, seismic eruptions, before the territory settles into an equilibrium which in turn is shattered by another external invader.
Much of this turbulence can be attributed to Gaza’s strategic location. Hemmed in between the Mediterranean and the Sinai and Negev deserts, this coastal oasis has long been a desirable waypoint on the trade routes that criss-crossed the arid region. Both the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the 1st century BC, and the Arab geographer Al Muqaddasi in the 10th century AD, commented on its beauty and enviable location. Critically, as the last point before a desert crossing, it was also an essential stopping place for conquerors looking either east from Egypt or west from the Levant. All roads of conquest ran through Gaza.
Enter stage left, from the 12th century BC, among the most historically compelling of Gaza’s many occupiers: the pagan Philistines of Philistia, etymological forefathers of the Muslim Palestinians of Palestine. And here, as the Philistines came to blows with the Jewish tribes of the interior over access to the coast, arose the earliest signs of the conflict that continues 32 centuries later between the Palestinians and Israelis.
This was the Gaza of the Bible, in which the Israelite warrior Samson was chosen by the Old Testament God to rescue Israel from the Philistines. Tricked by Delilah into revealing the secret of his strength, Samson was eventually undone, his eyes gouged out before he was imprisoned in Gaza and put to work turning a massive millstone around and around in an endless ordeal. But he had the bitter last laugh, as he pulled down the Philistine temple on himself and his persecutors, killing everyone.
This apocalyptic vision of going round and round in circles before wreaking death and mutually assured destruction endures as the defining narrative of Israel and Gaza. Old Testament smiting becomes 21st-century Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rockets, the violence circular and never-ending.
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SubscribePretty good article up until the point where the author forgets to mention that the Arabs tried to remove Israel from the map in 1967, failed miserably, and were unable to accept that they lost. So Israel annexed some territory from those who picked a fight with them. Big whoop. Losing wars has consequences. Israel even gave up most of the territory they occupied including the Sinai Peninsula. At some point you have to accept that the Palestinians have made just about every bad geopolitical choice they could. As far as I’m concerned about this whole mess, I have no problem with criticizing Israel and their actions but if anyone pretends the Palestinians are just innocent victims I stop listening and caring.
If it’s ok for Israel to annex territory by force, can they have any complaints if others try to do the same to them?
How much territory has Israel annexed vs how much have they ceded in pursuit of peace?
Indeed. In surrendering the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in 1979 Israel dismantled 18 settlements, 2 air force bases, a naval base, and gave back 23000 square miles (three times the area of Israel itself) and most of the oil resources under Israeli control. They’d all be pretty useful now.
Giving back the Sinai to Egypt and gifting the conquered Gaza to the ‘Palestinians’ represents the lions share of Israel’s spoils of war from 1948, 1967 and 1973. Syria will never get the Golan Heights back, it’s too strategic to Israeli national security. Jordan never wanted the West Bank back, or they would have fought for it, and it doesn’t belong the ‘Palestinians’, unless they can take it away from Israel in battle.
Look at a world map from 1800 or 1900, and see how many wars transferred lands from the losers to the winners. Look at what use to be called “colonial” Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, etc. and now are independent countries. But, knowing that the world accepts dramatic maps changes over time, and power transference in a post-colonial world, why is it only Israel that isn’t allowed to define its own original borders, or defend its right to absorb lands that it won in bloody battle? The answer: 125+ years of anti-Zionism mixed with thousands of years of antisemitism.
The only thing the Israelis are complaining about is the way the West expects them to preserve their security with one hand tied behind their back.
It is when you are attacked. That’s the crucial point you either don’t know about or pretend not to.
In 1967 Israel was attacked by the Arabs from all sides. At one point it looked like it would be wiped out. It begged Jordan not to join but Jordan did join. The Arabs, who number 22 states and 2.5 million square miles between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, can have no complaints when, after setting out to destroy a state the size of Wales, they end up losing and have to cede a tiny amount of territory. There has to be a price for launching failed invasions of your neighbours.
If the Arabs had accepted the 1947 Partition Plan, or land for peace proposals after the 1967 war, which they didn’t, they’d be in a much stronger position now.
Presumably you believe millions of ethnic Germans should be allowed to resettle in Western Poland or the Czech borders?
There are two accounts of 1967. The simple one, as you have given, and the complex and more realistic one, as extensively documented by Ilan Pappe. A ‘greater Israel’ had been the plan for two decades, and Israel largely provoked the 1967 war.
Provoked means what exactly? Israel forced 7 different states to declare war on it and then forced them to invade?
You seem to imply Arabs have no agency or control over themselves, just hot heads that can be provoked into a massive joint war. Pray tell, what might possibly make them so quick to invade a Jewish state?
Oh those Jews you know, they can do anything! Justin Marozzi in fact recently published a glowing review in the Spectator for a bizarre claim that the fleeing of Jews in Iraq in the 1950s was all apparently the doing of the fiendish Mossad, though his or why they would attempt that feat was left a little unclear.
Who invaded Israel?
Tensions were raised by Israel attempting to divert the water of the River Jordan.
The destruction of al-Samu.
Israel and Syria had been contesting their border region. Dayan: “Many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel”.
Israel shot down 6 Syrian aircraft on the Ba’ath party anniversary on 7 April to humiliate the regime.
Nasser became convinced that Israel was trying to topple the Ba’ath regime (much Soviet disinfo here), and when Israel called up reserves, he blocked the Straits of Tiran but only moved men, not tanks, into the Sinai. Rabin: “We are now ready to hit him, if we want. there is no preparation for a war in Iraq or Jordan. I do not believe they are preparing an attack. The north is quiet, no dramatic developments [there]. We are equal in number of troops and tanks to Syria and Egypt together.”
As late as 21st May, it was decided that there was little threat in Govt, but the army was ‘gung-ho’. Israel attacked on 5 June, destroyed Egypt’s airforce on the ground and seized the Sinai in 3 days. Jordan shelled Jeruasalem. Israel annexed the West Bank. Israel captured the Golan Heights. All over in 6 days.
Rabin in 1968: “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”
We are told that Israel acted in self-defence, but since Ben-Gurion, Israel had wanted the land. There is so much more on this in Pappe’s The Biggest Prison on Earth, on the long history of this, and documenting what happened between 21 May and 5 June. US involvement. Analysis based on declassified info. Read it and make your own mind up.
However, I don’t know where you got the idea that anybody invaded Israel. Are you sure you are not thinking of 1973?
Pappe’s work is riddled with errors, omissions and strained interpretations often based on wilful misquotation. For anyone interested, here’s a lengthy critique from way back in 1999….https://azure.org.il/article.php?id=313
This is 1999. The above book was published in 2017. Further documents have been declassified, including CIA ones.
More generally, of course, you are going to be attacked when you challenge narratives. It’s what academics do. Other revisionist historians have been challenged.
In the account above, I have only pointed to reading further on 21st May – 5th June. The rest is common knowledge.
It is certainly not the case that seven nations invaded Israel in 1967, as claimed.
Read Ilan Pappe’s article “My Israeli Friends: This is Why I Support Palestinians” of 10 October in the Palestine Chronicle and you will hopefully realise how appalling an individual he is and that you will be embarrassed ever to cite him again. He is a blatant apologist for Hamas. Shame.
Israel provoked the 1967 by having the temerity to exist. Israel begged Jordan not to invade but Jordan still did. At one point it looked like Israel might not survive. But of course, the Israelis wanted it, they just love being attacked.
And how did Israel come to exist? By ETHNICALLY CLEANSING Palestinians, beginning with the famous Deir Yassin atrocity and more than 400 other Palestinian villages.
Were Israel ever to give back ALL the land it acquired by violence and terrorism, it would hardly be more than a small province at best. And most of the land it acquired by “buying” was land owned by absentee landlords, and when Zionists acquired those lands, they mercilessly and with clear racism intent pushed Arab farmers off the lands they and their forefathers had worked for centuries (as documented by people like Pappe’), with no regard for the human cost to those farmers. No wonder Arabs began to be angry with Zionists, decades before the Nakba!
Israel came to exist because following WW1, the League of Nations required Britain to create a state for Jews within the defeated Ottoman Empire. That’s what happens, or used to happen when you lose a war – you lose territory. Then the UN, as successor to the League of Nations, after WW2 and after the British left and after Israel had been attacked by the surrounding Arab states, recognised Israel as a state.
Please can you point to a country that did not come about as a result of violence.
Why should Israel give back land it occupied after being attacked?
Pappe? That man is a disgrace. His revisionism is bad enough but on 10th October he wrote an apology for Hamas terrorism in the Palestine Chronicle. Shame. Shame.
How selective an account. Jews were ethnically cleansed from several Arab states at precisely the same time without hardly a mention from anyone. This is a historical done deal. Millions of Indians were displaced in 1947, so we’re millions of Europeans in the post war period. Their great great grandchildren are not going back to their ancestral homelands.
You stoop to using the all purpose denunciation of racism against the Jews but defend it in the Arabs, where anti Semitic toxic materials are widely circulated.
Palestinian “anger” appears in your world to be an excuse for pogroms launched against unarmed Jews in several period including 1929. Jewish aggression= racism, Palestinian= justified anger and resistance. How balanced.
Pappe is a complete outlier among historians, and takes away any agency from the Arab Muslim side of the conflict. He sounds an almost pathetic figure now. Nasser, whom I don’t think was an Israeli agent, did close the Straits of Tiran, in an attempt to economically strangle Israel. Jordan did intervene in that war, despite being warned not to. All the lands supposedly forming the Palestinian State were in Arab hands between 1948 and 1967, and indeed the Palestinians had full citizenship of Jordan at this time (which had been part of the original Mandate of Palestine).
“Pretty good article up until the point where the author forgets to mention that the Arabs tried to remove Israel from the map in 1967, failed miserably, and were unable to accept that they lost”
And had tried it in 1948 too.
And how precisely does a two-state solution work when one of the states is utterly determined to wipe out every inhabitant of its neighbour, has no moral inhibitions about slaughtering neighbours, and is supported by useful fools in the western democracies (who they equally despise)?
This has nothing to do with history and everything to do with a hateful ideology.
There’s no doubt the Palestinians have been badly mistreated throughout history, ancient and modern. A two-state solution is the only viable option IMO. Not sure either side is interested though.
However, I don’t think you can simply ignore the fact that Hamas is a corrupt, authoritarian, terrorist organization. It does not respect the lives of its enemies or its people. There is a reason Israel controls Gaza’s borders. Hamas started attacking Israel almost immediately after its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Split the territory roughly along the original partition, allowing small deviances for security. Say it will happen in 2030, which gives Israel 6 years to build whatever fortifications it believes it will need. Have a large demilitarised zone between the two, then after that date Israel has no duty of care to provide Palestine with anything
Agreed. A two-state solution is the only humane answer. How we get there seems intractable at this point.
What bothers me most about the west right now is we take our freedom, security and prosperity for granted – like it will always be there. Yet it can all disappear in the blink of an eye.
Meanwhile, people are suffering the most miserable existence in areas across the globe. I want to say Israelis and Palestinians need to forget their grievances and move forward, but WTF do I know. I’ve never truly suffered a day in my life.
I don’t think a two-state solution is the answer at all. The Arab countries are fed up with the Palestinians: the firm trend over the last twenty years has been towards normalisation of relations. Israel should either offer Gaza to Egypt (who doesn’t want it), or absorb it into its own territory; and reach a settlement with Jordan over the West Bank. Those Palestinians who wish to continue to fight will be left as domestic terrorists sponsored by Iran (together of course with Hezbollah in Lebanon): not perfect, but manageable and certainly better than having them embedded in a civilian population outside the country’s borders. All this has been the direction of travel for some time: this latest atrocity is a desperate throw to try and revivify the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The one state will quickly signal the end of Israel.
Why?
That would be just like allowing cancer cells to live within the liver and hoping it doesn’t spread to other organs.
What a disgusting comment!
Hamas explicitly rejects the two state solution. Israel is not keen on it either. Only the deluded lefty-liberals of the West want to pursue it as they don’t want to face up to the reality that a major conflict is inevitable. Just like they cling on to the delusion of a nuclear deal with Iran rather than accept the inevitable that conflict is unavoidable.
That’s like agreeing to building a new Afghanistan next door to you. A Palestinian state isn’t going to stop being Islamist in outlook and committed to a Muslim territory “from the river to the sea”. The only choices are a strong Islamic state dominating the area or a strong Jewish state dominating the area.
So Isreal would be reduced to 55% of Mandatory Palestine, or perhaps less to accommodate a demilitarised zone, and left with completely indefensible borders. That would quickly be the end of Israel, and death to millions of Jews. Which is exactly what “Palestine free from the River to the Sea” means. Failure to acknowledge that is disingenuous.
Disingenuous. That seems to be the apt description of the entire ordeal, from the media to our elected leaders.
When you say a ‘two-state’ solution, do you really mean that? If the Palestinians have a state, then it has to be just that. It should be a full plenipotentiary in supranational bodies. There can be no control over its borders, its defence, or its investors (Iran, Russia and China could all pour money into it).
If you put that on the table, then Palestinians might well be interested. Israel certainly would not, and justifiably so, the threat to its security would be intolerable.
If somehow a deal was struck where Palestine was never allowed to militarise, would we then prevent it from having advanced computing facilities, AI and CRISPR gene-editing technology? If we take these weaponisable threats away, then Palestine is looking less and less like an independent state.
Sadly, I am becoming more and more resigned to the idea that this all ends with the emptying of Gaza of Palestinians. It seems all but inevitable to me now. The fight now is about where they go.
Their visceral hatred of their neighbors, codified in their belief system, qualifies them as a cancer to society. We ought to treat the cancer as we do in the human body.
Are you calling for genocide here Warren?
You’re resigned to it and he wants it. God help us if the political caste share your sentiments.
Wow, you really are dredging the depths of humanity here. Vile.
It does seem intractable, but emptying Gaza of Palestinians would be a humanitarian crisis similar to the holocaust.
Agreed.
I wd suggest that ye did a wee bit o’ research b4 ye make the erroneous claims in yer comment.
The modern term ‘Palestinians’ didn’t exist before Yasser Arafat and his terrorist PLO publicity team created it in the 1960’s to infer that displaced Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, and Lebanese had an ancient right to lands within the 1948 borders of the nation of Israel, and then to the spoils of war which Israel annexed after the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars. Israel was generous when returning the Sinai to Egypt and magnanimous when gifting Gaza to the former Egyptians who were disallowed their reabsorption and citizenship in the land of the Pharaohs. Israel rightly annexed the Golan Heights, captured from a defeated Syria, and they have every right to do as they please with the West Bank, formerly Jordanian territory, lost by them in battle against Israel.
The author of this article only sees the good in the Gazans and the bad in Israel. I have no patience for this lopsided pseudo-journalism.
The term “Palestinian” is an ancient one. The Bible refers to the Philistines, which is the Hebrew (and Arabic) cognate. Indeed, since there is no “P’ in Arabic, the word in that language for “Palestinians” is indeed “FILISTINIYEEN.”
I will ignore the rest of your Zionist self-serving nonsense, like “ancient right,” etc.
But, if you are referring to the Bible as the source of “ancient rights,” consider that when God “gave” the land of Palestine to the “children of Abraham,” also included were the progenitors of BOTH the Hebrew nation, through Jacob/Israel, and… SURPRISE!… the Arabs, through Haggar, Abraham’s Egyptian slave.
So much for God-as-real-estate-agent.
And shame on you for justifying massacres and genocide and land theft. Of course there has to be truth to counter all the lies from Israel. It’s not lop-sided. If anything is “lop-sided,” it is the continuous propaganda from our Zionist-controlled MSM.
And so, it is refreshing to see–at long last–a timid, but fair-minded attempt at rectifying that from Unherd. I had despaired that this site would ever attempt to publish ANYTHING that wasn’t pro-Israel any more.
I specifically stated ” the modern term ‘Palestinian’ “, making no reference to its antecedents in the Bible or ancient history. In terms of lands acquired in war, it’s traditionally considered the spoils of war, and you only have to look back at world maps from 100 or 200 years ago to see how it works. What was once the Ottoman Empire are now Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Romania and some countries of the Middle East…what was the Austo-Hungarian Empire is now Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania, Austria, etc.
For the sake of clarification, the Zionist movement did NOT begin with the Balfour declaration at the end of WWI. The first Zionist settlers actually bought land legally from the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century, but this is rarely mentioned. A lot of Jews moved into the territory during the interwar years, but there were quite a few already there. Zionism was a true grassroots movement, and happened organically over time. Let’s remember this, they didn’t conquer the land, or demand it, or slaughter a bunch of civilians to cow their enemies into submission, they bought it and legally immigrated to their lands with the approval of the governments, first the Ottoman and then the British. They moved there en masse to the point that by 1948, when the partition was decided, it was largely decided by majority occupancy. The Jews were a vast majority in the territory given them, and they remain so today, with the modern state of Israel being over 80% Jewish. As the author points out, the area has been contested by outside empires for most of its history. The Israelis are the first to try to actually build their own nation there. If it hadn’t been for Zionism and the presence of Jews, I daresay that no such thing as Palestine would ever have existed, as that territory would have been divided between Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. The existence of Palestine has since biblical times been entirely theoretical. The existence of Israel, however, stands as a result of the efforts of Jewish people. Not an empire, not a nation, not a king, not a military junta, but hundreds of thousands of people voting with their feet and creating something that had not existed before.
As for the partition of 1948. The Jews accepted the partition for the sake of peace. It was the Arabs who chose war instead, thinking that they could easily defeat a foe they outnumbered with the aid of neighbors. The Arabs lost and paid the price one pays for losing wars. Germany never did get East Prussia or Alsace-Lorraine back, nor will they ever. Nobody questions that, and anybody who tried to bomb a cafe for these conquered German homelands would be labeled a criminal and a murderer and appropriately condemned. National boundaries and governments change over time based on the people inhabiting them. At some point, it is incumbent upon a population to accept the verdict of history and move on. Most of the Arab world has done this with regards to Israel. The chances of Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia riding to the aid of Hamas is quite low. Syria has their own problems to deal with. It’s past time for the Palestinians to take whatever they can get, make their peace with history, and finally and unequivocally reject terrorism as a solution to their political and social problems. They could have done so years ago and been well on their way to building a stable and peaceful nation. A small one, true, but Qatar, Switzerland, Singapore, and Taiwan have done pretty well for themselves, no? Instead they elected Hamas and clung to the destruction of Israel. They are paying the price for making bad choices. I have little sympathy for the vindictive, the antisemitic, the self-sabotaging, and the stupid.
The author says a lot, but leaves a lot out. The cycle of strife and violence stretching back to before the Mandate. The British selecting Amin Husseini to be Grand Mufti. Many particular decisions by both Jews and Arabs, each acting as their culture and history seemed to require but in ways incomprehensible and unacceptable to the other. That Balfour promised a “homeland” which in 1917 did not necessarily mean a nation-state. The impact of Nazi persecution before WW2 and the Jewish remnant after the War who had no place to live, none of which could be anticipated before it happened. The context of a postwar world awash in refugees far more numerous than the Arabs, who seemed not unique but one small group among others… except they were the one group whose people would not take them in. Black September in Jordan. Sadat making peace with Israel and then being assassinated by Muslim Brothers as a lesson to other Arab leaders.
So much…
It’s difficult to understand justification of barbarism now using poorly understood events from millennia past. Time to grow up and face reality. Human nature is flawed. We need to do better. Stop donating to and sending your precious children to Harvard. They(your children) deserve better. Harvard needs to drag itself out of the sewer.
In 1967 many Englishman of my acquaintance had considerable sympathy for Israel. I suppose it was our natural tendency to support what we mistakenly thought was the ‘under dog’.
Some had reservations given the barbaric behaviour of Jewish terrorist groups during the Mandate nearly twenty years before, but most were prepared to forgive and forget. Thus Israel’s ‘preemptive strike’ or Pearl Harbour style attack was generally applauded.
Since that time the vast reservoir of pro Israeli support has inexorably drained away, particularly after the exposure of the ‘lies’ associated with The Six Day War’. Whether this situation can ever be remedied is hard to know, but the next few weeks in Gaza will probably give us the answer.
No lingering affection for the Arab Legion?
BTW one is very much looking forward to seeing you at the Electric Ballroom in November for the Wolfe Tones. Does a man of your pedigree use ‘the tube’?
Yes the Legion fought well, Glubb Pasha, KCB, CMG, DSO, OBE, MC. would have been proud.
I would think using the ‘tube’ from now until Christmas might be a rather hazardous affair if “you know who” get their act together.
Have your club members given
approval for another ‘Islamist’ terror attack?you cause to believe that will happen? Us plebs must continue to use public transport. I still remember the fear of the few passengers as we passed through Edgware Road on 8th July ’05.Unherd commentators are not going to like your interpretation of history. They would rather pretend the Jewish fight to oust the British from Palestine never happened at all given the awkwardness it creates.
It’s drained away in the cause of swelling a dissatisfaction among people who wouldn’t ever go to these places, and who themselves would not tolerate living under a Hamas-style outfit longer than a week.
I have been there and have no answers. I feel sorrier for the local Christians. I would be up for making it easier for them to come here.
As I understand it, Britain changed its mind after 1917 and did quite a bit to dissuade Jewish immigration & to increase land allocation to the Arabs.
This was off the back of a pretty thin population in the area, of any ethnicity.
So is Koestler’s summing up accurate?