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- [00:01]
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- [01:26]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Joe Williams
Hello, I'm Joe Williams and you're listening to the New Books Network podcast today. My guest in the studio is an Irfan researcher and author of the recent book A Short History of the Gaza Strip. Hi Ann, thank you very much for joining us today.
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Ann (Author and Researcher)
Hi Jo, thanks so much for having me here.
- [01:51]
Joe Williams
Okay, so the focus of our conversation will be your recent book, but before we get into the book itself, could you please introduce yourself to our listeners and explain to us more about your research interests, please?
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Ann (Author and Researcher)
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a historian. I'm based at University College London, UCL. I've worked for close to 15 years now on Palestinian refugee history. In particular, I've researched and written a lot about the UN regime for Palestinian refugees, and my first book focused in particular on the historical development of that regime through the UN Relief and Works Agency, or unra, across the Middle east more generally. I'm also my research also looks at themes around the connections between colonialism, colonial legacies and displacement border regimes. And in recent years, I've increasingly become concerned with the juxtaposition of displacement and immobility, which I think is something that's particularly relevant to how we might think about Gaza.
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Joe Williams
Right, thank you. So, turning now to the book and one statement that you make quite early on, which I think we could perhaps start with, is you say to understand the history of a place, you have to go back to the start. For the Gaza Strip, that starting point is the Nakba. Nothing that happened subsequently from the 1950s to the 2000s can be understood without that. So let's unpack that statement and explain a little bit about Nakba and its relevance for understanding the current situation in Gaza.
- [03:30]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Sure. I mean, probably the first thing to say here is that I'm drawing a distinction in the book between the Gaza Strip and Gaza itself. So Gaza itself is a very ancient seaport. It has a very, very long history. It's mentioned in the Old Testament, it comes up in the records of various ancient empires. The Gaza Strip is something much more modern and much more recent that was essentially a product of 1948. And so when I say that the Nakba, and I'll explain what the Nakba is in a moment, when I say that nothing can be understood outside of that, I'm talking specifically about the Gaza Strip and I'm not suggesting there's no longer history here. But in terms of the Nakba, this is an Arabic word that translates as disaster or catastrophe. It is the word that's commonly used among Palestinians and in the Arabic speaking word world to refer to the mass displacement, dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people in 1948 when the state of Israel was established by military means on 78% of Palestine. As a result of that first assorted Zionist militia groups and then after it was formed, the Israeli national army carried out the large scale displacement and expulsion of Palestinians across the country. Historians have since established that at least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees as a result of those expulsions. And a particularly high number of them, at least 200,000 sought refuge in Gaza. So this is very significant if we think about the pre existing population of Gaza, which was about 80,000. So huge increase in the population, demographic transformation. It's the only part of the region that becomes majority refugee as a result of the Nakba. If we compare it to the west bank, which is the other part of Palestine not claimed by Israel, in 48 in the West Bank, Nakba refugees come to form about a third of the total, which is obviously still very significant. But in Gaza we're talking about, you know, more than half of the population after 48 are Nakba refugees. So that's hugely significant. The other point about the Nakba in relation to Gaza is that there's an ancient seaport known as Gaza, but there's no ancient Gaza Strip. There's no entity that has these particular boundaries of this particular territory that is a product directly of what happens during the Nakba. So in both demographic and territorial terms, we really have to go to the Nakba to understand the setup of Gaza in subsequent decades.
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Joe Williams
Sure, thank you. Absolutely.
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Ann (Author and Researcher)
Yeah.
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Joe Williams
This is a point which you'd also address in the book as well, is that there can be sometimes a tendency to attribute what's happening in Gaza to kind of some primordial ancient religious hatreds which are just, you know, too labyrinthine to address. But I think one of the things you're seeking to do in the book is to locate the origins of that in far more recent political history.
- [06:44]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Yeah, absolutely. It's a very, very recent phenomenon. If you take the long view as a historian, it's less than 100 years old. This narrative that often comes up, that it's ancient and primordial or somehow kind of tribal or intercommunal really doesn't stand up to the history. And I think that's, that's quite an important point to make because the knock on effect of that erroneous narrative is, is therefore for people to sometimes sort of say, well, there's nothing that can be done because it's just this ancient primordial conflict, which is absolutely not the case. It's also, I would argue, many of the driving forces behind it are very, very modern phenomenon. Actually, they're not ancient phenomenon at all. And I also don't think it's a primarily religious situation. Conflict, violence. Sure.
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Joe Williams
It feels like that narrative almost is served to try and depoliticise some of our understanding and analysis of it. Sure, absolutely. So in terms of how you approach then writing this more recent political history, you decided to kind of categorize sort of six phases of Gazan's history since 1940, 48. Could you please explain to us those six stages and why you think that's a useful framework for making sense of the recent history?
- [08:05]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Yeah, so the six phases are firstly the Nakba itself, which we just talked about a little bit. So that's 1948. Then secondly, 1956 is the first Israeli occupation of Gaza. Ten years later or thereabouts, we have 1967, which is the second Israeli occupation, and that becomes a very long lasting occupation that's ongoing. The fourth moment is the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987. The fifth moment is the passage of the Oslo agreement in the 1990s and the establishment of Palestinian Authority which has its first headquarters in Gaza. And then the fifth moment is 2006, 2007, where we see Hamas first win Palestinian parliamentary elections and go on to form a government in Gaza and the resulting split between Gaza and The West Bank. And the reason I chose this framework of these six moments is that one of the questions I really wanted to try and explore in this book is this issue of why Gaza is so important. Because that's something that has come to the fore time and time again in recent years, Most obviously since October 2023, when it's become this real headline issue where we've seen the killing of so many people, the Israeli war that's now been widely recognized as a genocide, but it's not a new phenomenon. Gaza has pretty much always had what I call in the book this outsized significance, and that's something we see in each of these moments. So at each of these moments, Gaza has this centrality to Palestinian politics, Israeli politics, Middle Eastern politics, sometimes even international politics. And it's not something that can be easily explained necessarily by just looking together as characteristics. It's a really tiny territory. It's less than 1.5% of historic Palestine. It actually, unlike the rest of the country, it doesn't really have many religious sites, doesn't have much in the way of sort of really valuable natural resources or geopolitical significance. So on paper, it's quite difficult to explain this outside significance. And I think it's only really through tracing these historical developments that we can come to understand both the history and also the present moment of why. Why do we find ourselves in a situation today whereby so much of regional and to a less degree, even international politics are centered around Gaza?
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Joe Williams
Okay, so if we look, then. So we've talked a little bit about the Nakba already, and then that's followed, as you say, by the Egyptian era, the Israeli occupation, the first Infantada, the Oslo Accords era, and then lastly by the rise of Hamas. So if we move on to, then maybe the Oslo Accords, because this is a moment which, you know, was supposed to kind of signal some kind of change, some. Some transformation in the situation in that area. Although a lot of. A lot of people might say that there was no real kind of lasting significant change affected from the. From the Oslo Accords. Then how do you approach this? What was the kind of impact of the Oslo Accords, and to what extent did it kind of achieve any of its objectives?
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Ann (Author and Researcher)
In that chapter, I really organized the analysis into looking at the possibilities of change versus the continuities that we saw before and after Oslo. And I think it's fairly undisputed now that there was a lot more continuity than change. I think it's also fairly widely accepted that the Oslo Accords in Substance were not really designed to bring about transformative change. They were designed to bring about continued accommodation of the status quo in a way that would, you know, deliver sort of minor tweaks to it. Unfortunately, most of the changes that did come about as a result of Oslo were negative, at least for the Palestinians. And I think you could probably make a case that they were negative for, for many Israelis as well. If, if ultimately what is in the interests of, of Israelis is, you know, to live in a situation that isn't characterized by violence and occupation and illegality. The setup of the Oslo Accords essentially created the Palestinian Authority, which was given very limited autonomy over parts of occupied Palestinian territory, but it did not contain any mechanism to end the Israeli occupation or to guarantee Palestinian independence, Palestinian statehood. It essentially neglected the many of the key issues of the Palestinian struggle, particularly the legacy of the Nakba, the refugees right of return, the status of Jerusalem. And also it was also essentially lopsided. You know, under the terms of Oslo, the Palestinian leadership recognized the state of Israel and agreed to a two state solution. And the Israeli government recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, but it did not recognize Palestinian right to self determination or statehood. The other really crucial thing that sometimes gets kind of overlooked about the Oslo Accords is that they were only ever intended to be a temporary interim agreement. It was meant to be a five year arrangement pending what was known as final status negotiations. So under that setup, by the end of the 20th century, Oslo should have come to an end. Instead, we have a situation, you know, basically 30 years later where we still have this Palestinian Authority interim setup operating in a kind of limbo with no real revolution on the horizon. And what it ended up doing was actually facilitating the Israeli occupation. The PA ended up really, really serving as a kind of outsourcing of the occupation. It became fixated on what was known as security, which generally meant defending Israeli security interests as defined by the Israeli government. And in that sense, it actually cheapened the cost of the occupation. The, the final really crucial point about Oslo is that there was nothing in it to prevent the continued expansion of Israeli settlements, which meant that while this process was ongoing, Israel continued to seize more land, expand more settlements, and in the process actually make the prospect of a Palestinian state less and less feasible.
- [15:04]
Joe Williams
Oh sure. So on that theme then, of kind of continuity and change, it reminds me of another statement that you make in the book or another idea that you evoke is that Palestinians today sometimes conceive of Nakba as ongoing, as a kind of Process rather than an event. The Nakba wasn't a self contained moment, a specific event. It's a drawn out process. And I just wonder perhaps if you could expand on that a little bit and perhaps relate some of that to things like displacement and immobility.
- [15:43]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is, this is a very central concept in a lot of Palestinian thinking, that of the Nakba as a process or of what's called ongoing Nakba, you know, the idea that it did not start and end in 1948, this is, it's worth noting. I think this is an idea. Excuse me, this is an idea that more generally has gained consideration in the academic field of refugee studies and in how we think about displacement. You know, increasingly now researchers are coming to conceptualize displacement as something structural and as a process rather than an event. And the Palestinian history, I think, exemplifies that. So there's a couple of things to say about the ways in which the Nakba should be ambassador to the protest. The first is that if the, if the ultimate purpose and function of the Nakba is the expulsion and exclusion of the Palestinians from their homes, then how it is enforced is not just through the original displacement, but also through the continued denial of the right of return. And this has happened continuously since 1948. So it's the combination of that original displacement with what you could then call immobility or confinement. You know, first. First forced migration and then enforced immobility whereby they're denied the right to return. This has been compounded by further displacements continually since 1948, either in the context of war or in the context since 1967 of the ongoing occupation of the west bank and Gaza. This can be displacement within those spaces. For example, when Palestinians have been evicted in order to make space for illegal settlement construction. It can also be displacement from Palestine altogether. So that could cover the expulsion or the deportation of particular Palestinian figures, individuals, groups, but it could also involve bigger scale plans. So we've, during the genocide of the last two years, we've heard various schemes being touted by both the Israeli government and the Trump administration for the permanent, quote, unquote, relocation of the Palestinians from Gaza to other parts of the world. There have been attempts to forge deals with Indonesia, with Sudan, with Somalia. None of these have worked. And they've all rightly been condemned as ethnic cleansing. But this is not actually something new. So dating back to actually the first occupation of 1956, Israel started investigating plans then to facilitate the. The permanent removal, the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. And many Palestinians would argue, and they and correctly that this needs to be understood as part of this ongoing process of expulsion and exclusion. But these are not just sort of random, unconnected events. This is, this is something structural built in to the setup here. And that's, that's really what ongoing Macquare refers to.
- [18:47]
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- [19:57]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Sure.
- [19:58]
Joe Williams
And this again ties into something that you've already mentioned as well, but about the kind of demographic transformation that's been affected in Gaza since 1948 with the influx of displaced persons and the shrinking borders of Gaza becoming the Gaza Strip, which is a political kind of creation, and so on and so on. And then your previous book Refuge and Resistance, which talks about the condition, the almost permanent condition of being a refugee displaced person from elsewhere in Palestine, now in Gaza. So could you talk a little bit about that then? About the relationship between. Between like refugee as a. Being a refugee is a permanent condition and the effect that has on demographics in Gaza.
- [20:47]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Refugee head has been really central to Palestinian politics since the Nakba. The Nakba saw the. The transformation of the Palestinian people into essentially a stateless, dispossessed refugee population at the hands of, of the Israeli state that is most pronounced in Gaza. In many ways, Gaza encapsulates historically and today the most extreme elements of the Palestinian experience. The fact that the majority of people in Gaza are majority of Palestinians in Gaza are Nakba refugees, either directly or by heritage, has had a huge knock on effect on the politics there. It has meant that Gaza has been particularly central to the Palestinian struggle for the right of return. It has also meant that many of the most significant Palestinian national movements have either originated in Gaza or have had very strong ties to Gaza. And this is something that successive Israeli governments have also always understood. From their perspective, obviously they've seen this as a source of concern, but they, Gaza has always had a reputation among Israel, the Israeli security and political and intelligence establishment, as being, quote, unquote, more radical than the west bank or than other areas. And there's actually a quote I have in the book that is, that's taken from a conversation between different government agencies in Israel very soon after the 1967 occupation begins, where someone is telling the Prime Minister, we're going to have more trouble with Gaza than we are with the west bank because of all the refugees. Now, that's a very different framing. It's obviously a negative framing and it's a framing that's problematic in all kinds of ways, but in some ways getting at the same point, the ways in which ultimately so much of Palestinian politics comes down to the original Nakba and to this question of displacement. I think this is something that's come to the fore again during the last two years because displacement has again been such a key element of the genocide. But actually the entire population of Gaza, so nearly 2 million people have been displaced over the last two years, either by direct Israeli military evacuation order or because people have had to flee for their lives to escape the bombing and the violence. And while we've seen rightly a lot of attention paid to that, many Palestinians have also pointed out that this displacement did not begin in October 2023 and that many of them had been displaced or their families had been displaced many times prior to that. So it's again that sense of ongoing process.
- [23:37]
Joe Williams
Coming back to another point that you make in the book about the need for contextualized and historicised understanding of, of the situation, not to justify any violence, but to contextualize and to offer some context and so on and so on, and the implications of that for policy choice and for policy formulation, what does having this kind of, you know, politicized and historicized understanding of the situation, what implications does it have for policy do you have any specific ideas about policy prescriptions and which actors may be best placed to act here?
- [24:16]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
I think historians should always be a bit careful about getting too into policy prescriptions. But what I would say, and I think I make this point towards the end of the book, is that many of the policy proposals we're seeing in much of the discourse, particularly that in the west and that led by the US Showed a real historical illiteracy, and that is itself a problem. I think this was also true of the Oslo process itself, that the Oslo process had a very limited historical understanding of the situation, and that's one reason why it was never going to work. But, I mean, there's lots of reasons, but that's one of them. I think the fact, for example, that the Trump administration initially seemed convinced that so many Palestinians would be willing to go along with this idea of their permanent relocation from Gaza or their permanent exile from Gaza, with an obvious sign of that historical illiteracy and that lack of understanding. I think also we've seen a related phenomenon that we've seen in a lot of the, particularly in a lot of the Western media discourse, is a chronology that begins on October 7, 2023. So it begins with, you know, the attacks of that day, the, the killing of 1200 people, the kidnapping, and that is almost set up as year zero. And that is also a barrier to understanding what's really going on here. One thing I try to show in the final chapter of the book, the final chapter, as you know, ends at the end of 2022. And one thing I try to show is how we had all of these various escalating phenomena already in place before that time, including increasing calls among not just Israeli politicians, but Israeli government ministers for the permanent expulsion of the Palestinians. So the roots of a lot of this go quite far back, and we're very limited if we try to ignore that or erase that.
- [26:23]
Joe Williams
One thing, that kind of one impression that I had while I was reading the book is that there are quite a lot of kind of firsthand testimonials, eyewitness testimonials from Palestinians and their direct experiences, their direct lived experiences of violence and displacement and so on and so on. And I think that's vital, too, of course, if we're going to talk about kind of, you know, representations in the news and so on, because it can sometimes feel a little bit difficult to grasp the extent and the scale of the tragedy and so on and so on, when you are presented with a lot of numbers, a lot of statistics and so on. And so on. There's that famous quote, of course, which is, you know, attributed to a lot of people, most commonly Stalin, that one death is a tragedy, but 20,000 deaths is just a statistic. So is this firsthand testimonial, is there a kind of an intent here to perhaps illustrate a more human side to the tragedy?
- [27:23]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
That's definitely part of it. And I think, I think it does get to a point where the numbers become quite difficult for people to almost fathom. Especially you know, now the death toll, the official death toll from the last two years is close to 70,000. There are a lot of, there's a lot of evidence that that's actually a significant underestimate. But even 70, you know, even 70,000 is huge. And it does, as you say, get to that point where, where it becomes difficult for people to almost have a reaction to it. So introducing personal testimony definitely is one way to try and counter that. I think it's also an attempt to bring on my part to try and bring a slightly more multifaceted understanding of this history because this is a part of the world that, you know, most certainly most readers in the west will only really have engaged with through the media and will associate almost entirely with, with violence and with destruction and with crus and chaos. And there is a lot more to this history than that. And I think showing the individual experiences and testimonies of people is one way to try and convey that. Because automatically you convey this, this broader sense. I mean, you know, one thing I talk about is the way the ways in which the Palestinians, Palestinians in general, and I think particularly Palestinians in Gaza can really be reduced in a lot of the Western discourse to these very one dimensional tropes that are often negative, that are sometimes sympathetic, but they're regardless that they're one dimensional. I think, I think there can actually be something quite humane about trying to re. Inject almost some of the humane ordinariness of day to day life. So you know, I also put in things there about, you know, people, people getting married or people's day to day attempts to try and make end meet people after the Nakba who started making sweets to make an extra living. Like all of these more day to day things that are a really important part of the history that get eclipsed by a narrative that focuses almost entirely on the violence. The other point I would make here is that I think again in the, a lot of the media discourse in the west, we have for the last 20 years or so tended to associate Gaza with political Islam or Militant Islam, particularly in the form of Hamas and Palestinian politics, have a lot of plurality to them. There's a lot more to them than just that. And as I try to show in the book, especially through the biographies of some of these individuals, there's actually quite a wide range of political activism and ideology in Palestinian history, including in Gaza's history. There's socialism, there's feminism, there's communism, there's secular nationalism, there's pan Arabism. We're talking here about actually, you know, in. In many ways a very diverse political scene here. And we're talking about quite a wide range of activism that runs the gamut from not only thinking about the violence and the militancy that we tend to see reported, but also looking at civil disobedience, looking at how many Palestinians used art and creativity for resistance, and also looking at the intersection between the struggle for Palestinian justice and also the struggle for things like women's liberation or workers rights, which have also been key elements of this history.
- [31:00]
Joe Williams
Thank you. So we're coming to the end here, then. So are there any final comments you'd like to make here about the book or about the broader context? In the light of, for instance, the ceasefire and the repeated violations of that ceasefire? I think there's something like 350 Palestinians who have been killed since the ceasefire came into effect. There have been violations of that ceasefire. Is there any final comments you'd like to make about any of this?
- [31:27]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Yeah, thank you for this question. I think there's a couple of things I would flag here. Firstly, as you say, the. The ceasefire has been repeatedly violated. It extensively came into effect on 10 October. The latest estimate I saw is that Israel has violated the ceasefire more than 500 times since then. Israeli forces have killed at least 300 Palestinians since then. Many. Many were civilians. Many were people trying to return to their homes or neighborhoods from which they'd been displaced. So the first thing here is that this is, again, not a new phenomenon that we hear in the news. The presentation of the end of a war or a ceasefire or some kind of resolution. The new. The media kind of goes elsewhere and the violence just continues, maybe at a slightly lower level, but it continues. This is something that's, I think, really important to understand about the. The period prior to October 2023 as well. But it wasn't a period of peace for Palestinians in Gaza or in the west bank, that it was a period of constant violence, albeit at a lower level than we've seen since then. So that's the first thing to say. I think the second thing to say is that a lot of what we're seeing play out now in the ongoing plans and machinations for Gaza, again, have very long historical roots. I've just been writing a separate piece about this that there's now talk of a US plan to permanently partition the Gaza Strike Strip along what is called what is known as the Yellow Line. Under this plan, more than half of Gaza, as much as 58%, would remain under the direct control of the Israeli military. Nearly all 2 million Palestinians would be confined to the remainder of the Strip, a really tiny area, and the Palestinian part would not really receive investment or reconstruction. Now, this is obviously, I think you could, you could make a pretty convincing case that this is simply another way to try and foment mass immigration by simply making conditions so miserable that people have no choice. I think it's also, you could argue, almost a replication of the original Nakba. The original Nakba saw the displacement of the Palestinian people into the southwest of Palestine that became the Gaza Strip. And now we're seeing the displacement of the Palestinians of Gaza into a western corner of the Gaza Strip itself. So it's almost like this continuing shrinkage of the territory and this continuing confinement. And I think if I could connect this back to one of your earlier questions, it's another way in which this history can help actually illuminate a lot of the dynamics of today and can also push against this chronology that limits us to just the last two years.
- [34:16]
Joe Williams
Great. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. And Irfan, it was a pleasure to speak to you. And your book, A Short History of the Gaza's Direct, is available now.
- [34:27]
Ann (Author and Researcher)
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.