Despite all the news about Gaza in the past two months, many people still don't know the history of this place or exactly where it is. Here's a concise, objective analysis of the history of Gaza.
It's notable that the Muslim Arabs who have usually comprised a large majority of the population there have never been able to rule themselves successfully. Over the last few thousand years, the area has been ruled by the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, European Crusaders, Arabs from outside of Gaza, the Ottoman Turks, the Egyptians, the British, the Israelis, the PLO and lastly the terrorist group Hamas.
Gaza was never part of a state called Palestine because there has never been such a state. In the last few decades, when Palestinians and their Arab neighbors had a chance to establish such a state, they rejected the opportunity and turned again and again to terror.
Now the chance of ever seeing Gaza become part of an Arab-Muslim majority state is more remote than ever and sadly the fault lies with the Palestinian people themselves.
quillette.com
...The Ottomans [Muslim non Arab Turks] ruled Gaza for over 400 years. The first few centuries were peaceful and prosperous, and the prosperity extended to Jews. In his 1991 book The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, historian Stanford J. Shaw relates that there were “150,000 Jews in the Ottoman Empire as a whole at its height in the sixteenth century, approximately three percent of its population, compared to only 75,000 Jews in Poland and Lithuania at the same time.” In other words, the world’s largest Jewish population was in the Ottoman Empire, which the historian Tahir Kamran claims “provided a principal place of refuge for Jews driven out of Western Europe by massacres and persecution.” When the Ottomans took over, about 1,000 Jewish families lived in what is now Israel, and Gaza was one of the principal cities Jews inhabited. In fact, Jews had lived in Gaza since Biblical times, and Gaza is mentioned in the Old Testament as one of the five city-states ruled by the Philistines. Traces of Gaza’s old Jewish Quarter can still be found today.
The later Ottoman Empire fell into decline and neglected many of its outlying territories, including Palestine and Egypt. This encouraged Western powers to move in, with their missionaries, scholars, and merchants. Gaza became an important grain depot, with a German steam mill, and it exported barley to England to make beer. In an attempt to sever Britain’s trade routes to its colonies in India, Napoleon led an expedition to conquer Egypt and Palestine. In 1799, he personally marched into Gaza at the head of 13,000 troops, calling it “the outpost of Africa, the door to Asia.” American Presbyterian minister and historian Edward Robinson, sometimes called the “father of Biblical geography,” traveled through the Holy Land in 1838 and reported that Gaza produced soap, cotton, apricots, mulberries, and olives, and that it was a key stop on caravan routes for Bedouin traders between Syria and Egypt. In short, for much of its history, Gaza moved people, things, and ideas by land and sea, and its name was associated with geographic interconnectedness.
This began to change around the turn of the 20th century, when life in Gaza became more about surviving disasters and conflicts than pursuing prosperity through its status as a hub of goods and ideas. Gaza is situated near a geological fault called the Dead Sea Rift. In 1903 and 1914, the fault caused earthquakes that destroyed parts of the city. During World War 1, most of Gaza’s urban housing was damaged or destroyed in the First, Second, and Third Battles of Gaza, and in 1917 the British captured the city from the Ottomans. In 1920, what was left of post-Ottoman Gaza became part of the British territory known as Mandatory Palestine, which existed from 1920 to 1948. Some 135 of Gaza’s Jews were killed by Arabs in anti-Jewish riots in 1929. This forced the Jews to leave the city, although some later returned. During the Mandate, Palestine’s Jewish population doubled as over 400,000 Jews immigrated, especially from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland. But Gaza remained almost entirely Islamic: A 1945 survey shows that the district of Gaza had 150,540 residents (it was the fourth largest district in Mandatory Palestine), of whom 97 percent were Muslim, 2 percent Jewish, and 1 percent Christian.
Mandatory Palestine came to a violent end in 1948, after the United Nations agreed that the territory would be divided between a Jewish and an Arab state. The Arab state would comprise about 43 percent of Palestine’s area and 40 percent of its total population and would be 99 percent Arab and 1 percent Jewish. The Jewish state would cover 56 percent of Palestine’s total area and contain nearly half its population and would be 55 percent Jewish and 45 percent Arab. The Jewish side accepted this deal, but the Arabs rejected it, and thus the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence set off the Palestine War.
Jewish Zionist militias swept through Palestine and took 78 percent of the territory, far more than the 56 percent in the UN plan. By the time Israel and Egypt signed the 1949 Armistice Agreements that ended the war, some 6,000 Israeli Jews and over 10,000 Arabs had been killed in the fighting. Many of the 700,000 fugitive or expelled Muslim refugees crossed the Armistice Line from Israel into the Gaza Strip, which was then administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, in the three years that followed the war, around 600,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, including 260,000 from neighboring Arab states.
Israel took Gaza back from Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis, then returned it again—only to retake it once again (along with the West Bank and other territories) in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel hoped to trade these captured Palestinian territories with its Arab neighbors in exchange for peace, but a deal never materialized.
Many other attempts at a two-state solution have been made, including the Oslo Accords in 1993, in which the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel’s sovereignty. But Gaza’s chances of being part of a two-state solution evaporated with the election of Hamas in 2007, the last election ever to be held in Gaza. Hamas has never wavered from the purpose stated in its founding charter, the 1988 Hamas Covenant:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. … [Hamas] strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. … The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
In 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip, removing its military and all 21 Israeli settlements. In 2017, Israel offered that if Hamas demilitarized, returned Israeli captives and MIAs, and recognized the State of Israel’s right to exist in peace, then Israel would invest heavily in turning Gaza’s refugee camps into the “Singapore of the Middle East,” including building a seaport and airport to make Gaza a high-tech international crossroads. Hamas refused, and today, according to the UN, the average Gazan lacks potable water and lives on two pieces of Arabic bread a day.
Privately, Israel has asked Egypt to allow Gazans to escape the humanitarian disaster of the Gaza Strip and move into refugee camps in Egypt’s Sinai region. But the prospect that a mass exodus of Gazans might bring Hamas onto their soil has made Egypt and other Islamic countries wholly uninterested in taking Gazan refugees. The political geography of Gaza has thus remained a lose-lose stalemate since 1967: its Muslims are stuck in an isolated corner of a Jewish state, while Israel is stuck with a hostile territory it has never really wanted to govern. Israel’s former prime minister Levin Eshkol called Gaza “a bone stuck in our throats.”
The bustling prosperity of Gaza’s past and the impoverished confinement of its present illustrate how differing societies can shape the same landscape in starkly contrasting ways. And they show how the same geographically-blessed site can be connected or isolated, recognized or overlooked, fought over or abandoned, developed or wasted.
The philosopher Aeneas of Gaza wrote that “soul’s nature is so great, just because it has no size, as to contain the whole of body in one and the same grasp; wherever body extends, there soul is.” Today, the body of Gaza is cramped between heavily-guarded border walls and a coastline off limits to maritime exports. But as a bridge between seas and continents, Gaza will always have geography on its side. Many waves of prosperity, cultures, and empires have come and gone. It is hard to imagine now, but there will be a time when the body extends again, and travelers bound for foreign shores will once more sail out over the waves of Gaza.
It's notable that the Muslim Arabs who have usually comprised a large majority of the population there have never been able to rule themselves successfully. Over the last few thousand years, the area has been ruled by the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, European Crusaders, Arabs from outside of Gaza, the Ottoman Turks, the Egyptians, the British, the Israelis, the PLO and lastly the terrorist group Hamas.
Gaza was never part of a state called Palestine because there has never been such a state. In the last few decades, when Palestinians and their Arab neighbors had a chance to establish such a state, they rejected the opportunity and turned again and again to terror.
Now the chance of ever seeing Gaza become part of an Arab-Muslim majority state is more remote than ever and sadly the fault lies with the Palestinian people themselves.
The Athens of Asia: A History of Gaza
For much of its history, Gaza moved people, things, and ideas by land and sea, and its name was associated with geographic interconnectedness.
quillette.com
...The Ottomans [Muslim non Arab Turks] ruled Gaza for over 400 years. The first few centuries were peaceful and prosperous, and the prosperity extended to Jews. In his 1991 book The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, historian Stanford J. Shaw relates that there were “150,000 Jews in the Ottoman Empire as a whole at its height in the sixteenth century, approximately three percent of its population, compared to only 75,000 Jews in Poland and Lithuania at the same time.” In other words, the world’s largest Jewish population was in the Ottoman Empire, which the historian Tahir Kamran claims “provided a principal place of refuge for Jews driven out of Western Europe by massacres and persecution.” When the Ottomans took over, about 1,000 Jewish families lived in what is now Israel, and Gaza was one of the principal cities Jews inhabited. In fact, Jews had lived in Gaza since Biblical times, and Gaza is mentioned in the Old Testament as one of the five city-states ruled by the Philistines. Traces of Gaza’s old Jewish Quarter can still be found today.
The later Ottoman Empire fell into decline and neglected many of its outlying territories, including Palestine and Egypt. This encouraged Western powers to move in, with their missionaries, scholars, and merchants. Gaza became an important grain depot, with a German steam mill, and it exported barley to England to make beer. In an attempt to sever Britain’s trade routes to its colonies in India, Napoleon led an expedition to conquer Egypt and Palestine. In 1799, he personally marched into Gaza at the head of 13,000 troops, calling it “the outpost of Africa, the door to Asia.” American Presbyterian minister and historian Edward Robinson, sometimes called the “father of Biblical geography,” traveled through the Holy Land in 1838 and reported that Gaza produced soap, cotton, apricots, mulberries, and olives, and that it was a key stop on caravan routes for Bedouin traders between Syria and Egypt. In short, for much of its history, Gaza moved people, things, and ideas by land and sea, and its name was associated with geographic interconnectedness.
This began to change around the turn of the 20th century, when life in Gaza became more about surviving disasters and conflicts than pursuing prosperity through its status as a hub of goods and ideas. Gaza is situated near a geological fault called the Dead Sea Rift. In 1903 and 1914, the fault caused earthquakes that destroyed parts of the city. During World War 1, most of Gaza’s urban housing was damaged or destroyed in the First, Second, and Third Battles of Gaza, and in 1917 the British captured the city from the Ottomans. In 1920, what was left of post-Ottoman Gaza became part of the British territory known as Mandatory Palestine, which existed from 1920 to 1948. Some 135 of Gaza’s Jews were killed by Arabs in anti-Jewish riots in 1929. This forced the Jews to leave the city, although some later returned. During the Mandate, Palestine’s Jewish population doubled as over 400,000 Jews immigrated, especially from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland. But Gaza remained almost entirely Islamic: A 1945 survey shows that the district of Gaza had 150,540 residents (it was the fourth largest district in Mandatory Palestine), of whom 97 percent were Muslim, 2 percent Jewish, and 1 percent Christian.
Mandatory Palestine came to a violent end in 1948, after the United Nations agreed that the territory would be divided between a Jewish and an Arab state. The Arab state would comprise about 43 percent of Palestine’s area and 40 percent of its total population and would be 99 percent Arab and 1 percent Jewish. The Jewish state would cover 56 percent of Palestine’s total area and contain nearly half its population and would be 55 percent Jewish and 45 percent Arab. The Jewish side accepted this deal, but the Arabs rejected it, and thus the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence set off the Palestine War.
Jewish Zionist militias swept through Palestine and took 78 percent of the territory, far more than the 56 percent in the UN plan. By the time Israel and Egypt signed the 1949 Armistice Agreements that ended the war, some 6,000 Israeli Jews and over 10,000 Arabs had been killed in the fighting. Many of the 700,000 fugitive or expelled Muslim refugees crossed the Armistice Line from Israel into the Gaza Strip, which was then administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, in the three years that followed the war, around 600,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, including 260,000 from neighboring Arab states.
Israel took Gaza back from Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis, then returned it again—only to retake it once again (along with the West Bank and other territories) in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel hoped to trade these captured Palestinian territories with its Arab neighbors in exchange for peace, but a deal never materialized.
Many other attempts at a two-state solution have been made, including the Oslo Accords in 1993, in which the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel’s sovereignty. But Gaza’s chances of being part of a two-state solution evaporated with the election of Hamas in 2007, the last election ever to be held in Gaza. Hamas has never wavered from the purpose stated in its founding charter, the 1988 Hamas Covenant:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. … [Hamas] strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. … The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
In 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip, removing its military and all 21 Israeli settlements. In 2017, Israel offered that if Hamas demilitarized, returned Israeli captives and MIAs, and recognized the State of Israel’s right to exist in peace, then Israel would invest heavily in turning Gaza’s refugee camps into the “Singapore of the Middle East,” including building a seaport and airport to make Gaza a high-tech international crossroads. Hamas refused, and today, according to the UN, the average Gazan lacks potable water and lives on two pieces of Arabic bread a day.
Privately, Israel has asked Egypt to allow Gazans to escape the humanitarian disaster of the Gaza Strip and move into refugee camps in Egypt’s Sinai region. But the prospect that a mass exodus of Gazans might bring Hamas onto their soil has made Egypt and other Islamic countries wholly uninterested in taking Gazan refugees. The political geography of Gaza has thus remained a lose-lose stalemate since 1967: its Muslims are stuck in an isolated corner of a Jewish state, while Israel is stuck with a hostile territory it has never really wanted to govern. Israel’s former prime minister Levin Eshkol called Gaza “a bone stuck in our throats.”
The bustling prosperity of Gaza’s past and the impoverished confinement of its present illustrate how differing societies can shape the same landscape in starkly contrasting ways. And they show how the same geographically-blessed site can be connected or isolated, recognized or overlooked, fought over or abandoned, developed or wasted.
The philosopher Aeneas of Gaza wrote that “soul’s nature is so great, just because it has no size, as to contain the whole of body in one and the same grasp; wherever body extends, there soul is.” Today, the body of Gaza is cramped between heavily-guarded border walls and a coastline off limits to maritime exports. But as a bridge between seas and continents, Gaza will always have geography on its side. Many waves of prosperity, cultures, and empires have come and gone. It is hard to imagine now, but there will be a time when the body extends again, and travelers bound for foreign shores will once more sail out over the waves of Gaza.
