‘A Short History of the Gaza Strip’ takes a long view of today’s conflict

A Short History of the Gaza Strip, by historian Anne Irfan, is a timely addition to an important corpus of literature taking a historical and contextual view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

By telling the story of the Gaza Strip, Irfan, a lecturer in race, gender and postcolonial studies at University College London, is telling the story of all Palestinians from 1948 to the present – from the catastrophe of the creation of the Israeli state, known to Palestinians as “al-naqbah” (the Nakba), to the catastrophe now engulfing Gazans in 2025.

It is a story of dispossession, colonialism, imperialism, resistance, samud, (Arabic for steadfastness/defiance), occupation, siege, destruction, death, hope, futility, ethnic cleansing and, more recently, alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While it is by definition a short history, one of the book’s most important contributions is that it gives the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, a voice. One of the many constant themes running through the book is how Palestinians are consistently denied agency; what the influential Palestinian academic Edward Said terms “their permission to narrate”. As colonised and marginalised people, Palestinians have been routinely and deliberately denied their ability to define their own struggle and to tell their own stories.

Perhaps what is surprising here is...

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