Homelessness: Palestinians carrying their belongings leave their homes in Bureij refugee camp to seek safer refuge in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, 26 December 2023
Ashraf Amra · Anadolu · Getty
‘I would like Gaza to sink into the sea.’ It was September 1992, and the Soviet Union was a thing of the past. One after another, the international crises that had punctuated the cold war, from southern Africa to Central America, were being resolved. In Washington, Israel held talks not only with the Arab states but also with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation on the future of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The man who wanted Gaza to disappear – even as he negotiated with the Palestinians – was Yitzhak Rabin. He had just beaten Yitzhak Shamir’s rightwing coalition in the June 1992 Israeli election. Three years later, a Jewish extremist killed him in cold blood for having signed the 1993 Oslo accords. While Rabin had acknowledged at the time that his wish was unrealistic, he knew that many of his Israeli political opponents, too, wanted to wash their hands of the territory, which had been frustrating their desire to get rid of the Palestinian people for nearly 50 years.
The port city of Gaza has a long, occasionally glorious, history stretching back to antiquity. But the Gaza Strip had never been a homogeneous administrative entity, either in the Ottoman era or under the British mandate (1922-48). It was only defined as such by the Arab-Israel war of 1948-49. By the end of the war, Israel had expanded beyond the territory allocated by the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan. Only East Jerusalem and the West Bank – both annexed by Jordan – escaped its grasp, plus a 365-sq km piece of land on the edge of Sinai containing Gaza City. The area’s status remained uncertain as Egypt, which controlled it, entered a turbulent period after the fall of King Farouk (23 July 1952).
‘Let’s not blame the murderers’
Today’s Gaza is mostly refugees. With the Nakba (1948-49), its 80,000 original inhabitants had to accommodate 200,000 to 250,000 more Palestinians forced from their homes. One hope kept them going – that of return. Those (…)
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(2) Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: a History, Oxford University Press, 2014.
(4) Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done, GP Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1974.
(5) Ofer Aderet, ‘We give them 48 hours to leave: Israel’s plans to transfer Gazans go back 60 years’ and ‘ “The Zionist dream in essence”: The history of the Palestinian transfer debate, explained’, Haaretz, Jerusalem, respectively 5 December 2024 and 12 February 2025.