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BOOKFORUM SEPT/OCT/NOV 2014
Battle Ground
A look at the tangled political history of modern Gaza
HUSSEIN IBISH
Filiu explains how the narrow-yet-pivotal terrain known as the Gaza
Strip has shaped the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict. First, he
notes, almost all of its inhabitants are refugees from southern Israel
displaced by the hostilities of 1947–48. Other Palestinian refugee
populations, including those in the occupied West Bank, are much farther
from the Israeli border. But here is a huge group of refugees who can
virtually see their former lands, and who contend with the Israeli
occupation on a daily basis. Second, Filiu lays out Gaza’s strategic
location between Egypt (and hence the rest of Africa) and Palestine (and
hence the rest of Asia)—a convergence of influence that has shaped the
region’s history since ancient times. Even the British campaigns that
targeted Palestine during the First World War had to pass through Gaza.
For those and other crucial reasons, Gaza has always played an outsize
political role in Palestinian collective life. The first aborted attempt
at creating a Palestinian national government arose and failed in Gaza
after the 1948 war. Gaza was also home to several of the core parties of
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and many of its leaders. As
Filiu notes, “It was in Gaza that the fedayin [the early Palestinian
guerrilla fighters] were moulded and the Jewish State would soon make
Gaza pay for it dearly.”
But also, crucially, the Muslim Brotherhood laid down deep roots in the
territory—both under Egyptian rule, following 1948, and after Israel’s
conquest of Gaza in 1967. For most of its history, the Brotherhood in
Palestine was quietist, refusing to engage in or endorse the PLO’s armed
struggle. But under the leadership of Ahmed Yassin, the Brotherhood in
Palestine acquired a political arm, Mujamma, that increasingly developed
militant tendencies. As Filiu notes, at the end of 1987, the Muslim
Brotherhood “finally called for a struggle against the occupation” and
founded Hamas.
It was no accident this decision came a mere five days after the
outbreak of the first intifada, which began in Gaza. Hamas was a
militant enterprise from the outset, with an allied faction attempting
to capture Israeli soldiers. But it was only in December 1991 that Hamas
fully established its paramilitary wing, the Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades.
FULL: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_03/13649
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