Lhe war that Israel launched against the Gaza Strip, following the terrorist carnage perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, is by far the deadliest of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it is only the fifteenth of the wars that Israel has waged against the Palestinian enclave. since the founding hostilities of 1948, which transformed the prosperous oasis of Gaza, a centuries-old crossroads of trade between Egypt and the Levant, into a “strip” of territory, with contours defined by the ceasefire between Israel and Egypt. While the Jewish state absorbed 77% of the territory of the former Palestine and Jordan annexed 22%, the “Gaza Strip”, administered by Egypt without being annexed to it, welcomed a quarter of the Arab population of Palestine on 1% of its historic territory.
The inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave, whose density already worried observers at the time, were two-thirds made up of refugees from all over Palestine, hence the structuring role that UNRWA assumed from the outset, the United Nations agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees, which has become the largest employer and service provider in the Gaza Strip. This overwhelming majority of refugees also results in the transformation of Gaza into a crucible of Palestinian nationalism, driven by the armed struggle of the fedayines.
From the border war to the intifadas
After the founding war of 1948, the following five wars were waged by Israel in an attempt, already in vain, to eradicate Palestinian nationalism. Firstly, there is the “border war”, which sees Israel establishing a security belt of militarized kibbutz at the gates of the Palestinian enclave, with a cycle of low-intensity hostilities between Palestinian “infiltrations” and “retaliations”. Israelis. Then came the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, from November 1956 to March 1957, all the more bloody as it was intended to eliminate the fedayines and their networks, an elimination which would nevertheless only be effective with the reestablishment of security. Egyptian supervision.
Then came the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War of June 1967, following which the Israeli army once again occupied the Palestinian enclave. This lightning victory, however, did not spare Israel from a laborious “four-year war” against a low-intensity Palestinian guerrilla, which was only defeated, under the authority of General Ariel Sharon, by the destruction of part of the enclave and by the emergence of an Islamist alternative to the nationalist movement. During the “shadow war” that followed, Israeli services mobilized the Muslim Brotherhood of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the future founder of Hamas, against supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
You have 58.88% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.