This is an interesting, albeit inadequate book about Gaza, especially since 1948. Although there is a short-ish section on the thousands of years prior, it’s not worth a whole lot. The book continues up until around 2010-11.

My main issue with the text is that, when I read Filiu’s presentation of events, I feel like I’m entering some surreal world where things just happen without any connective tissue. It feels like a series of events without causation, individual (or collective) agency, or meaning behind it.

The problem is, it’s not true. Gaza’s history is filled with meaning, and it’s a laboratory for different forms of agency. You see figures like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin surface then submerge, surface then submerge, and surface once more. This is true of Ismail Haniyeh as well. The problem isn’t the events (or my reading of the events); it’s the way the author ties it together. This does get better in the last section of the text, which really centers on the emergence of Hamas as a political actor, but the parts up until the outbreak of the first intifada are an absolute slog.

Due to my own training, I think this may coming less from Filiu as an individual, and more about research under the French system, where books and dissertations feel more like accumulated collections of notes organized in a logical way than a new narrative that says something about the larger world (or even the specific place being covered).

On the positive side, Filiu is fair to the Palestinian people, and that’s really important to me. I also learned a lot from reading this and it helped me put some figures like Yasser Arafat, Ahmed Yassin, Abdelaziz al-Rantissi, Khaled Mashal, and some others into their context.