On Gaza

This is an interesting if inadequate book about Gaza, especially since 1948. There’s a shortish section on the preceding millennia, but it isn’t worth much, and the book runs up to around 2010–11. My main problem is that reading Filiu’s account feels like entering a surreal world where things simply happen with no connective tissue — a sequence of events without causation, without individual or collective agency, without meaning. And that isn’t true. Gaza’s history is full of meaning; it’s a laboratory of different forms of agency. Figures like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin surface and submerge, surface and submerge, then surface once more, and the same is true of Ismail Haniyeh. The problem isn’t the events, or my reading of them — it’s the way the author ties them together. It improves in the final section, which centers on the emergence of Hamas as a political actor, but the stretch up to the first intifada is an absolute slog.

Given my own training, I suspect this comes less from Filiu the individual than from research under the French system, where books and dissertations can feel more like accumulated notes arranged logically than a narrative that says something about the wider world, or even about the specific place. On the positive side, Filiu is fair to the Palestinian people, which matters a great deal to me, and I learned a lot — it helped me place figures like Yasser Arafat, Ahmed Yassin, Abdelaziz al-Rantissi, and Khaled Mashal in their context.