A Short History of the Gaza Strip , by historian Anne Irfan, is a timely addition to an important corpus of literature taking a historical and contextual view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

By telling the story of the Gaza Strip, Irfan, a lecturer in race, gender and postcolonial studies at University College London, is telling the story of all Palestinians from 1948 to the present – from the catastrophe of the creation of the Israeli state, known to Palestinians as “al-naqbah” (the Nakba), to the catastrophe now engulfing Gazans in 2025.

It is a story of dispossession, colonialism, imperialism, resistance, samud, (Arabic for steadfastness/defiance), occupation, siege, destruction, death, hope, futility, ethnic cleansing and, more recently, alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes

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