Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe On How Gaza Strip Was Created By Israel

”Before 1948, there was no Gaza Strip. The Gaza, the strip, the strip itself was an Israeli invention. Gaza was a cosmopolitan town on the Via Maris the road from Alexandria up to Alexandretta in Turkey. And because it was the main road on the sea, many people from different countries and cultures passed through Gaza and left an impact that turned it into one of the most cosmopolitan towns before 1948. It also had a very good system of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

Just recently a friend of ours found an interesting declaration in 1905 by the three heads of the religions in the city of Gaza expressing their delight in 1905 and how well the three communities deal with issues of friction, disagreement, and conflict. Israel created the Gaza Strip because, unlike other places into which it could push the many Palestinians it expelled during the Nakba, during the 1948 catastrophe,  unlike other countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan that were willing to receive the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that Israel expelled, Egypt closed its borders.

Egypt refused to admit even one Palestinian and because of that the leader of Israel, the great architect of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, David Bengurion who ashamedly has a Boulevard named after him in Paris, is a war criminal, and he decided that Israel is willing to give two percent of historical Palestine to turn it into the biggest refugee camp in the world.

That is how the Gaza Strip was created by the Israelis as a kind of rectangle structure, a geometric kind of structure into which Israel pushed the Palestinians from the Central of Palestine, and from the South that Egypt was unwilling to accept.  The last group of Palestinians who were pushed into the Gaza Strip were those living in 11 villages on whose ruins, on the ruins of these villages Israel built the settlements that were attacked on October 7th by the Hamas.

So Hamas attacked settlements built on the ruins of the last villages of Palestine that were destroyed by the Israeli army and expelled together. In Israeli archives, we have a very known document called ”order number forty”.

Order Number 40 is from November 25th, 1948, and it was sent by the Israeli Central Command to the commander in the area of Gaza, it has the names of the 11 villages, and the Order says and I quote literally what the order says,  ”occupy the village, expel all the people to Gaza, burn the houses and demolish the stone houses because some of the houses of the Palestinian villages in 1948 were built out of mortar and straw and therefore it was possible to burn them but the stone houses had to be blown up by the Israeli army.”

So, one historical context we have here is a generation of grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers, mothers, and grandchildren that live either directly or indirectly the Nakba of 1948 in a very vivid way, on a daily basis, not only because they are thinking about Jaffa or they are thinking about Beersheba or any other place which they were expelled but also by watching the Israeli settlements on the other side of the fence from which most of their parents and grandparents came from.”