The succession of mass rallies across the UK against the genocide in Gaza form the single biggest protest movement in recent British history. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to show their sympathy for the bombed, starved and displaced civilians of Gaza.
Despite this, few British institutions have responded to this terrible humanitarian catastrophe in a manner that reflects public opinion. The BBC cancelled the only two documentaries it dared to commission that could have given some insight into the sufferings of the Palestinians; as recent events have shown, it is too cowed by Tory political appointees even to attempt to educate the British public about the Palestinians and their history of dispossession. British museums have done little to fill the gap: although we have unrivalled collections from the region, not one museum in the UK has attempted to give some historical or archaeological background to the most important news story of the day.
Luckily, you only have to travel as far as Paris to get an excellent education in the long history of Palestine. A wonderful exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut de Monde Arabe in Paris, “Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5,000 ans d’histoire” (“Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History”), gives a comprehensive overview of Gaza’s astonishing past. For those who cannot make the trip, there is also an excellent catalogue, edited by Elodie Bouffard, which gives a lucid and beautifully illustrated account of the early history of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but as the Gaza exhibition well illustrates, the reality is very different; indeed its contents stand as clear evidence of quite how unhistorical are the attempts by Israeli politicians to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the history of the region like fallen Politburo member from Stalin-era photographs. For Palestine is one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself.
On the temple of Medinet Habu near Thebes there is inscribed in hieroglyphs the name of the people who had invaded the Nile Delta from the north whom the Egyptians knew as the “Peleset”. The inscription, from the time of Pharaoh Ramses III, was carved in 1186 BC. The cuneiform inscriptions of the Assyrians from about 800 BC mention the same people as the “Palashtu”. The Book of Genesis, 21:34, says clearly that after migrating from the city of Ur, the Patriarch Abraham lived “in the land of the Philistines”. Herodotus, around 480 BC describes the same area as “Syria Palestina”. The name Palestine, in other words, long predates Britannia and most European place names.
The city of Gaza has an even greater antiquity than any of these recorded names: it is quite simply one of the oldest urban centres on the planet. Archaeology reveals signs of occupation dating back as far as the fourth millennium BC, and it is first referred to by name in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BC.
Gaza’s history has always been formed by its geography. It occupies the last stretch of habitable land before the desert: the fertile and well-watered frontier strip before the arid Sinai, ever the disputed border between Egypt, the Judean Highlands and Syria. Add to this the excellent harbour and Mediterranean port located at the point of arrival of caravans from both the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, and you begin to understand why it has always been such an unusually contested space: for more than 4,000 years the area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean, a strategic prize for anyone wanting to dominate the region.
As the principal residence of the region’s Pharonic governor, Gaza early assumed the role of an administrative and commercial centre, with its neighbouring trading posts sharing in its prosperity. Gaza was a particularly productive area where grain, olive oil and wine were produced, and its people became involved in long-distance trade in all these commodities. Gaza was especially famous for its sweet wines, which the Pharaohs made a royal monopoly and were sent south to Egypt under the royal seal. Indeed, this was a successful industry for many centuries: Gaza remained the premier centre of sweet wine production well past the Islamic conquest of the sixth century, and a display of the characteristic torpedo-shaped jars used to ship it around the Mediterranean form one of the first exhibits in the show.
The Bronze Age collapse of the 12th century BC saw the retreat of the Egyptian army from Gaza, in the face of an enemy the Egyptians called the Peleset. A few centuries later, the Bible calls the same people Philistines and says they formed a coalition of five city-states: Ashkelon, Ekron, Ashdod, Gath – home to Goliath – and Gaza. The Philistines used to be seen as part of the “Sea Peoples”, immigrants from the Bronze Age Aegean, but archaeologists have recently come to believe that they might in fact be locals, an idea endorsed by Josephine Quinn, professor of ancient history at Cambridge. “The Sea Peoples themselves are a flimsy 19th-century construct,” she wrote recently in the London Review of Books. “No ancient Egyptian source goes further than describing some enemy groups, not including the Peleset, as ‘from the sea’.”
The reasoning behind the hypothesis that the Philistines had foreign origins is largely cultural – their preference for Cypriot fashions in pottery, for instance – or circumstantial, such as a DNA study showing that some unfortunate infants buried at Ashkelon in the 12th century BC had a foreign father or grandfather. But pots aren’t people, and the Levant has always been busy with sailors, traders and migrants who mixed easily with local populations. The view from the Hebrew Bible is different: when Abraham arrives in the promised land from his native city of Ur, a Philistine king is already there to meet him.
Quinn makses an important point here. Recent DNA studies show remarkable continuities of the people of Palestine from the Bronze Age to the present. For all the long succession of conquests, as Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Israelites, Romans, Arabs and Turks came and went, with the fortunes of their elites rising and falling as empires expanded and contracted, the locals who have lived here throughout the centuries have apparently changed very little. Their faith has slowly evolved from paganism to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, and their dominant language has moved from Aramaic to Greek, then from Greek to Arabic – but they remained much the same cosmopolitan mix of Western Semitic peoples as the rest of the Levant, close cousins of the Israelis.
As well as an exporter of wine, Gaza was, from very early on, the great market and shipment point for incense heading from southern Arabia towards the temples of Mediterranean Europe. When Alexander the Great’s troops conquered the city they were astonished by the quantities of precious myrrh and frankincense that they found stored in its warehouses.
Gaza’s classical spirit long survived the conversion to Christianity in the third century AD. The public baths were adorned with paintings of the Theseus myth and scenes from the Iliad. Chariot racing, athletic contests, boxing, mimes and classical theatre were all popular, though performances were occasionally disrupted by the many monks of Gaza who considered the “night spectacles” performed there dangerously “pagan”. Yet early Christian Gaza is full of surprises. It was at this period that Gaza became a major literary centre, home to the annual Dionysian Festival of Roses which celebrated “the arrival of spring and the workings of Eros” at which amorous poetry was read, wine was drunk and much feasting took place: an improbable erotic Gaza literature festival.
By the sixth century the port was also home to a Christian-Byzantine school of rhetoric and philosophy, and an important library that could compete with Athens, Alexandria, Beirut and Constantinople. It attracted students from around the Greek-speaking Mediterranean. The writer Aeneas of Gaza claimed that, when the Academy in Athens was shut down by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in AD 529, some of the teachers migrated to Gaza. There, the classical tradition was transformed in the new world of late-antique eastern Christianity. Members of the Gazan schools mixed with the local cultures of the philosophers, rhetoricians, hermits and monks in nearby monasteries.
Byzantine Gaza was also famous for its celebrated public clock – a water-powered mechanical marvel situated in Gaza’s main marketplace, which seems to have been a monumental Byzantine version of a cuckoo clock with a figure of Hercules appearing on the hour to perform his different labours.
The Arab conquest of the seventh century was once considered a major turning point in the region’s history, but according to archaeologists this conquest is almost invisible: for many years very little changed other than the exchange of a Byzantine governor and garrison for one from the Hejaz. Gaza continued as an administrative centre of the region, and Greek-speaking Christians continued to run the bureaucracy.
In time, the inhabitants of Palestine accepted the language, government and religion of their new masters, but it was a gradual process of transition and did not cause any displacement of its peoples; indeed, Palestine was still majority Christian as late as the 12th century. The Arab conquerors were a small military elite; the local people remained much the same. As the exhibition shows, beautiful Byzantine-style mosaics of vine scrolls and cornucopia and Byzantine ecclesiastical sculpture persisted well into the period of Islamic rule. Now that nearly all of Gaza’s history has been levelled by the Israel Defence Forces, the exhibits in the Paris show are tragically almost all that remains. Outside the pages of the exhibition catalogue, Gaza’s long and fascinating history has best been told in the brilliant work of another French author, the former diplomat turned Sciences-Po historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, whose wonderful Gaza: A History is now updated and in its second edition. Recently Filiu managed to return to Gaza with Médecins sans Frontières and has published a tragic supplement to his history called A Historian in Gaza.
In it, he writes: “Nothing prepared me for what I saw and experienced… the Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.” As the first extended outsider eyewitness account of the Israeli genocide, it is itself a vital historical document as well as a moving account of the levelling of this ancient city which has brought its people’s suffering to the very limits of human endurance. “Gaza’s victims are killed twice,” he writes. “First when the Israeli war machine strikes them directly in the flesh. The second time when the intensity of their suffering and the scale of their losses are denied by Israeli propaganda.”
Filiu counters this propaganda by careful and humane observation, and by bringing to life the men and women the Israelis have called “human animals” and the Western press reduce to disputed statistics: two young women calligraphers buried alive in their home; an author trying to keep his 30,000 books from destruction; starving, barefoot children who still feed their cats: “We know what hunger feels like.”
The more recent and most tragic chapter of the history of Gaza from the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 is well told in a slim but excellent book by Anne Irfan, A Short History of the Gaza Strip which explains with wonderful lucidity the context for Gaza’s catastrophe.
Irfan opens with a rare moment of optimism in Gaza’s recent history when, on 5 December 1998, 48 passengers flew out of Gaza on the first commercial flight from the city. This historic event followed the arrival of Bill and Hillary Clinton a fortnight earlier to inaugurate the new airport during the height of the confidence following the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s.
Irfan then doubles back to the tragedy of the Nakba, when some 200,000 of the 750,000 Palestinians evicted from their homes upon the creation of Israel took refuge along Gaza’s shoreline, quickly leading to a quintupling of the population and raising the density from 500 to 2,300 people per square mile. She takes us through the massacres which accompanied the first Israeli military occupation of Gaza during the Suez Crisis of 1956, then the longer and more cruel occupation following the 1967 Six Day War that turned the Strip into a boiler room of Palestinian resistance.
The Intifada briefly raised prospect of freedom for the Palestinians during the height of the Oslo peace process. But hopes were quickly dashed as Hamas suicide bombs and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin brought in the dark days of the schism between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu’s siege and repeated bloody invasions in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. These created the despair and hopelessness that formed the backdrop to both the horrors of 7 October and its genocidal aftermath.
It is a deeply depressing story, but one told by Irfan with erudition and nuance, bringing an unsparing moral clarity and deep insight to this timely, scholarly, humane and profoundly tragic tale. Above all, Irfan highlights the incredible resilience of the Palestinians and their determination to cling on to their land despite all they have suffered. She ends with the testimony of one survivor of the Nakba: “I was a child when we were forced from our village,” he tells her. “We thought it was temporary. Now I am an old man and we are still refugees. They talk of taking Gaza as if we are nothing. But we are still here. We are still Palestinian.”
William Dalrymple is a historian and, with Anita Anand, hosts the “Empire” podcast
A Historian in Gaza
Jean-Pierre Filiu
Hurst, 208pp, £16.99
A Short History of the Gaza Strip
Anne Irfan
Simon & Schuster, 304pp, £18.99
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[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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