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syrians, the Babylonians , the Persians, the Romans, and the Crusaders.
The author's use of the word
Palestinian
is here a polemical anachronism,
Palestine
having first been used by the Romans, replacing the name
Judea.
Having covered ancient history, the author skips a full millennium ,
touches briefly on the occupation of Palestine by the Turks, and brings us
to the period of the British Mandate, when Jews first appear, seemingly
out of the blue, to " purchase and expropriate Palestinian land." As to
any Jewish presence in Gaza before this time, the reader would be ex–
cused for thinking that there was none.
3
Throughout the book, Emerson telescopes history in such a manner
that the reader is lost as to why and how Gaza has become what it is.
Most relevantly, the reader is not given the facts needed to understand
the crucial origins of the ultimately tragic clash of J ew and Arab, Zion–
ism and Palestinian nationalism. The 1947 United Nations partition plan,
Emerson writes, would have deprived the Palestinians of "Jaffa, the major
Palestinian port." J affa, the author should know, was not within the
territori es allotted to the J ewish state. The infamous Deir Yassin massacre,
she claims, was followed by the display of the victims' corpses in the
streets ofJerusalem, a claim these reviewers have never come across. The
storm of controversy that erupted in Israeli and Jewish society after the
massacre is reduced to a letter to the editor of
The New York Times
penned by "some Jews who had fled to New York."
In
1948, Emerson
writes, "Palestine was destroyed, its people dispersed, its history forbidden
and denied by the victors.
In
that same year Jordan occupied the W est
Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip." There is no mention whatsoever of the
3Jews have been in and out of Gaza from early times, as attested by a number of coins, in–
scriptions, tablets, and documents. The very earliest history of Gaza has not been recorded.
In the Bible, one of the oldest accounts available, we read that it was to Gaza that the
shorn and blinded Samson, judge of Israel, was brought after his seduction by the Philistine
Delilah to grind corn in prison till the end of his days. The Philistines, expanding eastward
from their coastal citi es, and the Israelites, pushing westward from their mountain
strongholds, were, from the beginning, rivals. At times, however Israelites participated in
Philistine raids. David £led from the jealousy of Saul to the Philistine coun of Achish, and
later, Philistines served in his bodyguard. In the second century B.C., Judas Maccabeus
gained all of Philistia . During the Byzantine peiod, we read that the Jewish Quarter of
Gaza was said to be one of the wealthiest communities in the land. The Turkish authori–
ties encouraged both Spanish and Turkish Jews to settle the Gaza, but with the waning of
the Ottoman Empire, the Jewish community also declined. Many families £led during the
Napoleonic invasion of 1799. By 1811 , none were left. Sixty-five years later, Jewish im–
migrants from Morocco settled in Gaza, only to be expelled during the anti-Jewish riots
of 1929. Kibbutz Kfar Darom was established south of Deir el-Balah in 1946, falling two
years later to invading Egyptian troops. A Jewish presence was renewed once agai n when
the Strip came into Israeli hands after the '67 War.
