Colonization – especially in Palestine – has never been only a military operation, but is in essence a narrative that seeks to present colonialism as a historical fact, which even belies the spatial existence of the communities that inhabited the land before it, stemming from the natural (read divine) right of the white man to the land, resources, and people. Colonization is in essence, then, a different story about the land, which does not allow for the existence of any other story: it comes to erase what came before it and who came before it.
It is necessary to begin by understanding that Gaza as a “strip” is a constructed narrative and a space created by the settler colonial occupation, cutting it off from its surroundings and the vital roots from which it feeds, and those that it feeds. Until the 1940s, Gaza City was surrounded by inland villages that grew rain-fed crops and grains, and coastal villages that grew irrigated fruits and vegetables, thus linking the farmers of the surrounding area to merchants in Jaffa. The creation of the “strip” constitutes a complete severing of these socio-economic relations after 1948, while all these spaces and relations exceeded the current form and borders of what the occupation called the “Gaza Strip.”
““The area of Gaza and its hinterland,” writes Rema Hammami, “was simultaneously reduced from 28,009 square kilometers to a mere 365 square kilometers, while its population tripled. The Gaza Strip is what remains after the destruction of agricultural life in southern Palestine1 Hammami, Rema Eva. “Between Heaven and Earth: Transformations in Religiosity and Labor among Southern Palestinian Peasant and Refugee Women, 1920-1993.” PhD Thesis, Temple University, 1994..” What else has the occupation used to change and redraw the map of Palestine, to cut off the memory of what it contains and to fragment and kill the place?
The concept of “fragmentation” is used to denote the division of areas and neighborhoods and their systematic separation from each other. This process isolates the occupied communities from each other, prevents them from living in certain areas and moving between them, creates a socio-economic disconnection and pushes for more dependence on the occupation economy.
Today, we are launching a dossier which we wish to be a space for understanding what happened and is happening in Gaza on the political, spatial and social levels. Ghayad Al-Khatib writes two articles about Gaza’s neighborhoods, landmarks and essential sites, and how Israeli settler colonialism targeted them in an attempt to erase the memory of its people in space. Yara Ramadan from the Engineering Cooperative in Ramallah writes about spatial genocide in Gaza and reconstruction. Majed Douglas from the cooperative also talks about the floating port as a political and military tactic.
During the war, the need to survive and be steadfast becomes almost biological. Attempts to prove one’s existence come in all possible forms, one of which we show here, by dismantling the projections of the colonial narrative on the place: the Palestinians are here, and Gaza their land as well, and these are its landmarks and neighborhoods.
