Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinian futures

Abstract

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue “Palestinian Futures Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments”, edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths.

ABSTRACT

The 2005 Israeli Disengagement from the Gaza Strip has left this region in a political and legal limbo. No longer strictly and fully complying with the definition of an occupied territory, the Strip, which has been under siege from 2007, cannot similarly be considered as fully independent. This paper argues that the Israeli control of Gaza is predicated on relegating this control to the past. Accordingly, it offers ‘post-occupation’ as a conceptual framework for deciphering Israel’s modalities of power over the Strip, claiming that rather than signifying a clear break from a now defunct occupation, post-occupation demarcates the persistence of Israeli domination. By rendering Gaza to the status of a post-occupation Israel can infer that Gaza’s future has already arrived, and relinquish its responsibilities towards the Strip and its residents through a fabrication of Palestinian political agency, while holding the Palestinian futures captive. The post-occupation condition therefore confounds normative narrations of time, while disrupting the distinction between past, present and future. This examination of the Disengagement and the siege as operating in tandem reveals that Israel substituted a burdensome and costly occupation with a more parsimonious spatial containment of Gaza, which allowed it to retain its grasp of Palestinian futurity.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel
• palestine
• the Gaza strip
• futures
• temporality

The Israeli Disengagement from the Gaza Strip was met with surprise by many. The 2005 withdrawal, in which Israel unilaterally evacuated all of its civilian settlements and military forces from the Strip, was perceived at the time as its yielding of control over parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) which had been under Israeli military rule since 1967. It therefore seemed to be at odds with the settler-colonial endeavour guiding Israeli policies up to that point. Absurd as it may seem in hindsight, at the time, some even interpreted this step as Israel progressing towards reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians (Efrat 2006; Golan 2008; Rynhold and Waxman 2008). Yet, even after the Disengagement, Israel has retained its command of the terrestrial, maritime and aerial boundaries of Gaza, strictly managing the flow of people and goods in and out of the Strip, and of the provision of basic amenities, including electricity, water, fuel and gas. In 2007, after the Hamas seized control of Gaza, Israel had severely increased its restriction of these flows, turning its blockading of Gaza into a full-fledged siege,¹ which, at the time of writing these words in 2021, shows no sign of relenting. At the same time, Israel also classified the Strip as a ‘hostile territory’ (Bhungalia 2010). Since then, the Israeli position has been that the Disengagement has ended its occupation of the Strip, and that it consequently no longer bore any responsibilities towards its residents as an occupier.

The Palestinian leadership has not accepted this position. As stated in 2005 by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat (2005), the Disengagement may have ended Israel's colonization of Gaza, yet not the occupation, as Israel still controls Gaza. Israel’s position is further considered highly controversial among international law experts and the international community more generally (Luft 2017). While some experts ascertain that the definition of an occupation is no longer applicable to Gaza, as the Israeli military is no longer present in the Strip (Samson 2010; Cuyckens 2016), the predominant legal opinion, also sustained by the United Nations, is that the Disengagement has yet to bring about the end to the Israeli occupation (Hajjar 2014).² Setting legal discussions aside, there are political arguments, which are no less substantial, for questioning the Israeli assertion that it should not be considered an occupying power in Gaza. As Erekat (2015) highlights, it keeps ‘the Gaza Strip out of the Palestinian space’ and is therefore intended ‘to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, which cannot be established without Gaza’. The Israeli position therefore further aggravates the geographic disconnect between Gaza and the West Bank brought about by its blockading of the Strip through an undermining the political unity of Palestine, a unity to which Israel has formally committed in the Oslo Accords. Israel’s denial that it controls the Strip has hence been subtending the eluding of its responsibilities towards the Gazan population, evading criticisms of its repression of this population, while further frustrating the prospect of Palestinian self-determination.

Querying whether Gaza should still be considered occupied is therefore not only legally controversial and politically contentious, but also may lend itself to consequential misreadings. Still, analysis of the formations of domination Gaza has been subjected to exposes their incongruence with discernable configurations of an occupation. In its pursuit of the adequate accurate analytic category and explanatory framework for deciphering the post-Disengagement configurations of Israeli rule over the Gaza Strip, this paper therefore argues that the broad classification of an ‘occupation’ is insufficient for deciphering Israel’s modalities of power. To clarify, this analysis does not question that for all intents and purposes Israel is still occupying the Gaza Strip. This assertion, however, merely reflects the formal status, giving us little by way of deciphering the shaping of Israel’s modalities of power which followed the Disengagement. Providing such an account calls for a methodological suspension of formal categorizations, merely for analytic purposes, in an effort to investigate de-facto praxes. The analysis which follows is therefore neither of the normative type, nor is it prescriptive in nature. Rather, it argues that the Israeli rule over Gaza has been reshaped to the extent that the ‘occupation’ give us little by way of adequately depicting this form of domination.

Notably, the failure of Israeli rule of the Strip, following the Disengagement, to align with an easily identifiable occupation is anything but incidental, as the Disengagement and the imposition of the siege abide by contradictory rationales. The Disengagement most evidently demarcated the nullification of Israel’s territorial claims over the Strip. Occupations, nevertheless, are not only a seizure of land, but are also regimes of population control. Alongside the evacuation of its military installations and civilian settlements, in disengaging from the strip Israel also dismantled its governmentalizing apparatuses, signifying its disinterest in directly controlling the Palestinians residing there. While the imposition of the siege did not reproduce an equivalent governmentalizing structure, it has nevertheless allowed Israel to reconstitute, rather than forsake this control. Considering this discrepancy, Helga Tawil-Souri (2012) classified the siege as a substitute mechanism, in which the meticulous management of Gazans that characterized the pre-Disengagement period has been replaced with a more distant and violent domination – nevertheless equally intrusive. This violent domination has been characterized by Darryl Li (2008) as ‘controlled abandonment’, where the retraction of Israeli ruling apparatuses has been accompanied with a frustrating of the emergence of sustainable alternatives, while for Lisa Bhungalia (2012, 270), it constitutes a particular form of biopower which is neither invested in propagating life, nor is wholly necropolitical, but manages this population on ‘a thin threshold between life and death’.

In such analysis Israel’s repudiation of this control is mostly assumed to be nothing more than a rhetorical ploy, a diversion tactic use to deny its persisting obligations as an occupier. Yet, this repudiation should not be brushed aside so easily. Most notably, this repudiation is eminent precisely because Israel has reshaped its control of the Strip in an effort to distance it from identifiable formations of an occupation; this supposition has therefore come to define its modalities of power over Gaza. Put differently: following the Disengagement, Israel has reconstituted the control it sustains over Gaza in a clear effort to distance it from what can clearly be identified as an occupation. These very efforts of disqualifying the adherence of this control with an occupation are therefore instrumental for deciphering the rationalities subtending the reconstitution of their formation. By paying particular attention to the efforts Israel has put into ensuring that its control of Gaza fails to clearly confirm with an occupation, the analysis here exposes that the inflection, and more particularly the tense of this proposition, is of the essence, as Israel’s assertion that it is no longer occupying Gaza has not only altered the spatial operationalization of this rule, but also its temporal constitution. This paper therefore argues that Israel has predicated its modes of control through the relegation of the occupation of Gaza to the past, and has accordingly aligned this control with a rationality of a post-occupation. The analysis which follows first examines the temporal formation of a post-occupation as a disheveling of political time. Explicating the temporal underpinnings of the Disengagement and the siege, it then claims that when considered in tandem, they constitute political technologies for arresting time. It finally argues that by designating the occupation of Gaza to the past, Israel has substituted direct spatial management of people and land to a domination over political trajectories, replacing territorial absolutism with a seizure of the region’s political futurity.

The time of post-occupation

Asserting that the State of Israel should not be regarded as the occupying power of Gaza is regularly employed by Israel’s spokespeople and Israeli apologists to rationalize and normalize the persistence of Israeli domination over the Strip. Still, a growing body of scholarship presents compelling arguments for departing from the concept of an ‘occupation’ for analysing Israel’s modalities of power, not only for Gaza, but for the Israeli rule over Palestine more generally. Importantly, these scholars distance themselves from such rhetorical maneuvering in defense of Israel’s repressive policies, offering instead alternative, and perhaps more compelling, analytic frameworks for critiquing the Israeli regime, which extend beyond the confinements of the legal definition of an occupation. This research is not driven by measuring the compliance of the Israeli configurations of control with an ‘ideal type’ of an occupation. As Ann Stoler (2006b) teaches us, every colonial regime is unique in its own way – an observation which is no less applicable to settler colonialism or apartheid (Evri and Kotef 2020), or to military occupations, for that matter. Rather, it is motivated by the wish to provide a more persuasive critique of the formations of Israel’s domination over the Palestinians, and offer a conceptual account which will best service such critique.

Most notably, Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) highlighting of Zionism as a paradigmatic case of settler colonialism was followed with a renewed prominence of this paradigm in much of the critical thinking on Israel/Palestine.³ Such efforts aim to de-exceptionalize this region, while emphasizing the continuities of the Zionist settlement enterprise across the Green Line. Yet, this classification has received its fair share of criticism. For Rachel Busbridge (2018), for instance, the settler-colonial definition – which is based on New World settlement – glosses over the nationalism underpinning the Zionist project, hence conscripting its decolonizing applicability. Similarly, Lorenzo Veracini (2013) argues that whereas Israel successfully implemented settler colonialism within the 1948 boundaries, it failed to manifest the same in the areas conquered by Israel in 1967, where its rule (Veracini claims) more closely fits the pattern of a colonial enterprise. Others have contended that alternative definitions, such as apartheid or ethnocracy, are better suited for describing the Israeli regime in its entirety (Yiftachel 2006, 2018; du Plessis et al. 2009; Tilley 2012). Honaida Ghanim (2019) argues that as much as these adjacent definitions (settler/colonialism, apartheid, ethnocracy, occupation) may prove useful in expounding the rationales, motivations and impulses driving Israel, they all relatedly fail to adequately typify what she terms the ‘hybridity’ of its control. Within the realm of these established definitions (while also steering away from exceptionalizing Israel yet again), and following Ron J Smith (2011) call for providing a more nuanced analysis which may account for what he terms the microgeographies of Israeli rule over the Palestinians, this paper endeavours to offer an interpretive framework for explicating the specificities of Israeli rule, as those manifest themselves in Gaza. It argues that if we shift our focus from a predominantly spatial analysis, to an examination which integrates a temporal perspective, Israel’s modalities of power over the Strip reveal themselves as abiding by the rationale of a post-occupation.

This proclamation calls for a careful explication, as designating a territory to the status of ‘post-occupation’ seems to imply that the occupying powers have rescinded, and that the region in question is progressing towards full independence. Indeed, in their human rights-focused analysis, Bashi and Feldman (2011) call for seeing the ‘end of occupation’, not as a singular event, but rather as a gradual process, and suggest that Gaza is residing on a continuum stretching between occupation and independence. While this analysis may allow for an explication of where Israel has relinquished some aspects of control over Gaza, and where it still maintains other forms of governmental power, it nevertheless positions Gaza on an implied emancipatory trajectory. There is little dispute that the Palestinians in Gaza indeed do enjoy a certain degree of self-governance under the Hamas government (Sayigh 2010; Berti 2015; Gross 2017); yet, it would be erroneous to conclude that this restricted self-government implies that Gaza has progressed towards full independence. Claiming that Gaza complies with a post-occupation condition therefore departs from such presuppositions. Suspending historicist assumptions of an innate progressivity, for which decolonialization is an inevitability, assumptions which fail to account for what Derek Gregory (2004) characterizes as our ‘colonial present’, in what follows I argue that Gaza may comply with a post-occupation condition, without necessarily inferring that the region is en route to self-determination.

The ‘post’ prefix itself yields to querying such teleological assumptions. As identified by Wendy Brown (2010, 9), this prefix signifies an affixing, rather than a departure from a past: ‘“Post” indicates a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on the contrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with this past’. Accordingly, what sets the post-feminist apart from plain old chauvinism, or what distinguishes post-Zionist from non-Zionist, is the unyielding influence of what is assumed to have been displaced (cf. Pappé 2002; McRobbie 2004). The persistent inability to disassociate from the past (albeit nowin a distinctly new form) is applicable to all ‘post’ terminology; yet in some instances, what makes such concepts legible is the inability to distinguish between past and present. The most ready examples are, perhaps, the postcolonial, the post-conflict and the post-trauma. The postcolonial condition demarcates the prolongation of the colonial legacies into the present, well after the colonial world order subsided (Loomba 1998). Relatedly, a post-conflict society is one in which the residues of conflict remain very much salient (Connolly 2006; Pinkerton 2011). And perhaps most evidently, the post-trauma denotes a failure to depart from the compulsive recurrence of the past (Fisher 2014).

The ‘post’ prefix therefore demarcates what Mark Fisher (2012) calls ‘broken time’, a dishevelment of normative narrations of temporality as linear, progressive and sequential. Importantly, drawing on Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’, Fisher sees broken time as potentially encompassing two directionalities. While the temporal disjunction of broken time is destined to be shaped by what is supposedly in the past, but is very much still actual, it may equally be unsettled by the imposition of its future: ‘that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual’ (19). This bidirectional disruption of time is particularly applicable to the post-occupation condition. Unlike the post-trauma which is predominantly compelled by an unrelenting past event, the post-occupation condition is affixed to an occupation which cannot be left behind, while it is no less persuasively weighed on by a future independence. This independence fallaciously, and prematurely, appears as already actualized, yet in fact remains out of reach. The analysis which follows therefore argues that it would be erroneous to conclude that the rendering of Gaza to the time of the post-occupation infers that this region has progressed, or is progressing, towards full independence. Rather, by capturing Gaza in the time of a post-occupation, Israel has compressed the time of the Strip. Gaza is therefore caught within a staggered temporality which is concurrently disturbed by the endurance of the occupation, and by the impelled future independence onto the present. Thus, Israel's designation of Gaza to a post-occupation landscape, it claims, strangles the Strip in a protracted stagnation, rendering it to a time which is deprived of both past and future.

Disengagement time

The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

      Dov Weisglass (Shavit 2004).

The dually strangulated time of Gaza, and the burdening of the present by a future in particular, reveal themselves most evidently when examining the divergence of the temporal formation of the Disengagement from that of an occupation. Since the 1967 War, Israel’s control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has been rationalized and justified by Israel as merely temporary, pending a future peace agreement. The impermanence of the Israeli control of these regions, which was first the derivative of its classification as an occupation, a status which is, by its very definition, time bounded, was later formalized through the Oslo Accords which were defined as interim. Since then, as identified by Adi Ophir (2016)

temporariness has become a constitutive moment in the structure of the Israeli regime … The indeterminacy of the Occupation is not a result of a political impasse and the failure to decide between the two options [of either withdrawal or annexation]

he claims, ‘but rather of the power of the system to postpone the decision’ (31). As highlighted by many of the researchers examining the post-Oslo period, this enduring temporariness has become, perhaps, its most conspicuous feature. While having been subjected to the temporality of an extended temporariness, as Amal Jamal (2016) shows, neither commence for the Palestinians after the signing of the Accords, nor began in 1967, but goes back to the 1948 Nakba, the Oslo Accords have, he argues, intensified the predicating of Palestinian lives to the time of the prolong suspension. This enduring temporariness has rendered Palestinians, in the words of Nayrouz Abu Hatoum (2020, 102) to a ‘suspended existence of “living in the waiting”’.⁴ Israel, by contrast, has been using it to serve its expansionist endeavours. As Ghanim (2020) argues, it has made way for Israel to resolve the inherent contradictions between a military occupation and of settler colonialism, allowing it to maintain a de-jure occupation in conditions of de-facto apartheid. Indeed, it is not only that the occupation legally rests on its ostensive temporariness (Lynk 2005; Gross 2017), its presume impermanence also makes way for its sanctioning by the international community (Grinberg 2016; Dajani 2017). Furthermore, as Azoulay and Ophir demonstrate (2012), the formal differentiation between the occupation and Israel’s procedural democracy inside the 1948 boundaries has been sustained through the alleged temporariness of the former. Its servicing in sustaining its settler colonial formations notwithstanding, the Israeli hold of the oPt has been nevertheless subjected to the same (formal) logic of impermanence, at least in principle.

The execution of the Disengagement Plan, I argue, has marked Israel’s departure from the temporality of enduring suspension. This calls for an explication. As stated above, since the Disengagement, the Israeli position has been that it is no longer the occupying power in Gaza, a position which was then ratified by the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ 9132/07). The policies enacted by Israel towards the Strip and its population since had accordingly not been subject to the same presumed impermanence of Israeli measures in the oPt. Prima facie, the extraction of the Strip from its status as occupied territory could have inferred that it, similarly, has escaped from the perpetual temporariness of the Israeli occupation. However, Neither complying with the temporariness of an occupation, nor adhering to the future-oriented progressive regularity of modern statehood (Giddens and Pierson 1998), Gaza is caught in the limbo of its indeterminate status, deprived from abiding by recognizable political trajectories. In what follows, I first examine how the Disengagement has been effected to cement Gaza to the occupation, throttling its ability to free itself from this past. I then continue by demonstrating how it has allowed Israel to similarly weaponize the future of Gaza. By relegating Gaza to this indeterminate condition, I argue, the Palestinian self-determination, which the Israeli occupation has been mechanized to defer in perpetuum, appears as a simulacra of a sort, as the ostensive materialization of this future is folded onto Gaza’s present. Thus, by way of the Disengagement, Israel has rendered Gaza to the bidirectional broken time of a post-occupation.

Leaving much wreckage in its wake (Salamanca 2011), the unilateral Disengagement was carried out with no coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) (Geist Pinfold 2019), fostering the political clashes between the PA and Hamas which ensued (Milton-Edwards 2008). Furthermore, despite heavily relying on the assumed temporariness of the occupation to suit its colonizing needs, Israel had never fully recognized that it occupied Gaza – or the rest of the Palestinian territory for that matter – resorting instead to a selective implementation of international law (Gross 2017). The Israeli government’s declaration of its Disengagement Plan accordingly deploys rhetorical acrobatics to avoid acknowledgement of the occupation, even retroactively, stating that after executing the Disengagement, ‘there will be no basis for claiming that the Gaza Strip is occupied territory’.⁵ The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was entangled in this double negation: it ended an occupation which Israel never acknowledged, never fully owned up to, and for which there is therefore no recompense. Hence, this declaration renounces the responsibilities which the ending of an occupation would have otherwise entailed, and averts the reparations and constructive obligations that this should have imposed on Israel. Such reparations would have gone some way towards fostering the reconstruction of Gaza, allowing it to avoid the wallowing in economic stagnation which ensued. The Disengagement has rendered the Strip to what Ann Stoler (2008) has classified as ‘imperial debris’: not merely a spectacular event of devastation, circumscribe to the evacuation itself, it was fashioned to perpetuate the ongoing decimation of Gaza. Examined in isolation from the escalating attacks which soon followed, and the suffocation of the relentless siege, the Disengagement alone is exposed as devised to foster ongoing ruination.

Gaza’s future prospects, following the Disengagement, have been weighing on it no less persuasively, predominantly through Israel’s fallacious propagation that Gaza is now independent. This is a deliberate misconstruing. As candidly explained by Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s confidant who devised the Plan, the purpose of the Disengagement was that the establishment of a Palestinian state would be indefinitely postponed. ‘The significance [of the Disengagement] is the freezing of the political process’ he boasted in a 2004 interview, ‘Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely’ (Shavit 2004). The counterfactuality of Palestinian independence in Gaza substitutes the occupation’s highly effective yet provisional suspension of the future with a preemptive foreclosing of this future, as the Disengagement has been narrated by Israel as setting future pathways for Gaza and regionally. Most explicitly, imageries of the Disengagement setting the Strip on a path towards a different, better, future have dominated the Israeli political discourse since.

Gaza’s future is curiously represented through its prospects of becoming the ‘Singapore of the Middle East’. This formulation is not original. It first emerged among Palestinian intellectuals and some of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders during the First Intifada and in the years leading to the signing of the Oslo Accords. Examining this analogy, Joseph Massad (1997) claims that these Palestinian intellectuals – who he classifies as realist-pragmatist – were drawing on the notion of Singapore to propagate Palestine’s significant developmental potential; one which will, according to this vision, prevent it from turning into ‘another third world country’ (29). Denouncing their orientalistic overtures and their ‘arrogance and contempt for the third world’, Masad identified the alienation of such intellectuals from the Palestinian political project.⁶ Emptied of the inferences of Israel’s control, the future of Gaza has emerged in Israeli discourses as a blank canvas onto which ‘Singapore’ may be projected. In a 2018 video address (ostensibly) to the people of Gaza, for instance, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time stated: ‘You can choose between poverty and unemployment or work and making a livelihood. Between hatred and bloodshed or coexistence and personal security’. He continued by arguing that if they decide to do so, they can ‘turn the refugee camps into the Singapore of the Middle East’.⁷ Speaking directly to the camera, Lieberman told the people of Gaza that their future is theirs to control: all of this is achievable, he claimed, if the Gazans stopped fighting Israel and agree to demilitarize the Strip. He then urged them to overthrow their government, if Hamas did not concede to these demands. This video perpetuates the story which the Israeli political leadership has been forcefully narrating, a story which portrays the Disengagement as offering Gazans the opportunity to flourish, and arguing that the warmongering Hamas government has been squandering this opportunity. Rather than investing in housing and infrastructure, in education and economic development, the Gazan leadership prioritized building assault tunnels and purchasing missiles (cf. IDI 2015; Achimeir 2018; Gilad 2018; Heller 2018).

Performatively appealing to the people of Gaza with an empowering message, this was a thinly-veiled propaganda speech-act, whose actual intended audience was the Jewish-Israeli public and Israel’s supporters internationally. Thus, as misguided and overly optimistic the reference to the trope of Singapore for delineating Gaza’s prospective future by some Palestinian intellectuals in the early nineties may have been, its evocation by Israeli leaders since the Disengagement does not possess the same level of sincerity. In the Israeli political discourse, Singapore appears as a future unreal conditional, and thus as a backward-facing denunciation. Instead of demarcating potential, ‘Singapore’ denotes a future of Gaza that is always already lost, signifying the failure of Gazans and their leadership. This reverse trajectory becomes apparent in Lieberman’s blaming Hamas for the dire conditions in Gaza. This condemnation does not only deliberately obscure the implications of a more than decade-long siege, but also the decade and a half of Israel-imposed economic strangulation, through the blockade of Gaza, which preceded it, well before Hamas took over (Roy 2016). Importantly, this video was released in July of 2018, as Israel was embarking on yet another military assault on the Strip. By fabricating the future of Gaza as a generative horizon which is for the Palestinians of Gaza to take command of, this mise-en-scene exposes that this address goes beyond this blame game. Implying that the people of Gaza, and not only their leadership, could have chosen economic prosperity over war, Lieberman sought to implicate this civilian population in the militant escalations which would soon ensue. As such, it is embroiled in Israel’s campaigns of justifying the targeting of civilians in Gaza (see also Bisharat 2009; Bhungalia 2010; Kotef 2010; Gordon and Perugini 2020).

As an aside, it should be noted that the use of the metaphor of Singapore by the Israeli leadership as signifying Gaza’s lost future is particularly telling. Most notably, unlike Gaza, Singapore is an island. Hence, even in this image of the bright future which supposedly could await it, the Strip is still narrated as detached from its surroundings. To an extent, this could be read as a projection, since Israel itself (of its own volition) operates as an island (Razin and Charney 2015). Yet, unlike Israel’s self-imposed detachment, the Palestinians are very much embedded into the Middle East. Projecting the isolation of Gaza onto this bright future which allegedly awaits it, this discourse conflates geographic disconnect with political and economic isolation. The likening of Gaza to an island further naturalizes, and hence depoliticizes, the Israeli-imposed siege of the Strip, and the severing of Gaza from its terrestrial geography. Equating the Strip to an island therefore serves to implicitly disavow Israel’s responsibility for Gaza’s deprivation, since, as island-states bridge their geographic disconnect from the continent, Gaza could purportedly overcome its own isolation.

While, admittedly, the use of such blunt ploys serves nothing more than to nourish Israeli mechanisms of self-justification, they should not be regarded as insignificant, since the measures undertaken by the Israeli government to stifle Palestinian national aspirations are very much dependent on the acquiescence of its Jewish-Israeli public. For this public, these articulations of the futures which could have awaited Gaza are mainly aimed at asserting that the Disengagement has granted Gaza with its long-awaited independence and a state-like political agency, and serve nothing more than justifying Israel’s aggressions in the Strip. Yet, even within such articulations, in which Palestinian political agency discursively emerges as nothing more than a rhetorical epiphenomenon, this agency is only made legible through its failure to materialize, as they ritualistically lament the now bygone potentialities of the Strip. This failure allegedly attests the Palestinians’ innate ‘unreadiness’ to assume independence, in a particular form of whataboutery (Robinson 2018, 84), that can be called ‘butGaza-ism’. Unlike classic whataboutery, ‘butGaza-ism’ is not primarily used to assert blame or to compete for superior victimhood status, though there is also plenty of that, but to render any discussion about future Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory mute. ‘ButGaza-ism’ is usually thrusted at anyone suggesting that Israel should strive to reach a peace agreement which complies with the two-state solution, and is usually formulated as ‘but we gave them Gaza and all they did was to build attack tunnels and bombard us with missiles in return’ (Eldar 2012). It is therefore garnered to foreclose Palestinian national trajectories more generally. While further destining Palestinian independence to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) ‘waiting room of history’, it has further allowed Israel to extract its configurations of control alone from the rationality of temporariness. By distancing its settler-colonial formations from their evident compliance with an occupation,

Israel has been fortifying its regional domination. Importantly, through a negation that the Disengagement has subtended the perpetuation, rather than ended, Israel’s control of the Strip, this extraction is predicated on a refutation of the endurance of this rule, and on a counterfactual negation of its persistence. Through a mimicking of the end of an occupation, this counterfactuality forecloses future prospects, as it serve to negate its underlying (violent) political reality, while pre-empting the prospect of change.

Siege time

In the last 11 years of blockade I lost my future: I was 18 when the siege started, I spent my youth under blockade and restrictions … just like every one of you is living happily and peacefully, we have the right to live. Enough is enough, we are fed up.

     Asmaa Abu Daqqa, the Gaza Strip, (quoted in Amnesty International 2018)

The compelling spectacularity of the cycles of war that Israel has waged in Gaza since the Disengagement – five extensive campaigns and smaller, yet much more regular bombardment from the air⁸ – and the extensive devastation to life and the environment they leave in their wake, tend at times to overshadow the brutality of the siege itself. By all measures, the prolonged siege alone has been detrimental for the close to two million residents of the Strip. Obstructing almost all mobility beyond the small confines of the Strip, the siege cuts Gaza's residents off from their next of kin, social relations and communities, in the West Bank, inside Israel, in East Jerusalem and in the Palestinian diaspora (Bashi and Diamond 2015). It has also denied the sick and the disabled access to adequate medical care beyond the severely diminished capacity of Gaza’s already frail healthcare system (WHO 2017). The siege has brought about the economic ruination of the Strip, while stifling any initiatives directed toward its regeneration, turning a previously productive economy to a predominantly consumer import-dependent market (Eltalla 2014). The frequent airstrikes and periodic full-scale military campaigns have also deliberately targeted much of Gaza’s infrastructure (Salamanca 2011), leaving the provision of clean water, electricity, fuel and gas scant (Gisha 2018a). Constituting what Omar Jabary Salamanca (2011) calls infrastructural violence, the siege severely curtails the movement of people and goods, inflicting severe deprivation on the people of Gaza. Characterized by some as economic warfare (Meisels 2011; Lowe and Tzanakopoulos 2012), the persistent crisis that the siege had imposed has led to high levels of household debt, and to unemployment rates exceeding international records (Gisha 2020). These contribute to levels of dependency on humanitarian aid equated with the depth and extent of refugee camps.⁹ Imposed after the Hamas government was established in 2007, the siege has subjected the civilian population of the Gaza Strip to living in a relentless war zone from which there is no escape.

The fortified fences and walls surrounding the Strip; the warships patrolling its coasts, enforcing the sea blockade; the drones ceaselessly hovering in its airspace: the spatiality of Israel’s domination over the Strip is easily discernable. Yet, the siege harms and kills no less through its accumulative sustainment. Identified by some as an extreme instance of ‘slow violence’ (Puar and Medien 2018),¹⁰ the siege that Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza can no less be characterized as violent slowness: disrupting the constitution of individual and communal time as holding the prospect of progress and change. Its predominant spatiality notwithstanding, the siege is therefore no less a type of temporal warfare, disrupting the circularity of motion (of bodies, goods, ideas) which life in modernity has come to depend on. Arresting the educational, professional and personal development of Gazans (Gisha 2018b), many residents of Gaza have come to describe the Israeli-imposed siege as destining them to a ‘slow death’ (Khader 2014; Manduca et al. 2014; Puar and Medien 2018; Nijim 2020). The extensive humanitarianization of Gaza’s households further aggravates this temporal dispossession. Humanitarian dependency, as Cathrine Brun (2016) shows, detaches biological life from the biographical. According to Brun, humanitarianism’s focus on the present disengages the recipients of aid from the personal and communal sense of continuity, severing one’s correspondence to the past and the future. This humanitarianization of the population of Gaza also has extensive political implications, as it not only infers a material deprivation, but also de-politicizes the cause of the deprivation, thus eroding the sense of a collective future (Jefferess 2013).

By confining the circulation of people and goods, the siege reveals itself, most evidently, as a biopolitical technology for obstructing regeneration and imposing decay. Yet, the siege is not only operationalized to force stasis onto the residents of the Strip; the rationalization of the siege as a central component in the Israeli economy of violence, as the less injurious alternative within a contrived logic of constraints, further exposes the impounding of the futurity which subtends it. Despite its imposition of more than thirteen years (to date), the siege is often rationalized by Israel as a provisional security measure, devised to stop the firing of rockets by Gaza’s militants. Yet, examining Israel’s rationalization of the siege shows that the language of security encapsulates a primarily political agenda. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2007, when the siege was first imposed, made this point most clearly, stating that ‘it would be a mistake’ to see the siege from ‘a narrow security perspective only’ (Quoted in Turkel 2011, 57). Rather, she explicates, the siege is primarily deployed to secure Israel’s political objective: the delegitimization of Hamas. Let us, momentarily, set aside the cardinal questions of whether such an extreme measure against a civilian population for attaining a political objective is legal, effective or, more crucially, moral, and examine the implications of this rationale on the temporality underpinning the sustainment of the siege.

Israel's obsession with its own ostensive delegitimization notwithstanding,¹¹ this objective does not sit easily within the realm of political aims. Defining delegitimization as ‘categorization of a group, or groups, into extremely negative social categories that exclude it, or them, from the sphere of human groups that act within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values’, Bar-Tal and Hammack (2012, 29) show how delegitimization entrenches conflicts while justifying extreme violence and immoral acts. No doubt, by delegitimizing Hamas – and, by extension, the population of Gaza – Israel's leadership garners Israeli support for the brutality that it inflicts on the residents of the Strip. Focusing on the psycho-social, and inter-group dynamics, Bar-Tal and Hammack’s account offers little by explicating the political effects of delegitimization campaigns aimed at political entities. While gaining legitimacy is a pillar of any authority (Habermas 1988), it is a quandary of governance, foreign to the realm of international politics, where recognition (or the lack thereof) order alliances and conflicts. The Israeli evocation of ‘delegitimization’ highlights yet again the liminality of Palestinian space, which is neither internalized nor allowed to be externalized to the Israeli realm – what Ophir, Givoni, and Sārī (2009) characterize as an ‘inclusive exclusion’.

In this instance, the delegitimization of Hamas is most evidently contrasted with a recognition of this leadership as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians. The siege therefore allows the Israeli leadership to portray itself as obstructing such recognition, as it subtends Israel’s refusal to negotiate with Hamas, rendering the mere prospect of such negotiations a taboo in the Jewish-Israeli political arena. This refusal is primarily performative, since Israel has, and continues to negotiate with Hamas, (albeit primarily through third-party mediation (Neumann 2007)). It further made way for the mainstreaming of the calls to topple this regime. Michael Oren (2014), Israel’s former ambassador to the US, voiced this view explicitly. Writing during the 2014 war, he urged the Israeli government to bring down the Hamas: ‘to guarantee peace’, he argues, ‘this war must be given a chance’, in what sounds too close to an Orwellian proposition for comfort. Yet, despite having the means in its disposal to take down the Hamas, Israel has consistently refrained from destroying it completely (Shamir and Hecht 2014). This refraining

sheds light on the interweaving of the siege into Israel’s political economy of violence. According to Amnon Aran (2012), Israel has been rationalizing the siege by drawing on the American Rogue State Doctrine, and its justification for resorting to punitive measures over diplomatic alternatives, when dealing with regimes defined as beyond the (Western) pale. Equated with the American-led sanctions and embargos on Iran and North Korea, the siege on Gaza is rationalized as spatially and politically containing Hamas. Yet, it would be more accurate to claim that rather than containing the Hamas, the siege is operationalized to contain Israel. Explaining that the siege has been obtaining its goals, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, stated that the ‘Hamas is restrained and wants to keep things quiet’, and continues by claiming that the only alternative for Israel, ‘is to occupy and control Gaza. You don’t have anyone else to give it to. I won’t give it to Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the PA in the West Bank]’ (quoted in Bismot and Lord 2019). Beyond exposing that Netanyahu sees Gaza as his to give, this articulation shows that Israeli military attacks are deliberately restrained, falling short of delivering a fatal blow to Hamas.

Examining the earlier years of the siege, Azoulay and Ophir (2012) argue that Israel has managed the population of Gaza through the administration of a ‘catastrophic threshold’. Maintaining conditions in Gaza on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe had allowed Israel to substitute its direct rule of Gaza with this form of proximate control. In the years since, Israel has abandoned this approach, and has become content with allowing Gaza to become uninhabitable (Trew 2019); however the siege maintains Gaza at a threshold of an abyss, yet of a different kind. Rather than the prospect of humanitarian devastation, Gaza is one military campaign away from the utter destruction of Palestinian self-governance. Operationalized to curb the extent of Israeli onslaughts, the delegitimization which the siege is geared to attain is no longer in opposition to recognition, but rather is contrasted against unrestrained military savagery. Indeed, as Aran sustains, the siege abides by the logic of containment – yet not merely the spatio-political containment of Hamas that he identifies, but a measure of self-containment, restraining Israel’s own violence.

Accordingly, the temporal underpinning of the rationalization of the siege are twofold. First, forestalling the spectre of Gaza’s absolute destruction, the siege is a katechon of a sort. As such, by its very constitution, it is structured to preclude the ominous catastrophic future of Gaza from unfolding. Second, since what awaits Gaza if the siege were to be lifted is the ruination and reoccupation of the Strip, the endless prolongation of the siege is sustained through its operationalization as a stabilizing mechanism deferring such graver prospects. As such, the siege has finally come to abide by what Ross Beveridge (2011) calls a ‘Politics of Inevitability’, precluding all alternatives. In this logic of constraints, holding Gaza under siege is no longer a contingent measure to be lifted once the right conditions are met. Undermining its presumed temporariness, the rationalization of the siege has instead constituted it as inexorable.

The actual conditions in the Strip further disrupt the constitution of time. Acute depravation in the Strip subjects life to the rationale of the emergency, governed by the recourse to short-term means, attending to the immediate and the urgent. Oscillating between full-scale war (inflicting extensive devastation to life and property) and to periods of tentative quiet, with long stretches of low-intensity warfare in between, such episodic disruptions have, to a large extent, themselves become regularized. Concurrently, when the fighting (temporarily) subsides, the siege subjects life in the Strip to a protracted suspension. The present of Gaza is unsettled, as its future stagnation is overdetermined. Winter (2016) claims that while scholars of empire have associated colonial expansion with the rationalization of space, the siege of Gaza exemplifies that what he calls ‘territorial de-rationalization’ is a no less effective tool of control. The siege, he states, ‘has constituted Gaza as a disordered hybrid space’ (5). Alongside Gaza’s juridico-political ambiguity, the unhinging of time which the siege entails has constituted its time as similarly hybrid and disordered. Yet, temporal de-rationalization cannot be straightforwardly equated to a spatial one. The intangibility of time infers its fragility. Constituting what Kyoo Lee (2013) describes as temporal deprivation, the injurious socio-psycho effects of losing command of individual and communal time are well documented (Turner 2005). There are, however, additional political corollaries at stake for the Palestinians.

As Anthony Giddens (1998) has established, moderate progressivity is not simply what we have come to expect from normal rulership. The future has become compelling for modern societies, and this future-orientation, and the management of this future, is central to the institutionalization of the systems of government. Accordingly, Peter Osborne (1994) argues that ‘the political’ is a mode of temporalization, and claims ‘all politics as centrally involving struggles over the experience of time’ (7). Deprived of the ability to fashion the future, Palestinian self-rule in Gaza has been destined to be restricted to the execution of applied administration of the everyday, devoid of the actual ability to harness this self-governance to managing the threats and the promises faced by any society. Vacated of the ability to shape its own future, this administration is emptied of the actual power of governance, no matter how much governmental capacity the Hamas government may sustain. Through instating this post-occupation condition on Gaza, by way of the withdrawal and the imposition of the siege, Israel has therefore replaced its meticulous control of space, and the domination over the minutia of governmentalization that such control allows, with a grip over political trajectories. The derailing of Gaza from the ready trajectories of coherent configurations of modern rulership has therefore dissipated the futurity of Gaza.

Post-occupation Gaza

Today, most observers — including Amnesty International — tacitly accept Israel’s framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict … This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel’s lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.

      George Bisharat (2009)

Through an interplay of continuities and discontinuities, and the rendering Gaza to the post-occupation condition, Israel has weaponized the presumed nearing of Palestinian independence while unhinging Palestinian political time. Most significantly, Israel’s designation of Gaza to the time of a post-occupation decimates any clear delineation of its political projection.

The Israeli Disengagement from Gaza, and its insistence that Gaza is no longer occupied, has further allowed Israel to (successfully, thus far) deflect criticism of its policies, and to evade internal or international pressure to relinquish its enduring grip on the Strip. As noted by George Bisharat (2009), even if Israel had not managed to convince the international community that the occupation had ended, many international observers have largely concurred with the Israeli stance that the reclassification of Israel's aggressions in the Strip fall under the law of armed conflict, rather than complying with the law of occupation. Israel has therefore succeeded in reshaping the political imaginaries of its control for international observers, by effectively projecting what Winter (2016) terms a ‘fantasy of an international border’ (313) on its bounding of the Gaza Strip. The spectacle materiality of the siege, with its heavily guarded fortifications mimicking border installations, further fosters this very same discourse, as borders imply a recognition of the sovereign authority residing beyond them (Schaefer 2014). Importantly, Israel’s boundary with the Strip fails to constitute a stable border by any standard. This border more closely complies with what Ann Stoler (2006a) classifies as ‘zones of ambiguity’ characterizing the boundaries of empire: overtly constrictive for Palestinians, this border is completely permeable for Israel.

Israel's insistence that the occupation of Gaza has ended folds Palestine’s prospective independent future into the present. The projection of this futurity to the present serves Israel in ensuring the sustainability of the siege, by undermining any opposition to its policies, while holding the Palestinian futures captive.

The post-occupation condition of Gaza is therefore not an intermediate position between an occupation which has latterly ended and a forthcoming full independence, as this title may infer. Rather, it forecloses the region’s future, while derailing its plausible alternative trajectories. The counterfactual designation of Gaza to the time of a post-occupation exposed here further entangles it in a web of shattered time, as this condition is predicated on a deliberate misconstruing of the region’s trajectory. The endurance of Israeli domination into the time of this post-occupation, and its predication on a refutation of the perseverance of this domination, has meant that the post-occupation of Gaza rests on counterfactual foundations which fragment its continuity. As the post-occupation of the Strip subtends the perseverance of Israel’s control, the past imposes on the present not only as that which cannot be forsaken, or that which fails to be reconciled; the suppressed persistence of Israeli rule over Palestinian people and land unsettles the distinction between past and present. Implying that the end of the occupation has already occurred, it similarly compels the projection of a prospective emancipated Palestinian future on the present. The contrived and premature summoning of this future frustrates the transformative potentiality of future unfoldings, vacating their prospective alterity, since this future has purportedly already been realized. The entangling of Palestinian decolonization in the dually disjointed post-occupation time therefore does not only unhinge the present; it is structurally constituted to pull the future into its web through a forward projection of its disrupted temporality. Thus, as Palestinian independence is concomitantly subtending Israeli configurations of power, and that which these same configurations are constituted to preclude, Israel's designation of Gaza to a post-occupation landscape strangles the Strip in a protracted stagnation, while the forgone occupation overshadows not only the present, but also the future.

This paper argued that through the reconfiguration of its modes of control, Israel substituted a burdensome and costly occupation with a more parsimonious spatial containment of Gaza, which allowed it to retain its grasp of Palestinian futurity. Explicating the rationalization of the siege, I further claimed that it serves to temper the extent of Israeli irruptive warfare, such as bombing campaigns or ground invasions. Understood as such, the rationale subtending the siege is exposed as geared towards the forestalling of time. Thus, a spatial restructuration, predicated on the annulment of Israeli occupation and deployed to foreclose avenues of conflict resolution, has culminated in the shaping of a futureless region, depriving Gaza from the mere notion of a future.

Post-occupation Gaza further demarcates a spatio-temporal modality of power which Israel is gradually adopting in the West Bank as well: a modality of power which substitutes direct spatial control (entailing a governmentalization of the occupied population) with a domination over political trajectories. Unlike in Gaza, the perpetual temporariness of the occupation of the West Bank has been constituted to serve Israel’s expansionist enterprise. Israel’s annexation plans in the West Bank demarcate a diversion from this course. As the many critics of the plan have argued at length, such an annexation would conclusively annul the prospects of the two-state solution (Benn 2008; Sharvit Baruch 2018; Haaretz Editorial 2019). Yet, as an extensive body of research has already exhaustingly demonstrated, the prospects of the two-state solution, and the establishment of an independent Palestine from ever materializing has long expired, if it were ever viable, not the least by the extent of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank.¹² An Israeli annexation of West Bank territory therefore should not be understood as mounting further obstacles towards Palestinian independence.

Much like the Disengagement, it would similarly entail a forsaking of Israel's claims to some territory (the Palestinians enclaves of Areas A and B in the case of the West Bank), and a relinquishing of the Greater Israel vision propagated by the Zionist nationalistic right. It would therefore constitute a recalibration of Israel’s spacio-temporality of control over its ex-territories and non-citizen population, whereby territorial concessions (limited as they may be) give way to a domination over future projections.

What the analysis here failed to provide is an account for how the people of Gaza live, and resist, living in a futureless region from which there is no escape. This paper cannot do justice for such an account, but we cannot conclude without acknowledging what has been perhaps the most evident political project of resistance in recent years. At noon on March 30 2018, a large crowd of around 30,000 people gathered in the Gaza Strip and started marching towards the heavily guarded Israel-Gaza barrier. This was the first demonstration of the Great March of Return. By the end of that day, 59 Palestinians were killed and over 1,400 were injured, making it one of the deadliest in Gaza in recent decades (Amnesty International 2018). However, this did not deter the protesters. What was originally planned as the first in a six-week campaign became one of the greatest showcases of Palestinian resistance, continuing on a weekly basis for almost 18 months. By the time it concluded, there were 214 fatalities amongst the demonstrators and more than 35,000 injured (Israel Palestine News 2018) – many losing limbs to sniper shooting, as Israel extensively exercised what Jasbir Puar (2017) called its ‘right to maim’.

Importantly, the Great March of Return – as its name infers – was not only protesting the siege, but demarcated the desire of the Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes, inside the State of Israel, from which they had been dispelled some 70 years prior.¹³ The protesters’ evocation of the notion of Palestinian return is of significance. The language of return, as Diana Allen shows, has become the hallmark of the future for Palestinian refugees, and has come to represent a hopeful trajectory for Palestinians more generally (Allan 2013, 32). The demonstrators’ resolution to redefine the future expressed a (symbolic, yet no less substantial) fundamental defiance of Israel’s control over Palestinian futures. The insistence on emphasizing historical continuities was not only protesting Israeli policies, but contested the response of the international community, which had not only failed to challenge Israel's siege of Gaza, but was content in relegating the Palestinians to humanitarian dependency. This campaign, which was met with nothing but resolute gunfire, was not merely drawing on the sheer desperation brought about by a decade-long siege; rather, it was an act of defiance, aimed against Israel's command of Palestinian futures. By invoking the trope of return, the protesters were, therefore, engendering what, following Ghassan Hage (2012), can be termed ‘societal hope’ in an Israeli-designated landscape of despair.

At the time of writing these words, in the spring of 2021, the Great March of Return protests have subsided and the global Covid-19 crisis has pushed Gaza further away from the international newsfeed. In this historical present, the prospect of the struggle for Palestinian freedom seems to be bleaker than ever. Yet, this crisis, and its implications for communities across the world, has underscored the fragility of collective futures. As these futures are put into question, one does not need to live in Gaza, to be trapped within its boundaries, to experience the debilitating effects of spatial confinement on futures and to have a glimpse of the personal and collective costs which such a deprived future entails. Grappling with the pandemic and its aftermaths may therefore bring into sharp focus the casualties of the war being waged by Israel on futures, not only of the residents of the Gaza Strip, but on Palestinian national aspirations more generally. As the tectonic plates of the international political scene move under our feet, one might see a glimpse of hope for Palestinian futures in a crisis of this scale.

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For a discussion of the blockading of Gaza as a siege, see Winter (2016).

2 Providing an alternative legal perspective, Aeyal Gross (2017) argues that such discussions amount to no more than legal pedantry, since the category of an ‘occupation’ is too blunt a tool to adequately define the status of Gaza, and that the scope of control which Israel retains over the Strip suffices to hold it responsible for the region’s residents.

3 This is not to suggest that this is a novel perspective. The interpretation of Zionism as a settler colonial project can be traced back to early days of Zionism (Pappe 2015). Yet, this interpretive framework has seen a resurgence more recently (Salamanca et al. 2012). For a review of these debates, see Kotef (2020).

4 For accounts of the effects of living in the time of a temporariness from which there is no escape, and how it has come to shape almost every aspect of Palestinian lives in the oPt, see, for instance, Abourahme (2011); Wick (2011); Hammami (2015); Tawil-Souri (2017); Naamneh, al-Botmeh, and Salameh (2018); Peteet (2018); Abu Hatoum (2020).

5 Available at: https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/mfadocuments/pages/disengagement%20plan%20-%20general%20outline.aspx. Emphasis added.

6 Similarly, Edward Said (1995) criticized the PLO leadership for alluding to such imagery in their false promises of prosperity. He stated that implying that Gaza will turn into a 'new Singapore' as 'illusions that interest only those who repeat them. They have no foundation at all' (177). For similar critiques, see also Alkhalili (2019).

7 Available at: https://videopress.com/v/7xoT1Uf9.

8 These include Operation Summer Rains in 2006, Operation Hot Winter in February of 2008, Operation Cast Lead between December 2008 and January 2009, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

9 It is estimated that approximately 80% of the population of Gaza is dependent on humanitarian aid for sustenance (World Bank 2018).

10 On slow violence more generally, see also Pain (2019), Nixon (2011), Christian and Dowler (2019).

11 See also Amir (2017).

12 For such analysis see, for instance, Benvenisti (1984); Jamal (2001); Falah (2005); Beinin and Stein (2006); Farouk-Alli (2007); Zertal and Eldar (2007); El-Atrash (2016); Faris (2013); O'Malley (2015).

13 According to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in December of 2019 there were 1,460,315 refugees from the 1948 war living in the Gaza Strip, making up nearly 70% of the entire population of the Strip (UNRWA 2020).