The shadow of Israeli colonization over the Gaza Strip
The enclave that was defined was populated two-thirds by masses of refugees, expelled during the founding of the State of Israel. It concentrated a quarter of the Arab population of Palestine – now disappeared – into just 1% of its historic territory. The Gaza Strip was bound to become a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism, leaving two possible outcomes: Either Gaza would be part of a "two-state solution," finally reconciling Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, or Israel's refusal to resolve the Palestinian question would further fuel projects to eradicate the enclave as a national space.
Legacy of three decades of colonization
The Israeli military first occupied the Gaza Strip for four months in 1956-1957, a bloody occupation aimed at eradicating the fedayeen, as the Palestinian fighters were known. In June 1967, Israeli forces again seized the Gaza Strip, as well as East Jerusalem, which was effectively annexed, and the West Bank, which was soon opened to Israeli colonization.
In Gaza, however, the occupiers faced four long years of low-intensity guerrilla warfare, which only General Ariel Sharon managed to crush in the summer of 1971. To achieve this, he brutally reconfigured the Palestinian enclave, forcibly displacing a tenth of its population and bulldozing new patrol routes. He divided the Gaza Strip into several hundred "blocks," a division the Israeli military would reinstate half a century later to expel the population from certain "blocks" during the current offensive.
Yet Sharon was convinced that Israel's military dominance over Gaza could be guaranteed only by weaving the territory with Israeli settlements. He used the metaphor of five fingers to describe five east-west axes, connecting Israeli territory to the Mediterranean through settlements, in order to break the geographic and demographic continuity of the Palestinian enclave.
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