The Occupying Pattern of Gaza, By Jamil Shawwa

The Story of Gaza!

Gaza over the decades has always had somebody else- from somewhere else- running its affairs. In more clear words, occupying her. Gaza- a Mediterranean city- on the Palestinian coast, nestled from the south and the north between the Israeli and the Egyptian coasts respectively might one day has it's say as any other city on the long beautiful silky clear shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The original people of Gaza are merchants, business people and smart politicians who knew over the decades how to wither all kinds of political storms. If we dig into the modern history of Gaza, going back couple of hundreds of years, we can witness the arrival of the Ottoman Empire, which occupied not only Gaza but also the modern and now called Middle East. Although the Ottoman Empire was in fact at that time calling itself the Islamic Empire of the East; it was a strange body in the Arab Middle East and the people there never felt that it was part of them or that they, the people of the Middle East, were part of her. The British Empire arrived at the shores of the Middle East by the end of the Nineteenth Century and took over Gaza in the early Twentieth Century after the fall of the Ottomans following World War I. The British withdrew from the historic Palestine, which Gaza occupies it's south part in 1947 and the first Arab-Israeli war broke following the withdrawal of the British and the UN partition of Palestine among it's Jewish and Arab residences and the declaration of independence of the state of Israel on the part approved by the UN. The Arab states rejected the declaration of independence, attacked Israel, were defeated and a new power-Egypt-emerged and occupied Gaza until its defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Because of that war, Israel took over the West Bank, The Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, and parts of Egypt and Syria. Israel signed the Oslo agreement in 1993 with Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO, The Palestine Liberation Organization, as a prelude to the creation of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The PLO under the name of the Palestinian Authority entered Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Israel in the summer of 2005 withdrew from the Gaza Strip and left it in the hands of the PLO- the Palestinian Authority and indirectly in the hands of the power in waiting, Hamas. In January 2006, Hamas won the parliamentary elections in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and moved to form a government. The situation worsened as Hamas continued to condone terrorism especially in the form of firing rockets into the bordering Israeli cities. Israel and the United States- because of this stand- blocked aids and other forms of financial cooperation. In June 2006, Hamas took over the Gaza strip, kicked the PLO out and formed a unilateral government that controlled the Gaza Strip with another government- the PLO- in Ramallah controlling the West Bank. Hamas is now the new occupier of the Gaza strip, its' people who controls the streets of Gaza are strange people among strangers. It's Gaza's destiny again to let someone else runs its' affairs.