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By: Barry Shaw
Gaza is a place that makes men mad and blind. Historically, it has been cursed and cursed again.
There is something about this place that rejects progress and breeds death and destruction.
It began brightly when settled by the Canaanites, an early Jewish tribe. It was even described in the Bible as “the Promised Land.”
Archeological evidence describes an overlapping of an Israelite and a Canaanite culture.
Etymology however hints at the inevitable fate of Gaza in the Hebrew letters of its Semitic name. To be subjugated.
Then the Philistines came, and Gaza has been cursed ever since.
The biblical story of Samson and Delilah tells of a strong man from the Jewish tribe of Dan who lived near Bet Shemesh who was lured into Gaza only to be tortured, blinded and killed, by the Philistines.
Hence the expression “Eyeless in Gaza.”
According to the Book of Judges, the Philistines oppressed Israel for 40 years.
The lesson of Samson was that he was arrogant and foolhardy. This has been the fate of those who have ambitions in Gaza.
Alexander the Great conquered and rebuilt Gaza only for it to be destroyed and desolated until the arrival of the Romans when it became a trading port.
After the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, Jews were sold into slavery and taken down to Gaza.
In the rebellion of 66 CE, Gaza was burned down.
Gradually, Gaza became a trading pivot between the Middle East and Africa. Christianity took root, mainly through conversions.
There was a Jewish presence as witnessed by the archeological site of a 6th Century synagogue with a mosaic floor depicting King David.
Arab Muslim conquest led to the end of the Byzantine period in which churches were converted into mosques.
In the year 766, Gaza was laid waste through civil wars between rival Arab tribes, something that was to repeat itself in our lifetime.
When the Crusaders arrived in the year 1100, they found Gaza uninhabited and in ruin. Yet, 60 years later, travelers described the place as “very populous and in the hands of the Crusaders.”
Gaza then endured a tempestuous period. First an earthquake, then conquering Mongols destroyed what had been rebuilt by the Mameluks.
Gaza suffered the wrath of heaven and hell with a bubonic plague, a flood, and further destruction through periods of conquest, treason and teachery, until the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the 16th Century.
Even under Ottoman rule, Gaza was plagued by Bedouin tribes plundering unguarded camel caravans using Gaza as a trade link between the Middle East and Africa.
Gaza was briefly occupied by the French under Napoleon Boneparte who referred to it as “the outpost of Africa and the door to Asia.” But even he was forced to abandon his short-lived control of Gaza after his forces failed to capture the port city of Acre which led to the French retreat out of the Middle East.
By 1838, one American traveler, Edward Robinson, described Gaza as being larger in population than Jerusalem but, a year later, the bubonic plaque struck again, and Gaza stagnated.
With the Ottomans battling encroaching Egyptians, this tempestuous place suffered more death and destruction.
By World War One, Gaza had been strengthened into an Ottoman fortress town largely populated by their military enlarged by the arrival of German forces.
In 1917, British forces failed twice to defeat joint Ottoman and German armies in Gaza.
A second Gaza battle in April 1917 ended in a massacre for the British.
Officially, General Murray put the casualty figures at “between 6,000 and 7,000,” but others claim numbers between 14,000 and 17,000 deaths.
Where else have we heard about disputed Gaza casualty figures?
Murray was replaced by General Allenby.
Under the advice of his senior British officers in Cairo, Allenby prepared for the third Battle of Gaza until a Jew, recruited into British intelligence, advised Allenby to ignore his generals and target Beer Sheba.
Palestinian agronomist, Aaron Aaronsohn, advised Allenby; “You can’t reach Jerusalem and liberate Palestine without watering thousands of men, thousands of horses and camels, and your motorized vehicles, and I know where the water is.”
An impressed Allenby countermanded his senior officers and ordered them to plan for Beer Sheba which was captured in heroic style with the last great cavalry charge in military history by the ANZACS on 31 October, 1917.
I recount the history of the battles, the characters and dramas, in my book, ‘1917 From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’
Gaza eventually fell with a British siege that depleted the Turks and Germans of food and water.
By avoiding Gaza, Allenby was able to liberate Jerusalem and eventually drive the Ottoman rulers out of Palestine.
Three points need to be emphasized in this war.
Jews fought in their own unit to drive the Ottoman Turks out of Palestine.
No Arabs volunteered to liberate Palestine west of the Jordan River.
The Jewish Legion, however, fought east of the Jordan River to apprehend captured Turkish prisoners after creating a bridgehead which the ANZAC cavalry crossed to win the battle of e-Salt in today’s Jordan.
There had been a Jewish presence in Gaza throughout this conflict until 1929 when Arab pogroms, initiated by Haj Amin al Husseini, reached Gaza. Those that weren’t killed were escorted out of Gaza by train to Tel Aviv by the British for their safety.
By 1946, Gaza was a stateless wilderness, but Jews returned to Gaza and created Kibbutz Kfar Darom.
The founders based their claim thus, “Our ambition is to settle this land and make the wilderness flourish because, since the exile of our ancestor, it has been abandoned and turned into a wilderness. At the same time, we wish to build our lives in the spirit of the Torah and the prophets, the same spirit which accompanied and strengthened our people through years of wandering, suffering and torment.”
They fortified their kibbutz initially against marauding Arab gangs, but they were caught up in the early stages of a war between Egypt and the fledgling State of Israel, and it was attacked before Israel declared its independence.
The battle began with Egyptian heavy shelling and an onslaught of armored vehicles escorted by field artillery tanks and thousands of infantry soldiers on the first day.
Miraculously, the Kfar Darom defenders fought and stopped the Egyptian attack.
Failing to conquer Kfar Darom, the Egyptians besieged the community and continued north. The defenders held their ground against the entire Egyptian army in an incredible heroic battle for three months.
In the night of July 9, 1948, they were commanded to evacuate the kibbutz. Ten had been killed and sixty injured when they locked the gate and retreated north out of Gaza.
In 1981, as part of an Egyptian peace treaty, Jews who lived in Sinai moved to the Gaza area and created twenty-one settlements. The most populated Gush Katif area was located along the Gazan coastline with homes, thirty synagogues, schools and yeshivot.
Another group of settlements were located along Gaza’s northern border with Israel, expanding the Jewish presence from Ashkelon to the edges of Gaza City with the Erez Industrial zone as part of this bloc.
Netzarim, Kfar Darom, and Morag were strategically located in the heart of the Gaza Strip creating a framework and its main transportation route. In addition, the settlements developed a thriving agriculture on land fed by the area’s main aquifers.
One settlement, Gadid, had a large French population and maintained an absorption center for new immigrants from France.
Gaza prospered into an agricultural and tourism paradise. Jews and Muslims coexisted for more than a decade, but tensions grew, ignited by malevolent Arabs and, in 1987, a Jewish shopper in a Gazan market was stabbed to death. The next day an Israeli truck accidentally killed four Arabs, sparking the first riots of what would become the first intifada.
A brief period of calm followed the Oslo Accords and Israel agreed to withdraw from parts of the Gaza Strip. But an escalation of violence after September 2000 led Israel to impose stricter measures on Palestinians in the area in order to protect the Jewish families in Gaza. But the Palestinian violence increased leading to frequent military operations to prevent terror attacks against soldiers and Jews living in the Gaza settlements as well as to prevent Arab infiltrations to attack targets inside Israel.
On August 17, 2005, in the search for peace with the Palestinians, Israel evacuated all the Jews from Gaza until there were no Jews left even exhuming the bodies of the dead for reinternment in Israel.
As Jews were being forced out of their homes in Gaza by Israeli soldiers, American Jews donated $14 million buying greenhouses from the Jewish farmers and donated them to Gaza’s new Arab government. Former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, even gave half a million of his own money to the scheme.
However, as soon as the last Jew left Gaza, the greenhouses were destroyed, looted and smashed while Gaza’s Arab police officers stood watching.
Since the disengagement no Jews have been present in the Gaza Strip. But the Arabs didn’t stop killing. Where there were no Jews, they began killing each other.
With the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004, the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah burst into a deadly civil war.
Over 600 Palestinians were killed in the fighting from January 2006 to May 2007. Dozens more were killed or executed in the following years as part of the conflict. Under Hamas control Gaza was turned into the world’s largest terror metropolis both above and below ground. Everything and everybody were dedicated to the ultimate goal of destroying Israel and killing Jews.
And so we have the curse that is Gaza today. A curse that has infected the West that actively, willingly, supports a Jew-hating terror regime. A curse that is heard and seen by its vocal and active hatred and criticism of Israel with one insidious example being a biased media that expresses sympathy for a hate fueled Palestinian Gaza by covering up blatant facts preferring to turn their biased venom against Israel, the collective Jew.
One example; “Not interested!” said Anna Botting and Sky News against Israeli spokesman, Mark Regev, of bombing the Al Ahli Hospital accusing him of killing 500 Palestinians after Regev requested her to withhold her anti-Israel judgment until the facts were known.
The fact turned out to be a Palestinian rocket, one of hundreds that were misfired in Gaza and killed Palestinians.
No apology from Botting or Sky News. They had become an arm of the Palestinian indoctrination machine in Gaza.
This is not confined to Sky News. It is wholesale across a rancid media that has become stained by the curse of Gaza.
The more pro-Palestinian they are the more viciously vindictive they are in their reporting against Israel. Example – the BBC is worse than Sky.
The more they dump down in Israel, the more they hide the murderous Palestinian ideology and crimes and, by doing so, gift Hamas a pyrrhic victory, help extend the war and seal the fate of our hostages.
The insane curse of Gaza exhibited by the Western media, extends to their politicians and into the international criminal courts that not only absolve Gaza of all its sins but act as prosecutors against the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
In the end, Gaza is not only about Israel and Jews. It is also about the closing of the Western mind. A West that has become subservient to those that practice jihadism and has imported the curse of Gaza into their own backyard.
There is no hope for a world that is infected by ignorance and blindness.
They are all eyeless in Gaza.
For three thousand years, this place has been cursed.
Unless there is a reawakening, the curse of Gaza will stain us all for generations to come.
Barry Shaw is the international public diplomacy director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies
