9.22 A Gaza History Lesson Part 1

Gaza is widely thought of as Palestinian land.  In the video below you can see an Israeli woman saying that it's Israeli land and she wants to live there.  Where did she get that idea from? 

The bible records that Gaza’s inhabitants turned over at least once. Though the original inhabitants were the Avvim¹, the Caphtorim (from Caphtor) “wiped them out and settled in their place” (Deuteronomy 2:23)² Caphtor was probably the isle of Crete.  The Caphtorim were seafaring people otherwise known as the Philistines. 

Gaza first appears in the bible as a Philistine city, the site of Samson's dramatic death. Jews conquered it in the Hasmonean era, and continued to live there. Gaza is within the boundaries of Shevet Yehuda (land of the tribe of Judah) in Biblical Israel (see Genesis 15, Joshua 15:47, Kings 15:47 and Judges 1:18).  The earliest settlement of the area is by Abraham and Isaac, both of whom lived in the Gerar area of Gaza. In the fourth century Gaza was the primary Jewish port of Israel for international trade and commerce.

Jews were present in Gaza until 1929, when they were forced to leave the area due to violent riots against them by the Arabs. Following these riots, and the death of nearly 135 Jews in all, the British prohibited Jews from living in Gaza to quell tension and appease the Arabs. Some Jews returned, however, and, in 1946, kibbutz Kfar Darom was established to prevent the British from separating the Negev from the Jewish state. The United Nations 1947 partition plan allotted the coastal strip from Yavneh to Rafiah on the Egyptian border to be an Arab state. In Israel's war for independence, most Arab inhabitants in this region fled or were expelled, settling around Gaza City. Israeli forces conquered Gaza, and proceeded south to El-Arish, but subsequently gave control of the area to Egypt in negotiations. In rhe 1956 war between Israel and Egypt, Israel conquered Gaza again, only to return it again.

With the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli forces reentered Gaza and captured it and created settlements in Gaza. The most populated Gush Katif area contained some thirty synagogues plus Yeshivat Torat Hachim with 200 students, the Hesder Yeshiva with 150 students, the Mechina in Atzmona with 200 students, Yeshivot in Netzarim and Kfar Darom, 6 Kollelim, a Medrasha for girls in Neve Dekalim and more. All of the settlements had their own schools, seminaries, stores, and doctors.

Jews and Muslims coexisted for more than a decade but tensions grew 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 agreements as Israel agreed to withdraw from parts of the Gaza Strip. Israel had to engage in frequent military operations to prevent terrorist attacks against soldiers and Jews living in the Gaza settlements as well as infiltrations to attack targets inside Israel. On August 17, 2005, Israel began to evacuate all the Jews from Gaza. Israel did not want to rule over the Arabs of Gaza, and didn't want to have to keep rescuing the Jews in Gaza from attacks.  Perhaps Israel thought that withdrawing would bring peace.  A total of 1,700 families were uprooted at a cost of nearly $900 million. This included 166 Israeli farmers who produce $120 million in flowers and produce. Approximately 15 percent of Israel's agricultural exports originated in Gaza, including 60 percent of its cherry tomato and herb exports. Israe also lost 70 percent of all its organic produce, which was also is grown in Gaza.

If you look at a map of Israel it looks like little bites have been taken out of it.  One on the right and one on the lower left.  The one on the right is Judea and Samaria usually called the West Bank often by people who want us to forget that it is Judea and Samaria.  The bite on the lower left is called Gaza. 

Shai Ben Tekoa wrote:

The Gaza Strip never existed in thousands of years of recorded history until modern Israel’s War of Independence (1948-49). Then, the Egyptian army invaded up the coast, heading for Tel-Aviv to steal it from the Jews, but was stopped by the heroics of the neonate Israelis at Kibbutz Mordechai.

The area seized by the Egyptians became the Gaza strip.  After reading this paragraph I became curious about the heroics at Kibbutz Mordechai and found the following text online. 

After the declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, an advancing Egyptian force reached the kibbutz’s doorstep and planned a massive attack against the settlement of just 200 people.  On the night between of May 18, it was decided to evacuate around 100 children, their carers, and nursing mothers. The remaining members, 20 women among them, remained behind to fight, supported by two squads from the Palmach (an elite unit of pre-state Israel’s army).

 You can hear about what happened next in the following video.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel and killed about 1200 people.  They tried to invade Kibbutz Yad Mordechai but the residents were able to hold them off.  One would think that after Hamas murdered 1299 peoplethere would be an outburst of sympathy all over the world and although some people spoke up for Israel and demonstrated for Israel there were many more demonstrations against Israel.  One such demonstration took place on January 15, 2024 in New York.  Protestors marched in front of the Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital yelling "shame".  Sloan Kettering includes a children's hospital.  Sloan Kettering saves the lives of cancer patients.  Sloan Kettering is a very special place that cares about the people they take care of.  Why on earth would people protest in front of Sloan Kettering and yell "shame" at children with cancer? 

The leader of the protest, Nerdeen Kaswani said the protest was justified because the hospital accepted a 400 million dollar donation from a Zionist named Ken Griffin. Are Zionists so bad that accepting a 400 million dollar donation from them is a bad thing to do?  Doesn't that donation mean that Zionist Ken Griffin is a very good person?  If he's such a good person and he's a Zionist maybe Zionism is good.  Isn't it shameful to stage a threatening demonstration in front of a cancer hospital especially one with children?  You can see a clip of the protest in front of Sloan Kettering below.

After Sloan Kettering the protestors targetted a Starbucks and a McDonald’s restaurant they reportedly accused of making “meals for genocide.” A month later protestors in Toronto, Canada targetted a Mt. Sinai hospital there.  You can see them climbing the front wall of the hospital while chanting in Arabic in the video below.

One anti-Israel protester, 18, told The New York Post that images of children killed by the Israelis were the reason why she was there.  She said “It’s really been weighing heavy on my heart just seeing it on my timeline,” the resident who grew up in NYC said. “Every single day it’s a different child.”

Are Israelis killing children every day in Gaza?  Pictures can be deceiving.

David Klepper, a journalist for the Associated Press wrote:

Among images of the bombed out homes and ravaged streets of Gaza, some stood out for the utter horror: Bloodied, abandoned infants. Viewed millions of times online since the war began, these images are deepfakes created using artificial intelligence. If you look closely you can see clues: fingers that curl oddly, or eyes that shimmer with an unnatural light — all telltale signs of digital deception. The outrage the images were created to provoke, however, is all too real...

In some cases, photos from other conflicts or disasters have been repurposed and passed off as new. In others, generative AI programs have been used to create images from scratch, such as one of a baby crying amidst bombing wreckage that went viral in the conflict’s earliest days. 

Hamas supporters flood social media with propaganda against Israel.  Why would Palestinians fake images of Israeli brutality and slander Israel?  Why did they attack Israel on October 7?  Arab propagandists have  successfully convinced many people to believe that Israel is occupying Palestinian land and is oppressing Palestinians and that is the reason for Palesitnian attack.  Is that true?  In order to understand the real cause of Arab attacks it is necessary to take a look at the history of Gaza and Israel.

If we look at history we find out that although Palestinians claim that the Jews are occupying Muslim land it is the Muslims who are occupying Israeli land.

The first Muslim invasion and occupation of Israel occurred in 636. 

The Israeli military, while fighting Hamas in Gaza, came across a synagogue built in 508 C.E. which was before the first Muslim invasion and prayed there.  Israelis had discovered this synagogue before and after the Six Day War transferred the mosaic below of King David playing the Lyre from the synagogue to the Israel museum in Jerusalem.

The invading Arabs expropriated Jewish houses and property, uprooted Jewish farmers from their soil, and drove many of them out of Israel.  In 1516, the Ottomans invaded and occupied Israel.  Initially the Ottomans were tolerant of the Jews.  The Ottomans had welcomed thousands of Jewish refugees who had recently been massacred and expelled from Spain by Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492. This may be in part because the Muslims saw the Jews as a good source of tax revenue since the Jews had to pay the Jizya tax.   Sultan Bajazet welcomed them warmly. “How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king,” he was fond of asking, “the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?” The Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent is said to have been the first Muslim sultan to allow Jews to live in Jerusalem.   

A geographer named  Hadrian Relandi, who visited Israel in 1695, over a hundred years after Suleiman's death found that the population of Gaza was evenly split between Christians and Jews.  He wrote that the Jews raised grapes, olives and wheat crops, while the Christians were occupied in commerce and transportation of goods. 

The Ottomans gave incentives to Muslims to colonize Israel while imposing severe jizya taxes on the Jews and brutal punishments if the Jews couldn’t pay. 

In 1852, Arthur Hollingsworth described what Jewish life was like under Ottoman occupation.  He wrote:

This Jewish population is poor beyond any adequate word; it is degraded in its social and political condition, to a state of misery, so great, that it possesses no rights. It can shew no wealth even if possessed of it, because to display riches would secure robbery from the Mahometan population, the Turkish officials, or the Bedouin Arab. ... He creeps along that soil, where his forefathers proudly strode in the fulness of a wonderful prosperity, as an alien, an outcast, a creature less than a dog,

Despite the terrible conditions under Ottoman occupation, there were Jews who moved to Israel from Russia and Yemen in the late 1800s.  The Jews who fled Russia were fleeing the Russian progroms.  This was known as the first Aliyah.  Between 1904 and 1914, more Jews immigrated to Ottoman Palestine from Eastern Europe to flee progroms and to return to the Jewish homeland.   Mountain Jews from the Caucasus and Jews from other countries including Yemen, Iran, and Argentina also arrived at this time.  Jews were attacked by Arab marauders and had to create a self defense organization which they called Hashomer which means the protector.  Here is a photo of a few members of Hashomer. 

World War 1 ended in 1918, the Ottomans were defeated and in 1920 the League of Nations gave control over Palestine to the British.  This was called the British mandate.

In the 1920s and 30s Jews were buying up land in Palestine.  This alarmed the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al Husayni who issued a fatwa that selling any inch of land to the Zionists was a betrayal of God, his messenger and the entire Muslim people.  This made it much harder for Jews to immigrate from countries where they were being persecuted.  The Arabs demanded that the British restrict immigration of Jews and the antisemitic British complied.  The British did not restrict Arab immigration.  During World War II when Germany was annihilating the Jews of Europe, the Arabs still didn't want the Jews to come in and the British continued to keep Jews from fleeing to Palestine.   The Arabs complain about the Jewish occupation but it was the Muslims, who were occupying Palestine, that pressured the British to keep the Jews from escaping the Nazis to their biblical homeland of Israel.

The third Muslim occupation occurred during the British mandate as a result of Jews who had managed to immigrate or who had lived there before the British mandate, clearing out malarial swamps, farming the desert, creating industries, and creating jobs.  Ladislas Farago in his book Palestine at the Crossroads wrote in 1937:

One always finds in Palestine Arabs who have been in the country only a few weeks or a few months. ... Since they are themselves strangers in a strange land, they are the loudest to cry: “Out with the Jews!” ... Amongst them are to be found representatives of every Arab country: Arabs from Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan and Iraq.

In 1929 Palestinians rioted, destroyed Jewish property and killed 133 Jews.  Jews had to be evacuated from Gaza in order to save them. 

In 1941 the grand Mufti met with Hitler and thanked Hitler for his sympathy with the Palestinian cause.  Hitler had written a letter saying he would not conquer the Arab world and that he supported the elimination of the Jewish national home.  The Mufti asked Hitler to make a public declaration to this effect which Hitler said he couldn't do yet but Hitler reassured him that when the hour of liberation of the Arab world from England arrived his objective would be only the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab sphere. 

The Grand Mufti and Hitler

To see the second page of the history of Gaza

Quiz is at the end of Part 2