A new history of Gaza and its people, recovering the overlooked past of a Palestinian borderland and its transformation in the age of empire

  Before the Gaza Strip, there was Gaza. The historical Gaza borderland linked the pastoral Sinai and Arabia with the urban centers of Greater Syria, spanning rain-fed plains, arid deserts, dune fields, and the Mediterranean coast. For much of its history, the city of Gaza thrived at this meeting point of ecologies, empires, and people, and served as a vital waystation for pilgrims and trade caravans. Recovering over a century of untold history, Dotan Halevy traces how and why historic Gaza, a key Middle Eastern gateway until the mid-nineteenth century, became the isolated and impoverished "Strip" by the mid-twentieth century.

  Greater Gaza offers a new history of the political, economic, and environmental upheavals that shaped southern Palestine from the 1850s to the 1950s. The Gaza borderland transformed with the Eastern Mediterranean's integration into the global market economy, the Ottoman-British clash over their shared imperial frontiers, and the Palestinian struggle to overcome environmental and urban destruction and dispossession under colonial rule. Gradually stripped of its historical, financial, and political resources, the region diminished to become the margins of Palestine, and a place where Palestinian refugees could seek shelter during the Nakba of 1948. Departing from the conventional understanding of the Gaza Strip as an accidental consequence of the 1948 War alone, Greater Gaza tells a new story—and offers a new political imagination that reaches beyond the current reality and its political confines.