Israel’s fifteeen wars on Gaza

Abstract 

The war launched by Israel after Hamas’ attacks on October 7, 2023 is by any standard the most devastating offensive of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is also the fifteenth war waged against the Gaza Strip by Israel since the Palestinian enclave was established as the result of the first Israeli-Arab war of 1948-49. By concentrating one fourth of the Palestinian Arab population on 1% of what was until then Palestine, the Gaza Strip could only develop as a center of Palestinian nationalism. Any sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians should therefore start genuinely from Gaza, while any escalation in Gaza could drag the two people into another cycle of hostilities, always bloodier than the previous one.

Jean-Pierre Filiu is professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po, Paris. He has been visiting since 1980 Gaza, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. From 1988 to 2006, he was a career-diplomat, serving in Amman, Damascus, and Tunis, as well as diplomatic adviser to the Prime Minister, Minister of Interior and Minister of Defense. Now in academia, he has held visiting professorships at the universities of Columbia and Georgetown. His books have been translated in some twenty languages, including Italian, Arabic and Hebrew. He authors since 2015 a weekly column in the French daily “Le Monde”.