Jean-Pierre Filiu, a widely acclaimed French historian of the Middle East/West Asia is better known for his masterly tome on the history of Gaza, where towards the end of that book he reiterates his long-held view that the only way ahead to untangle the complex and blood soaked Israel-Palestine impasse is the “foundation of a Palestinian state, both democratic and demilitarised, living alongside the State of Israel”.
At the time, Filiu asserted that for such a peace, “if it is to last, it absolutely must begin with Gaza.” That alas, is a worthy goal, which is as desirable as it remains elusive, in the tragic aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack and the genocidal war of retribution that Israeli PM Netanyahu has since pursued, resulting in the total ruination of Gaza.
In his latest book, A Historian in Gaza, Filiu provides a first-hand account of 33 harrowing days spent in Gaza (December 19, 2024, to January 21, 2025) and by coincidence, he enters the devastated region on his 63rd birthday—a region he has been visiting for the past four decades.
Filiu enters the ‘humanitarian zone’— that tiny enclave of a few square kilometers in the centre and south of Gaza and his first encounter is deeply poignant. His interlocutors share the horrific details of the Israeli bombings, most recently in Beit Lahia in October 2024 and apprise the historian of “the dead, the disappeared, the remains still buried under the rubble, of fleeing in panic, gripped by feat, holding children close, being displaced once, twice, ten times, the sorrow and loss, the grief and horror.”
Filiu notes in his diary-like book, a slim one at that: “I’d long understood that the Gaza I’d known and whose length and breadth I’d travelled had ceased to exist. Now this truth has come home to me. And I have a month to grasp its poignant reality.”
This saddening reality of the numerous killings and extreme deprivation that Gaza has been subjected to by a venal and murderous IDF (Israel Defence Forces) is compressed into 19 pithy chapters—some as short as two pages. Filiu provides a lucid, objective and empathetic account of the extended nightmare and hell-like conditions that the hapless citizens of Gaza have been living in since October 2023.
Drawing on his deep knowledge of the West Asian region and the distorted history of Palestine and Gaza, the author places his observations about current events against a larger geopolitical context, going back to the creation of Israel and the ‘Nakba’—the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’ of 1948.
His core observation is stark but powerful: “NOTHING HAD PREPARED ME for what I saw and experienced in Gaza. Nothing at all. Nothing.”
Systemic Collapse
The chapter on hospitals is heart-rending and exposes the diabolical strategy of the IDF in deliberately targeting medical staff, leading to the total collapse of the health infrastructure in Gaza. During the first ten months of the post October 7 conflict, the author records that 35 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were put out of service at least once. The silver lining to the dark cloud that shrouded Gaza was the bravery of the local medical staff—the doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers and their daily survival strategies amidst widespread destruction.
Many paid with their lives, and the numbers are numbing. One year into the IDF carnage, 587 medical staff have been killed which includes “185 nurses, 91 doctors, 57 ambulance drivers, 51 pharmacists, 42 physiotherapists and as many dentists.”
Palestinian journalists are the unsung heroes who resolutely brave all the dangers the IDF deliberately exposes them to, and report the reality that the mainstream global media has chosen to gloss over. It is a lump-in-the-throat experience, to read about an intrepid journalist couple—Sarraj and Aila—and the manner in which their house was bombed on October 22, 2023. Sarraj is killed as he tries to protect his wife and baby daughter and to her credit, Aila resumes her duty as a journalist once she recovers from her injuries.
Wars are often associated with poignant images. The hair-raising 1972 photograph of the ‘napalm girl’ altered the mood in the USA about the Vietnam war. Clearly it is a more jaded and image-suffused world that we now inhabit, and Filiu dwells on the November 2023 picture of a Palestinian woman embracing the body of her dead niece, wrapped in a white shroud at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. This photograph, called the ‘Gaza Pieta’, received the 2024 Photo of the Year, and Salem the photographer felicitated, but to little avail.
Comparing the ‘napalm girl’ photo with the Gaza image, Filiu rues: “Half a century later, and despite the praise from the global community, the ‘Gaza Pieta’ has not launched a debate on a par with its distressing intensity. It’s almost as though the ban on Western media in Gaza had deprived the ongoing tragedy of its full universal value.” And the line that follows is a searing indictment of the largely indifferent global consciousness. Filiu adds: “As though the mirror held up to us by the women and men in Gaza showed us only our lack of empathy for deaths that no longer feel like our own.”
Many Gazans share their anguish about the excesses of Hamas and the level of brutal punishments it has enforced and the crime and corruption it has spawned, describing this as a ‘nightmare within a nightmare.’ The kneecapping of Palestinians by Hamas goons is brutal and a reality check that Filiu describes in gory detail. Yet the Gazan citizen retains a sense of dignity and some even manage to smile amidst the ruins and stench.
Reflecting over the perfidy of Israel and the uncritical support it has received from the Trump White House, Filiu notes in great sorrow: “Gaza has now been handed over to the sorcerers’ apprentices of deal-making, the AI gunners and the vultures who feed on human distress.”
A brooding, elegiac elegance permeates this mournful chronicle, which records and annotates the devastation visited upon Gaza by Israel. First published in French, it has been commendably rendered into English by the translators. This is a book that must be translated into many languages apart from Arabic.
C Uday Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy Studies
A Historian in Gaza
Jean-Pierre Filiu
Translated from French
by Cynthia Schoch
and Trista Selous
Context
Pp 208, Rs 499