Summary
Gaza appears in this booklet only as the setting of Ghassan Kanafani’s short story Letter From Gaza (fiction). Everything below is what happens inside that story, told by its fictional narrator in a letter to his friend Mustafa; none of it is stated as fact about the real Gaza.
Details
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In Kanafani’s story Letter From Gaza, the narrator and Mustafa grew up together in the Shajiya quarter of Gaza and promised to go on together; in the story the narrator supports his mother, his brother’s widow and her four children there on his meagre UNRWA schools salary (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.31-32 / printed p.61-62).
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In the story, in the middle of the year the narrator describes, “the Jews bombarded the central district of Sabha” and attacked Gaza with bombs and flame-throwers, in the story’s own words; the narrator at that point plans to leave Gaza for California and says he hates the place (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.32 / printed p.62).
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In the story, the narrator visits his wounded niece Nadia, thirteen, in Gaza hospital; she has lost her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, after throwing herself on her little brothers and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames in the house, when she could have run and saved herself (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.32-33 / printed p.63-64).
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In the story, after seeing Nadia’s amputated leg, the narrator finds Gaza brand new: its sadness is a challenge, something like reclamation of the amputated leg, and the main street seems only the beginning of a long road leading to Safad; he refuses to leave for Sacramento and calls on Mustafa to return (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.33 / printed p.64).
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In Sayegh’s non-fiction account (a different work from Kanafani’s story, and not fiction), Gaza appears twice: the Gaza strip is included in the minimum definition of Eretz Israel officially formulated in 1919, and large-scale pogroms were unleashed on the Arab population of Gaza and Khan Younis during the brief Zionist occupation of the area in the wake of the Tripartite Invasion of Egypt in 1956 (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.220; PDF p.14 / printed p.219).
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The Israeli air force bombarded Rafah, Gaza and El-Arish in November 1948-March 1949; Pappe writes that the Gazans, refugees and veteran population alike, have thus had the longest history as victims of Israeli air bombardment, from 1948 until the present (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.228).
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Isdud and Majdal, taken in November 1948, had their populations expelled to the Gaza Strip; several thousand who had remained in Majdal were expelled in December 1949 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.228).
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In Sitta’s register Gaza appears only as an extra, partially depopulated village named in the Faluja row; the Gaza district’s main list is 46 villages headed by Al Majdal (Ashkelon), with a subtotal Arab Population 48 of 79,947 on 680,018 dunums (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.8).
Related pages
The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani