Historic background of Palestinian dispossession
To understand the situation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere today, a brief historic overview is necessary to situate the facts within the broader narrative of Palestinian displacement and dispossession since 1948.
In 1948, during the Nakba (‘catastrophe’), nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian people were forcibly uprooted from their homes, lands, and property during a widespread mass expulsion carried out by Zionist forces in Mandatory Palestine, which was until then under British colonial rule. This produced a massive wave of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons.
Palestinian society was decimated during the Nakba. Since then, Israeli laws, policies, and practices have sought to deny Palestinian refugees their right of return under international law, and attempted to cement their dispossession by confiscating land and property belonging to refugees and displaced persons.
To this day, Israel employs mechanisms of dispossession in order to uproot Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. The Nakba never ended. Today, Palestinians endure an ‘ongoing Nakba’ of prolonged refugeehood, in a coercive environment that is designed to drive their continued displacement and dispossession. These discriminatory policies and practices have continued and intensified since 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, which constitute the occupied Palestinian territory.
While Israel’s military occupation continues to be entrenched, 53 years later, the Palestinian people have been systematically fragmented and deprived of the ability to exercise their individual and collective rights, in particular their right to self-determination, including permanent sovereignty over natural resources, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
Instead, Palestinian refugees continue to live in refugee camps, villages, and towns in the occupied Palestinian territory and across the region. In the Gaza Strip, there are currently 1.4 million Palestinian refugees registered with the UN Palestine Refugee Agency (UNRWA), constituting about 70 per cent of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Since June 2007, Israel, the occupying power, has imposed a comprehensive closure on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, denying freedom of movement and access for people and goods. The Israeli occupying authorities have imposed various movement restrictions on the Gaza Strip since the 1990s, these restrictions intensified in 2007 as collective punishment.
Since then, Israel has closed off the Gaza Strip by land, sea, and air, imposing a stringent permit regime that largely prohibits entry and exit from the Gaza Strip.
This June 2020, Israel’s prolonged occupation enters its 53rd year and the closure of the Gaza Strip enters its 14th year. While political and entirely manmade, the closure impacts every aspect of Palestinians’ lives, conditions that are aggravated by three successive full-scale Israeli military assaults on the Strip. Israel’s illegal closure has undermined the exercise of the full spectrum of Palestinians’ individual and collective rights. As such, international observers have described the Gaza Strip as the world’s largest open-air prison.
