Gaza is once again a disputed territory, but when is it not? 3,500 years ago the troops of Pharaoh Thutmose arrived and later those of the biblical kings David and Solomon. Then the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar II and the Persians of Cyrus the Great. Alexander the Great fell wounded at its gates and then took revenge. The Seleucids and the Jews, Pompey the Great and Mark Antony, the crusaders of Richard the Lionheart and the Sultan Saladin fought for it. Mongols, Ottomans and even Napoleon. And all this without even reaching the 20th century.
Since the world began, empires have loved Gaza for its strategic location at the junction of Africa with Asia and the Mediterranean with Arabia. A crossroads halfway between Damascus and Cairo, Constantinople and Mecca, Paris and Bombay. Two thousand years ago Plutarch called it “aromatophora”, the dispenser of aromas, because it was the key port in the traffic of spices that came to Europe from Yemen and the Indian Ocean. Also, although today we have a different image, ancient travelers described it as a garden at the gates of the desert.
That is why Gaza has caught almost all the conquerors in their tracks. The pharaohs of the 14th century BC. C. they already knew the importance of “the road of Horus”, the seaside path along which they took 20,000 soldiers to conquer Syria. It is the same route that the Romans would call “Via Maris” and what under Muslim domination would be known as “Al-darb Al-sultani”, the Sultan's road. However, the texts of Antiquity also tell us about a region that, although framed by large empires, always tried to maintain a high degree of autonomy.
The closest thing to a first Gaza was Philistia. The Philistines are often “the bad guys of the Bible”: those who cut Samson's hair and those who had the evil giant Goliath as their champion until the future King David killed him with his sling. The bad image comes because Philistia was a confederation of city-states, including the current City of Gaza, that fought for centuries with the Jewish tribes of the Old Testament. Between the 10th and 7th centuries BC. C., maintained a complicated balance of loyalties between the pharaohs of the Nile, the kings of Jerusalem and the Assyrian Empire.
For centuries, each new empire that was born left its mark on Gaza: Assyria gave way to Babylon and Babylon to Persia, but the inhabitants of the strip were more focused on business than on the wars that almost always passed them by. Gaza, on the commercial route of the caravans arriving from Yemen, lived with the Philistines a golden age that ended abruptly at the beginning of the 4th century BC. C., with the visit of a young Macedonian king eager to battle.
Still in 2023, one of the key aspects of the possible Israeli invasion of Gaza is the existence of many tunnels under the strip that Hamas and other groups use to hide material, hostages and combatants. It is not new: the problem of tunnels is a problem that Alexander the Great already faced when he arrived in Gaza in 332 BC. C., when he unexpectedly encountered a fortified city willing to resist.
Both the invading Greeks and the defenders of the city dug tunnels to attack each other by surprise during the siege and, in one of these incidents, Alexander himself was wounded. As revenge, when the city fell after a hundred days of siege, the Macedonian ordered the execution of all the men who had fought him and sold his relatives as slaves. The commander of the defense of Gaza had his legs broken and was dragged through the city hanging from Alexander's chariot.
Gaza then became a city of Greek settlers and was the victim of disputes between Alexander's generals after his death. It was economically reborn once again thanks to its strategic position, although for a century and a half it changed hands between the Seleucids of Antioch and the Ptolemies of Egypt, and suffered at the hands of the different kings of Judea. Thus until the arrival of a new empire that had been born much further away from Gaza than all the previous ones: Rome.
In 36 BC C., Mark Antony conquered Gaza to give it to his wife Cleopatra. After his defeat by Octavian, the biblical King Herod, a vassal of Rome, was able to continue on the throne, and entering the 1st century AD. C., the strip became a rich commercial city in the Roman province of Syria: large temples dedicated to gods like Zeus, a hippodrome, a theater, a stadium... and even the visit of an emperor, Hadrian, in 130 The city enjoyed considerable peace and prosperity until the partition of the empire in 395, when it began to answer to the rulers of Constantinople.
Gaza's problem with the new authority was mainly religious. In a city of Greek tradition, Christianity had been greatly persecuted, but now the tables were going to turn: the bishop of Gaza, today known as Saint Porphyry, traveled to Constantinople to enlist the support of Emperor Arcadius to eradicate paganism. Upon his return to the Fringe, he sacked the city and directed the total destruction of the temple of Zeus Marnas, on the ruins of which a church was built consecrated in 407.
Although the official religion of Gaza would be Christianity for the next two centuries, schisms within the Church would be abundant, and the rest of the religions could be practiced discreetly and quite freely. In the 7th century, the Sassanid Empire conquered the city and held it for a decade, but on the horizon of the strip there was already a change that was going to be much more profound and relevant: the arrival of the caliphate.
When the Prophet Muhammad took power in Mecca, he already knew Gaza well. Hashem's great-grandfather had been a prominent merchant who died on the strip. Furthermore, one of his in-laws, Omar, had also made his fortune in Gaza. This would be the second successor of Muhammad and the one who would incorporate Mesopotamia, Syria and the strip itself into the caliphate, as the first step towards the conquest of Egypt.
Omar did not punish the inhabitants of Gaza after his victory and, although he converted the church that had been the temple of Zeus into a mosque, he allowed Christians to continue practicing their religion in the rest of his temples. Despite this, the city would end up becoming almost completely Islamic without any coercion or violent incidents being recorded. However, the religious problems did not end there.
Gaza had experienced attempted conquests by different Muslim leaders from Egypt, Baghdad and Tunisia, but it was the arrival of the Christian crusaders that caused the preventive flight of the entire population around 1099, and the dominance of the Christian kings of Jerusalem during just under a century: the mosque built on the temple of Zeus was converted into a Christian cathedral, but the city was yet to change hands at least five times in the next 150 years.
The alternation ended in the mid-12th century, when two other different empires began to dispute Gaza: the Mongols, commanded by the grandson of Genghis Khan, and the Muslim Mamluk sultanate of Cairo. The Mamluks became owners of Gaza from the year 1200 and for more than three centuries, a so-called “golden age” of commercial and intellectual development for the strip. Of course, it also meant the umpteenth resignification of that temple that had been converted from paganism to Christianity and Islam countless times already.
The Mamluk dynasty left a deep mark on Gaza, in part for its support during two terrible plague epidemics in the 14th and 15th centuries that killed up to a thousand people a day. So much so that, when a new conqueror arrived in 1516, the Ottoman sultan Selim, the city rebelled against him, giving rise to harsh repression with which they wrested four centuries of rule from Istanbul. Gaza was in for a long decline, punished by the Ottoman emperors and falling victim to changes in the trade routes that had made it rich in the past.
In an area that had changed so many hands, Ottoman domination seemed immutable, but in 1799 Napoleon's French troops, who had just conquered Egypt, needed just ten days of siege to take over the city. They did not stay long either: when the emperor failed in his attempt to conquer Syria, he lost interest in the campaign and returned to Paris, leaving Gaza back in Ottoman hands in 1800.
Despite the reconquest, the Ottoman Empire was wounded and plagued by internal strife: for more than forty years, the viceroy of Egypt was at odds with the power of Istanbul, with both sides pulling on Gaza. Furthermore, both tried to gain the support of Western powers to gain a foothold, which would end up causing their ruin at the beginning of the 20th century.
With the end of the First World War came the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire and Gaza became part of the “Palestinian mandate”, a colonial figure that in practice converted Gazans into subjects of the British Crown. Later, after the Second World War and with millions of Jews “returned” to Palestine, the State of Israel was proclaimed, complicating the situation in Gaza ever since.
Today more than two million people live on a narrow strip of land through which countless conquerors have passed. They hold their breath before an imminent invasion, another one, now Israeli. After 3,500 years of fighting, religious wars, occupations and empires, Gaza is once again in dispute.
