Anne Irfan’s A Short History of Gaza is a deeply partisan narrative that prioritizes Palestinian grievance over balanced historical analysis.
Anne Irfan, a lecturer at University College London specializing in race, gender, and postcolonial studies, has built her academic career around Palestinian refugee rights and modern Middle Eastern history. Her latest work, A Short History of Gaza, is positioned as a concise historical account of the region, but it reads more like a polemic than a neutral chronicle. Irfan’s sympathies are clear, and while her research is extensive, her selectivity in presenting facts undermines the book’s credibility as a historical text.
The book traces Gaza’s trajectory from 1948 to the present, emphasizing the displacement of Palestinians and the humanitarian crises that followed. However, Irfan omits critical context that complicates the narrative she promotes. She does not acknowledge that Palestinians never ruled the land they claim: it was governed by the Ottomans, then the British, and later administered under a UN mandate. The UN’s 1947 partition plan recognized the historical claims of both Jews and Arabs and offered statehood to each. The Arab leadership rejected this compromise, choosing war over coexistence—a war they lost. The Nakba, often framed as a catastrophe inflicted solely by Israel, is more accurately the result of this rejection and its consequences.
Further omissions weaken Irfan’s account. She fails to mention that approximately 40% of Palestinian refugees hold citizenship in other countries, and that all Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza already live in territories they claim as their own. Her coverage of the 2023–2025 Gaza War notably excludes the extensive tunnel network—dubbed the “Gaza Metro”—used by Hamas for military operations. Most troubling is her tendency to recount Israeli-inflicted suffering without acknowledging the provocations or strategic decisions by Arab actors that led to such responses. This lack of causality presents Palestinians as passive victims rather than agents within a complex conflict.
Irfan’s disdain for Palestinian leadership—including the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas—is evident, but this does not translate into balanced critique. Instead, it reinforces her activist stance. Like Ilan Pappe, who famously declared he was more concerned with what history should say than what it does, Irfan uses history as a vehicle for advocacy. Her book should be read with scepticism, not as a definitive account but as a reflection of a particular ideological lens. For readers seeking a comprehensive understanding of Gaza, this work offers insight—but only into one side of a multifaceted story.
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