Through dates, personalities and generational transitions, Filiu describes the scenario of one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes since the Second World War. The tragic current events in Gaza have unfortunately obscured the long history of this prosperous oasis, which since ancient times has been involved in the affairs of all the empires in the region. It was in 1948 that the fate of this ancient land was overturned, reduced to a strip of territory, first administered by Egypt and then, two decades later, occupied by the State of Israel. Mother of the fedayeen and cradle of the Intifada, Gaza has since played a decisive role, for better or worse, in Palestinian nationalism. Far from being merely a besieged enclave, Gaza holds the key to peace or war in the complex Middle Eastern framework, because it is there that both Israel's security and Palestine's future are at stake. The research carried out in this volume, in its first translation into Italian, is unrivalled in terms of the breadth of its documentation and goes beyond historical reflection on one of the major political crises of our time to cover contemporary developments.

Jean Pierre Filiu is a university professor of Middle Eastern history and the author of seminal essays, including Mitterand et la Palestine (Fayard, 2005), Main basse sur Israël (La Découverte, 2019) and Comment la Palestine fut perdue (Seuil, 2024). He contributes to Le Monde, publishing the column Un si proche Orient on the newspaper's website, which is followed by millions of readers.