In 1948, the tiny Gaza Strip was cut off from the rest of historic Palestine, absorbing a huge number of Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral lands. In 1967, it was militarily occupied by Israeli forces, its inhabitants suffering from a plethora of colonial domination techniques and movement restrictions over the subsequent decades. An unprecedented land, air, and sea blockade was imposed on Gaza since June 2007, constituting the longest siege in modern history. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 has noted in her latest report: “Israel’s apparent strategy is the indefinite warehousing of an unwanted population of two million Palestinians, whom it has confined to a narrow strip of land through its comprehensive 15-year-old air, land and sea blockade.”
With generous support from Brown University's Mahmoud Darwish Chair in Palestinian Studies.
Cosponsors: The Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston and The Jerusalem Fund.