Israel’s assault on Gaza, which was launched after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, is now widely recognised as a genocide. Yet the violence in Gaza, and Palestine-Israel as a whole, did not begin in October 2023. This talk takes its history back to the original ethnic cleansing of 1948 (known in Arabic as the nakba or catastrophe), when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, with more than 200,000 fleeing to Gaza. Over subsequent decades, Israeli military occupations caused further displacements, juxtaposed with immobilising measures that increasingly confined Palestinians to the Gaza Strip’s 141 square miles. The situation in Gaza today, whereby Israeli forces have displaced virtually the entire population and the government is openly planning their expulsion, can only be fully understood within this long-term trajectory. This talk will trace the historical antecedents of displacement and immobility in Gaza, arguing that the Strip is a site of modern refugee history at its most extreme.

Dr Anne Irfan is Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London, where she researches histories of displacement and humanitarianism in Palestine. She is author of the books Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the international refugee system (Columbia University Press, 2023) and A Short History of the Gaza Strip (Simon & Schuster/ WW Norton, 2025), and has published award-winning articles in journals including the Journal of Refugee Studies, Contemporary Levant and Jerusalem Quarterly. In addition to her academic work, Dr Irfan has written for The Nation, The Washington Post and +972 magazine, and has appeared on BBC, Al Jazeera and ABC News. She also teaches the class Colonial Past, Refugee Present on the RSC’s International Online School in Forced Migration.

Please register to attend this event.

The seminar will be followed by drinks in the Hall.

All enquiries should be directed to rsc-outreach@qeh.ox.ac.uk.