At a time when Gaza is being razed to the ground, and its people are killed and dispersed by the most violent military means ever seen in Palestine, the new and groundbreaking book by Yohann Buessow and Yuval Ben-Bassat offers a glimpse into a parallel universe. Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation returns to the last decades when Gaza and its surrounding region were a vital part of the Eastern Mediterranean economy and culture, and when Gazans played key roles in the imperial quarrels between Cairo, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. The book captures Gaza in a moment of transition as it integrated into the international maritime trade, while becoming an imperial frontier between the Ottomans and the British in Egypt. Drawing on a treasure trove of untapped documents composed in Gaza by Gazans during the late Ottoman period, the book reveals how these regional changes have reshaped Gaza’s elite politics in tandem with the city’s evolving structure. This “spatial factionalism” (p. 33) also situates Gaza anew vis-à-vis the region’s fellahin villages and the bedouin confederacies. Beyond adding an underexplored chapter to the history of Gaza and Palestine, the book raises a host of new historiographic and methodological questions about what cities were during the late Ottoman period and how they should be studied.

While this essay is being written in the Summer of 2025, Israel is outspokenly and systematically wiping out the Gaza Strip, decimating its populace, and annihilating most life-supporting environments, institutions, and infrastructures. What is the point of writing or reading about Gaza’s history at this moment? Is it a way of mentally coping with the catastrophe to compensate for the sheer impotence of intellectuals, activists, and anyone who cares to affect what is happening? Is it a sign of giving up and moving on from the phase of grief to that of memorization, aiming to recollect Gaza’s past glory like a family of a deceased person wishing to remember his or her better days? Or perhaps insisting on contextualization and historicization, despite the heavy blows inflicted upon these concepts by layers of critical theory, is the only way of claiming justice, recognition, and accountability for the fate of Palestine and the Palestinians? As a historian, I was trained to distance myself from presentism and avoid reading history backward. Still, I could not help but be haunted by these thoughts of inevitability, paths not taken, and the futility of learning history while reading this path-breaking new book of Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow. The research for this book on late Ottoman Gaza began many years before the October 7 attack and Israel’s war on Gaza, but by the time it was published, reading about this place could no longer be the same. It became a reading that is literally painful.

This pain begins creeping in with the very first glance at the book’s cover, which shows a group of children enjoying the sun on the roof of one of Gaza’s old houses. This skyline view of late Ottoman Gaza captures the minaret of the city’s Great Mosque, as well as various types of buildings of different architectural styles, with tall palm and tamarisk trees sprinkled among them. The joyfulness of the kids in this scene is captured by the blurriness of their figures, indicating that they were scampering around while the photograph was being taken. One cannot help but wonder about the fate of these children’s descendants in the decades to come, or the fate of such children now. Pain strikes again while reading about Gaza’s longstanding ties to Egypt, defining Gaza’s learned elite, or the origin of many of its peasant and seminomadic people, and thinking that today these “relations” are marked by an unsurmountable wall or the overinflated fees taken by Egyptian companies from penniless refugees wishing to escape Gaza to save their families’ lives. Pain returns when the book analyzes Gaza’s integration into the nineteenth-century international maritime trade, a reality inconceivable under the Israeli blockade on Gaza, now marking almost two decades of serving an intentional policy of engineered famine.

Almost surrealistically, then, Late Ottoman Gaza invites us to delve into a different reality, at a time when Gaza was not stripped, isolated, or detached from its surroundings. Indeed, as the authors make clear, the late Ottoman period was one of the last historical “moments” when the Gaza region was still naturally integrated into its desert, maritime, and agricultural surroundings, before a series of catastrophes, starting with the city’s destruction in World War I, would channel Gaza into a historical course of relative marginality, and following 1948, of political isolation and refugeehood.

In stark contrast to the modern view of Gaza, the book reveals that during the late Ottoman period, the city and its broader region were a cultural and economic hub along the Eastern Mediterranean coastal plain, connecting Egypt and Greater Syria, and serving as a trading center and a key hajj station for resupplying caravans. Gaza has served in these roles since the Mamluk period and even before, but Late Ottoman Gaza captures this borderland region in a historical phase of significant and faithful transformation. Roughly from the 1870s onward, southern Palestine gradually integrated into the Mediterranean maritime grain trade. At the same time, the British presence in Egypt was transforming the region into an imperial frontier, drawing the Ottoman imperial center’s attention to the region’s fate. This new reality, Late Ottoman Gaza shows, reshaped the city’s politics, urban structure, and relations with its surroundings, creating new social coalitions and spatial divides.

Probably the best way to assess the book’s intervention and importance in the current moment is to discuss its sources. Working with a limited array of original documents is all too common for scholars of Middle Eastern history, and especially those working on Palestine and the Palestinians, whose archives and collections have been looted or destroyed by Israel, or are approachable only under Israeli restrictions and occupation. The case of Gaza is probably the most radical in this regard. Enclosed, bombarded, and besieged by Israel and ruled by the authoritarian Hamas government since 2007, access to Gaza’s libraries, archives, family collections, and any other sources was, for decades, on the verge of impossible for foreign scholars. In recent years, several projects have sought to make some of Gaza’s intellectual treasures accessible, but these efforts have barely scratched the surface. The solution adopted by the authors of this book, as well as many others, was to consult the documents stored outside Gaza—in this case, Ottoman collections in Istanbul and Jerusalem. Distancing one’s research from “the field” obviously has the potential of being problematic. Historical studies that rely primarily on documents from imperial archives may tend to reflect the imperial center’s gaze, complete with its biases, generalizations, and disregard for the agency of imperial subordinates.

However, in this book, the opposite is true. The primary archival resources of this study are hundreds of petitions and other texts composed and disseminated by Gazans themselves up the imperial ladder to the Sublime Porte, urging the Ottoman administration to address their concerns and demonstrating their active participation in determining their region’s fate. The existence of this ample body of knowledge outside of Gaza is in and of itself a proof of concept. Late Ottoman Gaza was indeed an imperial hub, with its political struggles and transformations radiating as far as Jerusalem, Cairo, and Istanbul. Searching for Gaza outside of Gaza, in other words, is not only a research default in this case but also a method that reveals an unknown aspect of the city’s history, its imperial and regional centrality.

Ben-Bassat and Buessow undertook an incredible task of identifying the names of signatories who appear on the various petitions, thereby recovering the structure and composition of the city’s main political factions and how these changed over time. They show, for instance, how the prominence of Gaza’s Husayni family, the local elite of Islamic learning, had declined over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, giving way to the rise of the al-Shawwa, Abu Khadra, Busaysu, and Saqalla families, all still prominent names in Palestinian society to this day. The main issue at stake was a rivalry over the position of Gaza’s mufti, a role traditionally occupied by the Husayni family. The challenge posed by the rising families to the Husaynis’ hegemony reflected not only a power struggle but also the emergence of new loci of power and influence: the administrative institutions established by the Ottoman reforms, most prominently the Gaza municipality, as well as the city’s integration into the international grain market. Over time, the prestige of the Husayni family was eclipsed by new personalities in tandem with the decline of the muftiship in importance.

Anchoring Gaza’s political struggles as an urban phenomenon, the book triangulates the findings with data from the 1905 Ottoman census retrieved from the Israel State Archives, which holds records dating back to the Ottoman period. Over the past decade, the authors ran a digital humanities project that compiled a database of all entries from the 1905 census for the Ottoman subdistrict of Gaza. Analyzing the distribution of the city’s population across its neighborhoods (as registered in the census), they discovered that the factional divide between rival families translated remarkably into the city’s urban structure and development. The Husayni family dominated the historic Daraj neighborhood, adjacent to the shrine of al-Sayid Hashim, which was also the family’s waqf. As the Husaynis’ rivals, the rise of the al-Shawwa family to prominence entailed their migration to the peripheral al-Shuja‘iyya quarter and the establishment of their stronghold and central mosque there. This reconstruction of the city’s social makeup also relies on a detailed analysis of historical maps and aerial photographs, in which the authors identified the historical buildings, institutions, streets, and monuments mentioned in archival documents and in Gaza’s Islamic Court records from the 1850s. The book circumvents the potential pitfalls of using European mapping and photography of the Ottoman Empire, which often replicate European understanding of the terrain for intelligence, military control, or colonization. Drawing on categories from local sources, they transform these foreign maps, contrary to their original meaning, into a Palestinian, indeed Gazan, reflection of late Ottoman Gaza. The overlaying of these various sources informs the book’s overarching argument that late Ottoman Gaza, although a maritime port in progress, was socially characterized by urban factionalism reminiscent of that in inland cities. This contrasts with the urban fragmentation built on ethnicity, sect, or national origin that characterizes coastal hubs of the same period, such as Alexandria, Jaffa, or Beirut. Gaza was sociologically an inland city situated on the coast.

This exceptionality stems from the fact that, more than being a coastal locale, modern Gaza of the late Ottoman period is formed as an imperial frontier. Beyond its urban aspects, the book shows that Gaza’s “spatialized factionalism” is deeply rooted in the region’s geostrategic transition, as it becomes a borderland threatened by a rival empire. In addition to petitions, this fact is revealed in two extraordinary literary manuscripts that Ben-Bassat and Buessow recovered from the Ottoman archives and the collection of Gaza’s Great Mosque. The first, dating to 1895, is an untitled, anonymous fictional text about a clandestine conversation held on the Gaza beach between an Ottoman emissary from Egypt and a Gazan resident who sings the praises of the Husayni family and their loyalty to the Ottoman sultan. The Gazan speaker warns that the contemporary governor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, is allegedly collaborating with the British to transfer Ottoman lands from the Gaza subdistrict to Egypt by dispossessing the local bedouin clans and instigating a border dispute. The second text, composed by the scholar and Sufi Shaykh Ahmad Busaysu in 1897 under the title Kashf al-Niqab, advocates for the Busaysu and al-Shawwa families, highlighting their loyalty to the Ottoman state and their strong bonds and knowledge of the bedouin tribal confederacies in the Gaza borderland.

By weaving these texts into their story, Ben-Bassat and Buessow expand beyond the urban sphere into the hinterland of Gaza, demonstrating the reverberations of the city’s politics in its relations with the bedouin and fellahin villages of the Gaza subdistrict. Although clearly polemical and rhetorical, the arguments in these texts are corroborated by the petitions in which village mukhtārs (headmen) and tribal shaykhs are among the signatories. This broader context returns in a circular manner to explain why the petty politics of this secondary city occupy such a prominent place in the Ottoman registers: the city has significant stakes for the emerging frontier with the British in Egypt. Indeed, the mastery of this borderland eventually led to the Ottoman–British showdown in 1906, resulting in the demarcation of a boundary between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, and ultimately to the clash between the two empires during World War I.

A minor critique I may offer regarding the book’s methodology concerns the authors’ treatment of their data. The book mostly treats historical sources as reflective of preexisting categories rather than exploring whether the media in which these sources appear also played a role in producing those categories. For example, the book’s analysis of class differentiation across Gaza’s neighborhoods relies on the professions and titles registered for each entry in the Ottoman 1905 census. However, can we be sure that contemporaries “knew” their categorical profession or title before the census was conducted? It is worthwhile asking what their involvement was in defining these categories themselves, and what the circumstances were for making this choice. The census, in other words, can be understood as an event rather than just a source. The same may apply to the authors’ analysis of Gaza’s political factions. We may ask whether the process of signature collection to support a given cause was not, in and of itself, an act of forming a coalition, forcing people “to take a stance” on a public issue, rather than the capture of a coalition already existing. None of these proposals challenge the book’s main findings. They suggest, however, integrating the making of the book’s sources into the story the book tells.

This way or the other, the significance of this book is, first and foremost, in breaking new ground in our factual knowledge of historic Gaza and its people. Much of the data analyzed in the book are drawn from untapped resources and entirely new. The importance of the book’s painstaking reconstruction of Gaza’s neighborhoods, familial ties, institutions, and agricultural hinterland, given the recent destruction of Gaza, cannot be overstated. It is both a memorial for Gaza before the Strip and a horizon for Gaza beyond it.

More broadly, however, the book addresses scholars of urban studies and history well beyond Gaza, as it uses the city as a model for exploring what cities in the Ottoman Empire were by the late nineteenth century, and how they should be studied. The book’s analysis of marriage patterns, migration, street names, honorific titles, professions, and political affiliations points to the social diversity and malleability condensed into the category of a “city,” as well as the diverse subcity spaces such as quarters, neighborhoods, or even streets, each a social unit in and of itself. Published in an era when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the concept of scientific authority and rigor, this book serves as an exemplar for solid, creative, and thorough research that promotes humanism, bringing a historic place to life. Not less important, in a time in which AI analysis stitches identities to urban spaces for the destruction of Gaza and its people, this book proves that a labor-intensive reconstruction of Gaza has a crucial role in rehumanizing it.