LOTL Remastered: The Strip and the Envelope

On the strange relationship between Gaza and its hinterland

Throughout the summer, I'm revisiting and updating early pieces that were previously behind a paywall, giving them the broader readership they deserve with some minor revisions and expanded analysis. This piece, originally published in February 2024, has proven prescient despite the dramatic events that have unfolded since. While politicians and commentators debate fantasies of a "Gaza Riviera" or the forced resettlement of Palestinians, the reality remains unchanged: when this war ends, Gaza will likely be rebuilt with its surviving population intact, leaving the fundamental geographic constraints that fuel this conflict entirely unaddressed.

The Gaza Strip, in the words of Jean-Pierre Filiu (author of Gaza: A History) is an “accidental territorial entity” sandwiched between the international frontier at Rafah, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Israel-Egyptian armistice lines of February 1949. Before there was the Gaza Strip, though, there was southern Palestine. From the 1860s, this area (from a line just north of Jaffa and Jerusalem southward) was an independent sanjak (mutasraflik) ruled from Istanbul. During the Mandate, there was a Gaza subdistrict, but it was significantly larger than the Gaza Strip of today, stretching almost as far north as Ramle.

The demographic transformation of Gaza began with the War of Independence. Prior to 1948, the population of what became the Gaza Strip was 80,000. Afterwards this increased by 200,000, mostly refugees from what is today the southern coastal plain (45 of 56 population centers were expelled or fled) and the Shephelah, but also from central Palestine and even the Galilee. “These people even more than the rest [of the refugees],” Jean-Pierre Filiu writes “were haunted by the desire to return to homes and lands that were sometimes within sight.” This is a reminder of an important but often neglected point about Palestinian refugees from 1948 – most of them ended up living a short distance from their former homes, which was clearly a recipe for trouble. What was unique about those who ended up in Gaza, though, was that many of them could see their villages and agricultural lands from their refugee camps. Worsening the problem was the fact that 90 percent of the refugees were illiterate, two thirds of the adult men had no educational qualifications, and an area that had previously been home to just one hundredth of Palestine’s population now housed a quarter of the Palestinians living between the river and the sea.

This volatile demographic situation set the stage for the border conflicts of the 1950s. This is the background to Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan’s famous eulogy for Ro’i Rotberg, Kibbutz Nahal Oz’s security officer, who was murdered and mutilated by fedayeen armed by Egypt in April 1956. In the immediate aftermath of 1948, hundreds of refugees crossed the border to see their former land or even to cultivate it, with many being killed by mines or the army. This soon intensified into what Benny Morris described as a “border war,” with an increasing number of infiltrations, often murderous, which were tacitly or openly supported by the Egyptians. This in turn led to the creation of Ariel Sharon’s infamous Unit 101. It was fedayeen raids like the one in which Rotberg was murdered that led to the Sinai War and the first, temporary Israeli occupation of Gaza. Dayan’s eulogy – which is really more of a manifesto - deserves to be quoted in full:

Yesterday morning Ro'i was murdered. The morning's silence dazzled him, and he didn't see those lurking for his soul at the edge of the furrow. It's not among the Arabs in Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi's blood.

How did we shut our eyes to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty? Have we forgotten that this small group of young boys, settled in Nahal Oz, is carrying the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?

Beyond this, hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for our coming weakness, so that they may tear us to pieces. Have we forgotten this? Don't we know that in order for the hope of our destruction to perish we must be armed and ready, morning and night?

We are a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the canon's maw we cannot plant and build a home. Our children won't have lives to live if we won't dig shelters. And without a barbed wire fence and a machine gun, we won't be able to pave a path or drill for water.

The millions of Jews who were exterminated and have no land are watching us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle and rebuild a land for our people.

But beyond the furrow that marks the border lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day serenity will dull our alertness, for the day that we'll listen to the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, calling us to lay down our weapons.

Roi's blood is crying out to us, and only to us, from his shredded body. Although we have sworn a thousandfold that our blood shall not flow in vain, yesterday we were tempted again. We listened. We believed.

We will make our reckoning with ourselves today. Let us not flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who are sitting and longing for the moment their hands can get our blood. We must not avert our gaze, lest our hands be weakened.

That is our generation's fate and our life's choice -- to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fist and our lives cut down.

Young Ro’i, who went forth from Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza to be a bulwark for his people – the light in his heart blinded his sight and he failed to see the sword’s flash. The longing for peace deafened his ears and he failed to hear the voice of the murderer waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza proved too heavy for his shoulders, and overcame him.

Much of what Dayan said could have been repeated on October 8^th, 2023. According to this view, so long as Gazans seek the right of return and Jews seek to defend their sovereign homeland, war is inevitable, and denying this reality is fatal.

To understand today’s challenges, we must first examine how the ‘Gaza Envelope’ emerged as a concept. The term is of surprisingly recent vintage and has only been commonly used in the years since Hamas came to power in Gaza. In fact, “envelope” isn’t an ideal translation. The Hebrew word is עוטף (otef), while envelope, which shares the same root, is actually מעטפה (ma’atafa). The word otef pops up in Psalm 102 and has connotations of enwrapping rather than of the final product of the envelope.

In any event, the Gaza Envelope emerged as more of a technical-legal term than a geographical-descriptive one, in that it defines the 54 communities who live within seven kilometers of the Strip, mostly kibbutzim and moshavim but also the city of Sderot, a total of around 70,000 people who lived within range of mortar shells and Qassam rockets, and as a result were eligible for special tax breaks and other benefits.

The obvious question that follows from this, particularly considering the Rotberg eulogy, is why were so many communities – admittedly not huge numbers of people but not negligible either, especially when compared with other areas of the northern Negev – placed so close to this “surging sea of hatred and vengeance”? To answer this, we must return to the ethos of pre-state settlement. Ben-Gurion believed that the “line of the furrow” would determine where the border would be, which is why – contrary to many other countries, particularly those with hostile neighbors – there are numerous communities situated along most of Israel’s borders (the border with Egypt, with its desert terrain, is an obvious exception).

This ethos also had implications for defense policy once the borders had been – at least provisionally – established. As explained in a recent article in the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, prior to 1967, these border settlements were Israel’s first line of defense. They both defended themselves and provided cover to the regular army with reserves. Those living in these communities were organized in companies and platoons and were integrated into the IDF, where they were trained and equipped accordingly. This concept of “spatial defense” then fell out of fashion after 1973, with IDF special forces becoming responsible for dealing with attacks on the northern border (for example Ma’alot in 1974 and Misgav ‘Am in 1980).

In the case of Gaza, while there were settlements there, they became the main target for attack. But following 2005’s disengagement and Hamas’s 2007 takeover, the Gaza Envelope came under fire from mortars and rockets. During this time, while there was readiness for small terrorist infiltrations, nobody was prepared for an event on the scale of October 7^th, and as a result nothing was done to improve these communities’ self-defense, apart from the creation of small “preparedness squads,” with insufficient weaponry to address a large-scale event. This created the conditions for the massacre, with the one major exception being Kibbutz Nir Am, where the residents, led by 25-year-old Inbar Lieberman, realized they were being invaded, organized accordingly, and successfully fought off the terrorists.

After the war, spatial defense in which residents of border communities are at least partially responsible for their own defense will be back on the agenda. In the case of Gaza, though, this doesn’t address the wider problem described by Dayan. Much of this stems, I think, from a dynamic whereby the Green Line – the armistice line between Israel and Egypt/Jordan that followed the War of Independence – has taken on a kind of holy aura because of Israel’s continued occupation, blinding us to the fact that it was a mere armistice line. As was stated clearly in the Rhodes Agreement: “The Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question.”

All the rhetoric about Gaza having the potential to become the new Singapore ignores the fundamental problems of the Strip and the Envelope, even without the problem of Hamas or UNRWA and its eternal perpetuation of refugeehood. The Gaza Strip is too small; to be viable it needs to be bigger. One way of doing this is a through a trilateral land-swap scenario whereby Egypt triples Gaza’s size by giving land to Palestine in the Sinai, Israel gives land to Egypt in the Arava, the Jordanians give land to Palestine, the Saudis give land to Jordan, and Palestine cedes land to Israel in the West Bank.

The obvious objection here is that this plan is completely unrealistic in the current environment. This is true. But the idea that the Palestinians will be expelled from Gaza or that Israel will resettle Gaza or that Israel will divide the territory up into mini-emirates (really Bantustans) is also unrealistic, and yet it dominates much of the discourse. Nobody would have wilfully created a territory like the Gaza Strip, sandwiched as it is between Egypt, Israel, and the sea, and divided from the West Bank by southern Israel, but here we are. Even if Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas and removing UNRWA this basic problem will remain.

The fundamental challenge facing Gaza and its surrounding communities cannot be resolved through military action alone, nor through the tired formulas of previous peace attempts. Dayan’s stark assessment from 1956 remains relevant today: the proximity of displaced Palestinians to their former homes (particularly in the context of the perpetuation of Palestinian refugeehood) combined with the precarious nature of Israeli border communities creates an inherent tension that defies simple solutions. The current boundaries - drawn not by design but by the accidents of war and armistice - have proven inadequate for both peoples’ needs. The ‘Gaza Strip’ and ‘Gaza Envelope’ are flawed geographical constructs that perpetuate rather than resolve conflict. True progress requires abandoning the sacred status of these artificial boundaries and embracing creative territorial solutions. Only by removing the Strip and the Envelope from the lexicon can any progress be made.