The Gaza Strip is presented in Edward Said’s account as part of a contested Palestinian landscape whose inhabitants’ suffering is repeatedly filtered through political conflict and Orientalist ways of knowing. Its significance lies not only in the events associated with it, but in Said’s insistence that the region cannot be understood as a passive object to be mapped, represented, or remade by outside powers.

Political conflict and Palestinian suffering

Said places the Gaza Strip alongside the West Bank in describing the continuing violence after the failure of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second intifada. He writes that Palestinians in the reinvaded territories suffered as Israeli aircraft and helicopters were used against civilians as part of collective punishment. Gaza thus enters an account of conflict in which political events are not abstractions: they shape the daily conditions of a population whose experience risks being obscured by grand claims about an irreconcilable clash between civilizations.

The book also situates Gaza within a longer sequence of regional confrontations. In reflecting on the political developments after the publication of Orientalism, Said refers to the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the beginning of the intifada in late 1987. These events, alongside other conflicts and interventions, intensified pressures on people to identify themselves as either Westerners or Easterners. For Said, such hardened identities are not timeless facts about peoples; they are reinforced by political circumstances and by narratives that turn complex histories into a stark opposition between “us” and “them.”

Occupation and the politics of omission

Gaza appears again in Said’s criticism of the selective historical account he attributes to Bernard Lewis. Said argues that Lewis discusses democracy in the Middle East while omitting Israeli emergency regulations applied to Arabs, preventive detention, settlements in the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza, and restrictions on Arab rights, including immigration in former Palestine. In this argument, omission is not incidental: leaving occupation and unequal political conditions out of the account helps sustain a narrative in which democratic claims are presented without the realities affecting Palestinians.

Said’s criticism concerns the authority such accounts claim for themselves. When scholarship presents itself as impartial but excludes consequential facts about occupation and political rights, its apparent neutrality can conceal the standpoint from which it speaks. Gaza is therefore part of a broader dispute over representation: whose experience enters the record, which political conditions are named, and whose interests are served when a history is told selectively.

Representation, power, and historical change

Said rejects the idea that the Orient has a stable essence or that the West and East are permanent, self-contained realities. He argues instead that such identities are made through human action, including the naming and representation of an Other. The modern history of Orientalism, in his account, is bound to imperial power: a region can be described in ways that make it appear naturally suited to outside direction, while its many peoples, languages, and histories are pushed aside.

That framework helps explain why Gaza is not simply a geographical reference in the book. It belongs to an account of how political power and knowledge interact: descriptions of the region can either acknowledge lived histories and political circumstances or reduce them to a ready-made image. Said’s argument does not claim to defend a single “real” Orient. Rather, he expresses regard for the capacity of Arab and Muslim peoples to struggle for their own visions of what they are and wish to become, against external judgments that flatten complex societies into stereotypes.

Historical context and significance

Said connects the modern imperial setting of Orientalism to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, while stressing that the broader histories of the region cannot be collapsed into one model. He contrasts the monumental French account of Egypt, produced by a scholarly corps backed by a conquering army, with the three-volume account of the invasion by the Egyptian chronicler Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti. The contrast demonstrates how power shapes what is recognized as authoritative history and how accounts from the invaded may be ignored even when they record the same historical encounter from a different position.

His discussion of Gaza extends this concern into contemporary politics: histories and identities remain subject to change, but they are also repeatedly narrowed by conflict, occupation, and the circulation of demeaning generalizations. Against the claim that East and West are destined for endless opposition, Said argues for understanding other peoples through careful study and an effort toward coexistence rather than domination. Gaza’s place in the book makes that distinction concrete: the region is not a symbol detached from its inhabitants, but part of a contested history whose representation has material political consequences.