The Fifteen Wars of Israel against Gaza
16 April 2026. From 18:30 | Conference | Spanish | IEMed
The war that Israel launched against the Gaza Strip, following the massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, is by far the deadliest in the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it is only the fifteenth of the wars that Israel has waged against the Palestinian enclave since the foundational hostilities of 1948, which transformed the prosperous oasis of Gaza, a millennia-old crossroads of trade between Egypt and the Levant, into a “strip” of territory whose boundaries were defined by the ceasefire between Israel and Egypt.
A lecture by Jean-Pierre Filiu, historian and professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris.
Filiu has also taught at Columbia and Georgetown universities. A French diplomat from 1988 to 2006, he served as an advisor at the French embassies in Jordan, Syria, and Tunisia, and as a diplomatic advisor to the Minister of the Interior (1990–1991), the Minister of Defense (1991–1993), and later the French Prime Minister (2000–2002).
He is the author of more than twenty books published in nearly twenty languages (including Spanish and Catalan). His work covers a wide range of subjects, including studies on Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring, among others. His Histoire de Gaza (Fayard, 2012) is the only comprehensive history of this Palestinian territory from the time of the pharaohs to the present day. His most recent work, Un historien à Gaza (Les Arènes, 2025), a testimony of his stay in the Strip with Doctors Without Borders, will be published in Spanish by La Cebra.
Among his most notable works are Apocalypse in Islam (University of California Press, 2011), La Révolution arabe. Dix leçons sur le soulèvement démocratique (Fayard, 2011), and the three-volume work Los mejores enemigos. Una historia de las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Oriente Medio (with David B., Norma Editorial, 2012).
A session of the Aula Mediterrània conference series 2025-26 co-organised with the Master’s Degree in Contemporary History and Today’s World (Universitat de Barcelona, UB) and chaired by Antoni Segura, Professor of Contemporary History, UB.
Language: Spanish
Speakers
Jean-Pierre Filiu
Historian and professor of Middle Eastern Studies Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po
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