(UN)frozen in time: Temporal politics, UN peacekeeping, and the Gaza exception

Abstract Scholars are increasingly interrogating distinctions between ‘war time’ and ‘peace time’, but what happens when time itself becomes a weapon of war or, even, a model of conflict response. Focusing on the case study of the first armed UN mission, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to Sinai and the Gaza Strip during the 1956 Suez Crisis, I examine the mission’s attempt to replace the Israeli invasion and establish an open-ended international administration on the Gaza Strip. Using archival documents and photographs, this paper explores how UN operations in Palestine shaped temporal assumptions about the population and the conflict. I argue that the Suez Crisis ruptured an UN-managed temporal paralysis on the Gaza Strip which opened up opportunities for new futures in Gaza, as well as anxiety to return to controlled paralysis. Examining both Palestinian and international reactions to the UN occupation, I show how the ‘Gaza exception’ policy transformed international perceptions of the region – its past, present, and future. Thus, by focusing on the moment of the brief UN occupation, I argue that this international intervention shifted global perceptions of the strip from a ‘frozen’ site of past conflict into a space of unfinished ownership and future potentiality.