Decolonizing Egypt’s occupation of Gaza: Political interstitiality and deferred sovereignty

The Egyptian administration discursively represented its rule in Gaza between 1948 and 1967, along with the governing structure it established there, as a form of ‘liberating’ and ‘protective’ engagement. This article argues, however, that Egyptian rule in Gaza requires renewed scrutiny in light of both the continuities and the ruptures that marked the subject–power relations inherited from the Mandate era. From a postcolonial analytical perspective, it advances a decolonizing reading of the experiences and discourses imposed upon the local population in the aftermath of the Mandate. Drawing on British and Turkish diplomatic archival documents, the study investigates the modalities of power that politically relegated Gaza to a condition of interstitiality and that functioned through strategies of delay and deferral in relation to the making of post-Mandate Palestinian sovereignty.