Description
This paper examines the first UN peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF, 1956-1967) and interrogates the coloniality of the UN troops’ response to anti-UN protests during its occupation of the Gaza Strip. The mission staff occupied Gaza during a ‘state of emergency’ in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and imposed a UN administration in the territory replacing the three-month occupation of Israeli forces during the conflict. I explore how UNEF’s officials reacted to anti-UN dissent and how their responses shaped their strategy for ‘protection’ and stability in the region whilst occupying and patrolling the territory. The paper makes two key arguments. First, it examines the content of the anti-UN protests in Gaza at the time to uncover the alternative forms of peace presented in 1950s Gaza and to counter gendered and racialised conceptions of host populations as either uncritically welcoming, passive victims or disorganised guerrilla fighters. Secondly, it argues that spaces of interaction or engagement between peacekeepers and civilians – such as in protests – should be understood as just as instrumental in helping to construct hierarchies between peacekeeper and civilian as sites of UN disconnection or international ‘spaces of aid’. Using photographs, local newspapers, oral histories, and UN archival documents, the paper focuses on how interactions between the UN troops and protestors influenced the troops’ conceptions of the host population and justified their ongoing occupational presence in Gaza. Scholarly attention on this period for the UN has largely focused on member-state critiques of the organisation in New York rather than on the political ideas and resistance of local populations in the field. Thus, this paper takes a ‘bottom up’ approach to international history, seeking to recentre Global South populations and spaces in scholarship on international organizations and peacekeeping.
