Over the past thirty-five years, Mahmoud Assaf has collected over thirty thousand books in his Gaza City home. Despite being displaced five times (from Gaza City to Khan Yunis to Rafah, and now to a tent in Deir al-Balah), the renowned Palestinian author manages to keep tabs on his collection, entrusted to the watchful care of neighbors.
With Assaf’s home still relatively untouched, in a city reduced to rubble, his library caught the eye of a local baker, who called its owner up with a chilling proposal. He proposed that Assaf sell the books — not so that people can read them, but to burn them. Fuel is in short supply, the baker said, and Assaf could help “feed his people.” But Assaf refused. “Turning knowledge into ashes for survival,” he said, “feels like dying.”
Assaf’s story is not just a parable of dignity amid destruction, it’s a window into what remains of a society under siege. It is one of many such stories chronicled in Jean-Pierre Filiu’s searing new eyewitness account, published in late May: Un Historien à Gaza (“A Historian in Gaza,” to be published in English in January 2026).
Filiu is not your average war reporter. In what he calls “normal times,” he is a historian, a professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po Paris and a former diplomat who has advised both the French government and the United Nations. He’s taught at Columbia and Georgetown, but also under Russian bombs in Kyiv, and is never pictured without his khaki “Fight like Ukrainians” hoodie. Fluent in Arabic, Filiu pens a weekly column analyzing the Middle East and the Arab world for French daily Le Monde. Thirteen years ago, he wrote what remains, to this day, the only comprehensive modern history of the territory. Gaza: A History (translated into English in 2014) is the culmination of Filiu’s numerous trips there since 1980.
But a historian needs archives to work, and Filiu’s were burning before his eyes after October…
Auteur: Diane de Vignemont
