City Research Online

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.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Occupation Palestine Peace Peacekeeping Time United Nations
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General) J Political Science > JX International law J Political Science > JZ International relations
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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