The Arab conquest in the 7th century changed Gaza’s political and cultural setting profoundly. Britannica’s treatment of Roman Palestine and the Arab conquest shows how the region moved from Byzantine Christian rule into the expanding Islamic world under the first caliphs.
What matters for Gaza is that it did not become a sovereign state centered on Gaza. It became part of successive caliphates: the Rashidun, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and later the Fatimids. Britannica’s overview of the caliphate is useful here because it explains the scale of the imperial system into which Palestine was absorbed. Gaza was governed as part of a larger political order whose centers of power lay elsewhere.
This period is also when Arabic and Islam became more central to public life in the region. That fact matters for any honest account of Palestinian Arab history. It helps explain the linguistic, religious, and social background from which much later Palestinian identity emerged. But that emergence took place over time. It should not be read backward as if a modern national form already existed in the 7th century.
In a classroom, this chapter works best when taught as a history of transformation rather than replacement. The region’s Jewish and Christian histories do not disappear when Muslim rule begins. Nor does Muslim rule erase the importance of the land to those communities. Gaza enters the Islamic world, but it does so as a provincial city inside an empire, not as the capital of a new Gaza-centered state.