Netanyahu’s Dangerous Narrative About Israel’s Gaza Disengagement

On August 15, 2005, Israel began “unilateral disengagement” from the Gaza Strip. Less than a month later, it removed 11,000 soldiers and settlers from the region. Although most Israelis supported the disengagement, the policy divided the ruling dream party. The most critical for the disengagement of Benjamin Netanyahu-from the government shortly before its implementation and warned that leaving Gaza was a “irresponsible step” that would transform the lands into a “base of Islamic terrorism”.

The international community has forgotten the disengagement, but the Israelis did not. Successive opinion polls show that the Israelis are increasingly believed Netanyahu’s criticism of the disengagement when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, which led to a devastating cycle of violence that reached its peak on October 7, 2023, attacks. For most Israelis, the disengagement showed that regional concessions bring disasters and should be avoided at any cost. As a result, Israeli support for the Palestinian state reached the lowest level in the record, while the Israeli right plans to settle and the Gaza attachment and the West Bank are steadily moving.

On August 15, 2005, Israel began “unilateral disengagement” from the Gaza Strip. Less than a month later, it removed 11,000 soldiers and settlers from the region. Although most Israelis supported the disengagement, the policy divided the ruling dream party. The most critical for the disengagement of Benjamin Netanyahu-from the government shortly before its implementation and warned that leaving Gaza was a “irresponsible step” that would transform the lands into a “base of Islamic terrorism”.

The international community has forgotten the disengagement, but the Israelis did not. Successive opinion polls show that the Israelis are increasingly believed Netanyahu’s criticism of the disengagement when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, which led to a devastating cycle of violence that reached its peak on October 7, 2023, attacks. For most Israelis, the disengagement showed that regional concessions bring disasters and should be avoided at any cost. As a result, Israeli support for the Palestinian state reached the lowest level in the record, while the Israeli right plans to settle and the Gaza attachment and the West Bank are steadily moving.

But Israel in Gaza was never about following the two -state solution. On the contrary: it was an exercise in the management of the conflict that sought to freeze the conflict and press the pour into negotiation with the Palestinians. The defect of the disengagement was not failure, but it was very successful.

In the accumulation of separation, Israel and the Palestinians were drowning in the second intifada, a bloody campaign at that time unprecedented in virginity. Then, as is the case now, the right -wing government of Israel faced external and internal pressure to clarify a “day after day” plan that was transcending the confrontation of Palestinian violence with explicit military force. But the then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refused to do so. As a result, the Bush administration faced what the names of the state at the time described Condoleezza Rice later in its autobiography as “a division of deepening with Israel”, as American officials were increasingly criticizing the Sharon government.

In addition to Sharon’s concerns, in 2002 and 2003, many Israeli pilots, special forces and reserve forces deployed many open messages that justify their refusal to serve in the West Bank or Gaza. DOV Weisglass- Long-term lawyer, Confidante, and Chief of Staff-in an interview with 2004 with HaritzThis was the backbone of the Israeli army, not “strange children with a green ponytail and a ring in their nose, giving a strong smell of grass.”

The most prominent alternative at that time was the Arab Peace Initiative and the Geneva Initiative. Previous, the Saudi -led plan, was a change from games, as it recorded the entire Arab League in the record as a conditional commitment to peaceful recognition of Israel. But for Sharon, the required price – the Israeli withdrawal from the entire West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights – was very high. It was believed that the withdrawal was an existential threat. He felt the same way towards the Geneva initiative, a proposal at the final introduction that requires an Israeli withdrawal of 95 percent of the West Bank in exchange for the Palestinians’ approval to end the conflict.

By “unilateral disengagement” from Gaza, Sharon sought to anticipate and neutralize both proposals. This is not a conspiracy theory, because the evidence is hidden in sight. Sharon has publicly argued that “the world will not allow death to continue.” Accordingly, the disengagement sought to prevent Israel from “clouds to” i.e. “” dangerous “international” “international initiatives.” Leaving Gaza – an area of ​​a few strategic or emotional value – will reduce pressure to make withdrawals not palatable to many Israelis, that is, even or near the country’s borders of 1967.

But the disengagement had long -term goals: closing negotiations with the Palestinians. In a dispersed now Haritz An interview, Weisglass described the disengagement as “formaldehyde” that will stop “a political process with the Palestinians.”

He later sought to provide a more acceptable explanation for his statements, both in 2014 Economist In an interview with him in 2018. [the political process]So I should have said “on the ice.”

Weisglass’s private statements before that, however, lie to re -interpret it. In October 2004, he stated that, with the Sharon plan, “the Palestinian state, with everything it requires, was removed indefinitely from the agenda.”

The disengagement in Gaza was undoubtedly a shock to the settlers movement. After all, 8,000 of the movement of the houses were removed by Sharon, a veteran right -wing people. That is why many observers have struggled to understand the supposed Sharon shift from Hook to Dove. However, Sharon’s public data shows that this was less ideological and more than tactical: Israel abandoned 20 percent of Gaza, which still controls it directly in 2005 (it has already left the remaining region in the mid -1990s as part of the Oslo Agreement) to unify its rule over large parts of the West Bank.

But this was not a state of “Gaza first and the last;” When identifying the areas that must be included in the disengagement plan, Sharon looked at the withdrawal of Gaza and large parts of the West Bank in Tawdda. The only reason for not doing this is due to the poor management of the catastrophic management.

Instead of negotiating with the Palestinians, Sharon was negotiating with the United States. Israeli and American officials went back and forth for weeks, not only discussing where Israel will withdraw, but what political concessions will obtain from the Bush administration in return.

The challenge was that while the Bush administration wanted to use the disengagement to start the peace process, the Sharon administration sought exactly the opposite. Sharon’s goal was to make the final borders of Israel without involving the Palestinians. The United States saw what the Israelis were trying to do and sought to prevent it while using the disengagement to achieve its own goals and are still getting the Sharon administration to withdraw from the lands.

This dynamic created a contradictory result in negotiations. The Israelis presented Washington three possible exits for the West Bank, which vary in size and importance. However, the Bush administration prevented the most fundamental options. As a result, Israel withdrew from only 20 percent of the Gaza Strip, which is still controlled, along with four small settlements in the northern West Bank.

While US officials prevented the exit of the Israeli West Bank for all the correct reasons, they have never followed up. Instead, Israel was allowed to raise itself throughout the entire West Bank. Moreover, to reward Israel for the disengagement, the Bush administration has publicly bordered the 1967 and resettled Palestinian refugees inside Israel. These were major concessions. The Israelis previously accepted the 1967 lines as a starting point in addition to a limited return of some Palestinian refugees. So, the Bush Israel administration gave semi -withdrawal rewards.

Worse than all of this, that it is too late to show us that the Israelis, and not the Americans, who got exactly what they wanted from decomposition.

There was no return to the peace process. Away: Netanyahu organized a dramatic political return in the 2008 elections by recycling the separation as a gesture to the land that failed. But his policies when he returned to his position indicates that he knows better.

Under Netanyahu, Israel was firmly prevented by any initiatives to change the current situation in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel has even pushed Hamas’s rule by facilitating the transfer of funds to maintain the regime to support life. In 2019, Netanyahu claimed that “those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas” to discriminate “between the West Bank and Gaza and prolong the diplomat’s dead end.

Consequently, decompression is not an ancient history: it has created the strategy that we produce and expand the scope of its greater criticism. With Hamas’s control of Gaza, Israel, with Weisglass’s special words, can “comfortable garden in a temporary position.”

Twenty years later, Netanyahu is still using the disastrous, assumed withdrawal defects to exclude future regional clouds from Gaza or the West Bank. At the same time, the extreme right framework has become the dominant perspective in Israel. Even opposition politicians who supported Sharon’s actions used the anniversary of 20 years to withdraw to condemn this as a mistake.

However, the disengagement tragedy is that it worked exactly as intended. The real failure of the wrong belief that the conflict could be managed indefinitely. This strategy of parking in a temporary parking worked very well for Israel so as not to do so. On October 7, everything came collapsed. Today, the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the wider region are still paying a great price for Sharon’s anger and Netanyahu.