On Aug. 15, 2005, Israel began its “unilateral disengagement” from the Gaza Strip. Less than a month later, it had removed 11,000 soldiers and settlers from the territory. Though most Israelis supported the disengagement, the policy divided the governing Likud party. The disengagement’s most high-profile critic—then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—resigned from the government shortly before it was implemented and warned that leaving Gaza was an “irresponsible step” that would turn the territory into “a base for Islamic terrorism.”
The international community has forgotten about the disengagement, but Israelis have not. Successive polls show that Israelis increasingly believe Netanyahu’s criticisms of the disengagement were vindicated when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, leading to a devastating cycle of violence that culminated in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. For most Israelis, the disengagement demonstrated that territorial concessions bring disaster and should be avoided at all costs. As a result, Israeli support for a Palestinian state has reached a record low, while the Israeli right’s plans to settle and annex Gaza and the West Bank are moving steadily forward.
But Israel’s Gaza disengagement was never about pursuing a two-state solution. To the contrary: It was an exercise in conflict management that sought to indefinitely freeze the conflict and torpedo pressure to negotiate with the Palestinians. The disengagement’s flaw was not that it failed, but that it was too successful.
In the buildup to the disengagement, Israel and the Palestinians had been mired in the Second Intifada, a bloody campaign that was at the time unprecedented in its ferocity. Then, as now, Israel’s right-wing government faced significant external and internal pressure to articulate a “day after” plan that looked beyond countering Palestinian violence with blunt military force. But then-Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refused to do so. As a result, the Bush administration faced what then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later described in her autobiography as a “deepening split with Israel,” where U.S. officials were increasingly and publicly critical of Sharon’s government.
Adding to Sharon’s worries, in 2002 and 2003, multiple Israeli pilots, special forces, and reservists published several open letters justifying their refusal to serve in the West Bank or Gaza. As Dov Weisglass—Sharon’s long-term lawyer, confidante, and chief of staff—recalled in a 2004 interview with Haaretz, these were the backbone of Israel’s military and not “weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose who give off a strong odor of grass.”
The two most prominent alternatives at the time were the Arab Peace Initiative and the Geneva Initiative. The former, a Saudi-led plan, was a game-changer in that the entire Arab League went on record as conditionally committing to a peaceful recognition of Israel. But to Sharon, the required price—an Israeli withdrawal from the entire West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights—was too high. He believed withdrawal represented an existential threat. He felt the same way about the Geneva Initiative, a final-status proposal that required an Israeli withdrawal from upward of 95 percent of the West Bank in exchange for the Palestinians agreeing to end the conflict.
By “unilaterally disengaging” from Gaza, Sharon sought to preempt and neutralize both these proposals. This is not a conspiracy theory, because the evidence is hiding in plain sight. Sharon publicly argued that “the world won’t let deadlock continue.” Accordingly, the disengagement sought to keep Israel from being “dragged into” any “dangerous” international “initiatives.” Leaving Gaza—a territory with little strategic or sentimental value—would reduce pressure to make withdrawals unpalatable to many Israelis, i.e., up to or close to the country’s 1967 borders.
But the disengagement also had more far-reaching aims: to shut down negotiations with the Palestinians. In a now-infamous Haaretz interview, Weisglass described the disengagement as “formaldehyde” that will stop “a political process with the Palestinians.”
He later sought to offer a more palatable interpretation of his remarks, both in a 2014 Economist interview and in an interview I conducted with him in 2018. He told me, “Formaldehyde is used to preserve dead tissues, but my intention was to say we want to preserve [the political process], so I should have said ‘on ice.’”
Weisglass’s own statements before this, however, belie his reinterpretation. In October 2004, he stated that, with Sharon’s plan, a “Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from the agenda.”
The Gaza disengagement was indubitably traumatic for the settler movement. After all, 8,000 of the movement’s number were removed from the homes by Sharon, a veteran right-winger. This is why so many observers struggled to understand Sharon’s supposed transformation from hawk to dove. Yet Sharon’s public statements illustrate that this was less an ideological shift and more of a tactical one: Israel abandoned the 20 percent of Gaza it still directly controlled in 2005 (it had already left the remainder of the territory in the mid-1990s as part of the Oslo Accords) to consolidate its rule over large parts of the West Bank.
But this was not a case of “Gaza first and last;” when deciding what territories to include within the disengagement plan, Sharon considered a withdrawal from Gaza and large parts of the West Bank in tandem. The only reason that he did not do so is because of the Bush administration’s catastrophic mismanagement.
Instead of negotiating with the Palestinians, Sharon was instead negotiating with the United States. Israeli and U.S. officials went back and forth for weeks, discussing not only where Israel would withdraw from, but what political concessions it would get from the Bush administration in return.
The challenge was that while Bush administration wanted to use the disengagement to jump-start the peace process, the Sharon administration sought the exact opposite. Sharon’s goal was to decide Israel’s final borders without involving the Palestinians as all. The United States saw what the Israelis were trying to do and sought to prevent it while using the disengagement for its own ends and still getting the Sharon administration to withdraw from territory.
This dynamic created a paradoxical result in the negotiations. The Israelis presented Washington with three potential West Bank exits that varied in size and significance. The Bush administration, however, blocked the two most substantial options. As a result, Israel only withdrew from the 20 percent of the Gaza Strip that it still controlled, alongside four small settlements in the northern West Bank.
While U.S. officials blocked an Israeli West Bank exit for all the right reasons, they never followed up. Instead, Israel was allowed to entrench itself throughout the entire West Bank. Furthermore, to reward Israel for the disengagement, the Bush administration publicly disavowed the 1967 borders and the resettlement of Palestinian refugees within Israel. These were two major concessions; the Israelis had previously accepted the 1967 lines as a starting point as well as the limited return of some Palestinian refugees. The Bush administration, then, gave Israel the near-maximum rewards for a minimum withdrawal.
Worst of all, hindsight shows us that it was the Israelis, not the Americans, who got exactly what they wanted from the disengagement.
There was no return to the peace process. Far from it: Netanyahu staged a dramatic political comeback in the 2008 elections by spinning the disengagement as a land-for-peace gesture that failed. But his policies when he returned to office suggest that he knows better.
Under Netanyahu, Israel steadfastly blocked any initiatives to change the status quo in either Gaza or the West Bank. Israel even propped up Hamas’s rule by facilitating the transfer of funds to keep the regime on life support. In 2019, Netanyahu claimed that “those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support strengthening Hamas,” to “differentiate” between the West Bank and Gaza and prolong the diplomatic impasse.
The disengagement, therefore, is not ancient history: It established the strategy that Netanyahu, its biggest critic, then propagated and expanded. With Hamas in control of Gaza, Israel could, in Weisglass’s own words, “park conveniently in an interim situation.”
Twenty years later, Netanyahu is still using withdrawal’s supposedly catastrophic flaws to rule out future territorial withdrawals from either Gaza or the West Bank. Meanwhile, the far right’s framing adisengagement has become the dominant perspective in Israel. Even opposition politicians who supported Sharon’s actions have used the withdrawal’s 20-year anniversary to condemn it as a mistake.
Yet the tragedy of the disengagement is that it worked exactly as intended. The true failure was in the false belief that the conflict could be managed indefinitely. This strategy of parking in an interim situation worked very well for Israel until it didn’t. On Oct. 7, it all came crashing down. Today, Palestinians, Israelis, and the broader region are still paying a heavy price for Sharon and Netanyahu’s hubris.
The post Israel’s Gaza Disengagement Worked Far Too Well appeared first on Foreign Policy.
