27-The Israeli Disengagement from Gaza Was an Act of Peace

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MYTH: The Israeli Disengagement from Gaza Was an Act of Peace.

Israeli disengagement was not a peaceful act. The Gaza Strip accounts for slightly more than 2% of Palestine’s landmass. This minor detail is never mentioned whenever the Strip is in the news, nor in the Western media coverage of the horrific events in Gaza in the summer of 2014 or the Israeli belligerence in 2021. Indeed, it occupies such a small portion of the country that it has never existed as a distinct region. Prior to 1948, Gaza’s history was similar to that of the rest of Palestine, and it was always administratively and politically connected to the rest of the country. As one of Palestine’s primary land and sea ports, it tended to develop a more adaptable and cosmopolitan way of life, similar to other gateway societies in the Eastern Mediterranean during the modern era. Its location on the coast and along the Via Maris from Egypt to Lebanon brought prosperity and stability, until the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 disrupted and nearly destroyed this.

The Strip was founded in 1948, during the final days of the war. It was a zone into which Israeli forces pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Jaffa and its southern portions down to the town of Bir-Saba (Beersheba of today). Others were expelled from towns such as Majdal (Ashkelon) as late as 1950, during the ethnic cleansing‘s final stages. Thus, a small pastoral section of Palestine became the world’s largest refugee camp. It is still this way today. Between 1948 and 1967, the Israeli and Egyptian governments delineated and severely restricted this vast refugee camp. Both states prohibited movement out of the Strip, resulting in ever-worsening living conditions as the population doubled. The catastrophic nature of this coerced demographic transformation was evident on the eve of Israel’s occupation in 1967. Within two decades, this once pastoral coastal region of southern Palestine became one of the world’s densestly populated areas, despite the absence of economic and occupational infrastructure.

Israel permitted some mobility outside the area, which was cordoned off by a fence, during the first two decades of occupation. Thousands of Palestinians were allowed to enter the Israeli labour force as low skilled and low-wage workers. Israel demanded total surrender in exchange for this. When this was not followed, laborers’ freedom of movement was withdrawn. Israel attempted to shape the Strip into an enclave in the run-up to the Oslo Accord in 1993, with the peace camp hoping it would become autonomous or a part of Egypt. Meanwhile, the nationalist, right-wing camp desired to incorporate it into the “Eretz Israel” they envisioned replacing Palestine.

The Oslo Accords enabled Israel to reaffirm the Strip’s status as a distinct geopolitical entity, not just distinct from the rest of Palestine, but also distinct from the West Bank. Both were nominally under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but any human movement between them was contingent on Israel’s good will. This was a rare occurrence in the circumstances, and it nearly vanished when Netanyahu took power in 1996. Simultaneously, Israel controlled, and continues to control, the water and electricity infrastructure. Since 1993, it has used this control to safeguard the Jewish settler community’s welfare on the one hand, and to blackmail the Palestinian inhabitants into submission on the other. The people of the Strip have thus been forced to choose between being internees, captives, or inmates in an impossible human space for the last fifty years.

This is the historical context in which we should view Israel’s violent clashes with Hamas since 2006. In light of this, we must reject Israel’s actions as part of the “war on terror” or as a “war of self-defense.” Nor should we accept Hamas’ portrayal as an extension of al-Qaeda, as a component of the Islamic State network, or as a pawn in an Iranian plot to control the region. If there is a dark side to Hamas’ presence in Gaza, it can be found in the group’s early actions against other Palestinian factions from 2005 to 2007. The primary conflict occurred with Fatah in the Gaza Strip, but both sides helped contribute to the ensuing friction, which burst into an open civil war. The conflict erupted in 2006, after Hamas won legislative elections and formed a government that included a Hamas minister in charge of security forces. President Abbas transferred that duty to the head of the Palestinian intelligence service, a Fatah member, in an attempt to weaken Hamas. In response, Hamas established its own security forces in the Strip.

In December 2006, a heated exchange between the Presidential Guard and Hamas security forces at the Rafah crossing sparked a conflict that lasted until the summer of 2007. The Presidential Guard was a 3,000-strong Fatah military unit composed primarily of Abbas’s loyalists. It had been trained in Egypt and Jordan by American advisers (Washington had allocated almost 60 million dollars to its maintenance). The incident was precipitated by Israel’s refusal to allow Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to enter the Strip, despite the fact that he was carrying tens of millions of dollars in cash donations from the Arab world. Hamas forces then stormed the Presidential Guard-manned border control, sparking fighting. (Ibrahim Razzaq, “Reporter’s Family Caught in Gunfire,” Boston Globe, May 17, 2007—one of numerous eyewitness accounts of those trying days.)

Following that, the situation rapidly deteriorated. After crossing into the Strip, Haniyeh’s car was attacked. Hamas accused Fatah for the attacks. Clashes erupted throughout the Strip and the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority decided the same month to depose Hamas’s government and replace it with an emergency cabinet. This precipitated the most severe confrontations between the two sides, which persisted until the end of May 2007 and resulted in the deaths of dozens of people and numerous injuries (it is estimated that 120 people died). The conflict was resolved only after Palestine’s government was divided into two entities: one in Ramallah and another in Gaza. (BBC News, “Palestine Papers: UK’s MI6 ‘tried to weaken Hamas,’” January 25, 2011).

While both sides contributed to the carnage, there was also an external factor that pitted Fatah against Hamas (as revealed by the Palestine papers leaked to Al Jazeera in 2007). Preventing a possible Hamas stronghold in the Gaza Strip, following Israel’s withdrawal, was suggested to Fatah as early as 2004 by the British intelligence service MI6, which drew up a security plan aimed at “encouraging and enabling the Palestinian Authority to fully meet its security obligations… by degrading the capabilities of the rejectionists” (which the document later refers to as a terrorist group). (Ian Black, “Palestine Papers Reveal MI6 Drew up Plan for Crackdown on Hamas,” Guardian, January 25, 2011.).

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister at the time, took a special interest in the Palestine issue, hoping to have an impact that would vindicate or absolve him of his disastrous Iraq adventure. According to The Guardian, his role was to encourage Fatah to crack down on Hamas. (A sample of his views can be found in Yuval Steinitz’s New York Times article, “How Palestinian Hate Prevents Peace”)

Israel and the US offered similar advice to Fatah in an effort to prevent Hamas from seizing control of the Gaza Strip. However, things devolved into chaos, and the preemptive strategy backfired in a variety of ways. This was partly a struggle between democratically elected officials and those who still struggled to accept the public verdict. However, that was far from the entire story. What transpired in Gaza was a battle between the US and Israel’s local proxies: primarily Fatah and Palestinian Authority members, the majority of whom became proxies unintentionally but nonetheless danced to Israel’s tune, and those who opposed them. Hamas’ actions against other factions were later retaliated against by the PA in the West Bank. One would have a difficult time condoning or cheering either action. Nonetheless, secular Palestinians’ opposition to the establishment of a theocracy is understandable, and, as in many other parts of the Middle East, the struggle over the role of religion and tradition in society will continue in Palestine as well. For the time being, Hamas retains the support, and in many ways the admiration, of a sizable number of secular Palestinians for the tenacity with which it fights Israel. Indeed, it is this struggle that is the central issue.

According to the Israeli government’s official narrative, “Hamas is a terrorist organization that commits heinous acts against a peaceful Israel that has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip.” However, was Israel’s withdrawal motivated by a desire for peace? The answer is emphatically NO.

To gain a better understanding of the situation, we must go all the way back to April 18, 2004, the day after Hamas leader Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi was assassinated. On that day, Israeli radio interviewed Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee and a close aide to Benjamin Netanyahu. He taught Western philosophy at the Haifa University prior to becoming a politician. Steinitz claimed that Descartes shaped his worldview, but as a politician, he appears to have been more influenced by romantic nationalists such as Gobineau and Fichte, who emphasized racial purity as a prerequisite for national excellence. (Reshet Bet, Israel Broadcast, April 18, 2004.) The translation of these European concepts of racial superiority into the Israeli context became clear when the interviewer inquired about the government’s plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Both interviewer and interviewee giggled as they agreed that the policy should include the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership, which amounts to approximately 40,000 Palestinian Authority members. “I am so happy,” Steinitz said, “that the Americans have finally come to their senses and are fully supporting our policies.” (Benny Morris, Channel One, 18 April 2004; see also Joel Beinin, “No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism,” MERIP, 230 (Spring 2004).) On the same day, Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University reiterated his support for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, claiming it was the only way to resolve the conflict. (Pappe, “Revisiting 1967.).

Opinions that were once considered marginal, if not lunatic, were now at the heart of the Israeli Jewish consensus, disseminated as the one and only truth by establishment academics on prime-time television. Israel in 2004 was a paranoid society, hell-bent on putting an end to the conflict through force and destruction, regardless of the cost to society or potential victims. Frequently, this elite received support only from the US administration and Western political elites, while the rest of the world’s more conscientious observers stood helpless and befuddled. Israel was comparable to a plane flying on autopilot; the course was predetermined, as was the speed. The goal was to establish a Greater Israel that would encompass half of the West Bank and a small portion of the Gaza Strip (thus amounting to almost 90 percent of historical Palestine). A Greater Israel without a Palestinian presence, separated by high walls from the indigenous population, which was to be crammed into two massive prison camps in Gaza and what remained of the West Bank. Palestinians in Israel could either join the millions of refugees living in camps or submit to an apartheid system of discrimination and abuse, according to this vision.

The same year (2004), the Americans oversaw the implementation of what they dubbed the “Road Map” to peace. This was a ridiculous notion first floated by President Bush in the summer of 2002, and was even more implausible than the Oslo Accord. The idea was to offer the Palestinians an economic recovery plan in exchange for a three-year reduction in Israel’s military presence in parts of the occupied territories. Following that, another summit would bring the conflict to an end for good.

The media in many parts of the Western world conflated the Road Map and Israel’s vision of a Greater Israel (including autonomous Palestinian enclaves), portraying both as the only path to peace and stability. The task of bringing this vision to fruition was entrusted to “the Quartet” (acronym for the Middle East Quartet, or occasionally the Madrid Quartet), which was established in 2002 to enable the UN, the US, Russia, and the EU to work cooperatively on Israel-Palestine peace. The Quartet, essentially a coordination body comprised of the foreign ministers of all four members, became more active in 2007 when it appointed Tony Blair as its special envoy to the Middle East. Blair contracted the entire new wing of Jerusalem’s legendary American Colony hotel as his headquarters. This, like Blair’s salary, was a wasteful operation.

The Quartet’s spokespeople promoted a peace discourse that included references to a complete Israeli withdrawal, the abolition of Jewish settlements, and a two-state solution. This instilled hope in some observers who continued to believe that this course was rational.

However, the Road Map, like the Oslo Accord, enabled Israel to continue implementing its unilateral plan to create Greater Israel on the ground. The difference this time was that Ariel Sharon, a far more focused and determined politician than Rabin, Peres, or Netanyahu, was the architect. He employed an unexpected gambit that few anticipated: he offered to evict Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip. Sharon floated this proposal in 2003 and then pressed his colleagues to accept it within a year and a half. In 2005, the army was dispatched to forcibly evict the resisting settlers. What motivated this choice?

Israel’s successive governments have been unequivocal about the West Bank’s future, but less certain about the Gaza Strip’s fate. (Ari Shavit, “PM Aide: Gaza Plan Aims to Freeze the Peace Process,” Haaretz, October 6, 2004.) The strategy for the West Bank was to keep it under direct or indirect Israeli control. Since 1967, most governments, including Sharon’s, have hoped that this rule would be implemented as part of a “peace process.” In this vision, the West Bank could become a state if it remained a Bantustan. This was Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan’s original vision in 1967; areas densely populated by Palestinians should be governed from the outside. However, when it came to the Gaza Strip, the situation was quite different. Sharon agreed with the early governments’ decision to send settlers into the heart of the Gaza Strip, just as he supported the construction of settlements in the Sinai Peninsula, which were eventually evicted under the bilateral peace agreement with Egypt. In the twenty-first century, he came to accept the pragmatic views of prominent members of both the Likud and Labor parties regarding the possibility of withdrawing from Gaza in order to maintain control of the West Bank. (Haaretz, April 17, 2004.).

Prior to the Oslo process, the presence of Jewish settlers in the Strip did not complicate matters; however, once the new concept of a Palestinian Authority emerged, they became a liability rather than an asset for Israel. As a result, many Israeli policymakers, even those who were initially opposed to eviction, sought ways to erase the Strip from their minds and hearts. This became clear following the signing of the Accord, when the Strip was encircled by a barbed-wire fence and access to Israel and the West Bank for Gazan workers was severely restricted. Strategically, control of Gaza from the outside was easier under the new arrangement, but this was not entirely possible while the settler community remained inside.

One possibility was to partition the Strip into a Jewish sector with direct access to Israel and a Palestinian sector. This strategy worked well until the Second Intifada began. The road that connected the settlements, dubbed the Gush Qatif block, was an obvious target for the uprising. The settlers’ vulnerability was fully exposed. Israeli army tactics during this conflict included massive bombardments and destruction of rebellious Palestinian pockets, which resulted in the massacre of innocent Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Due to the presence of Jewish settlers, these tactics were difficult to implement in the dense Gaza Strip. Thus, it was unsurprising that a year after the most heinous military assault on the West Bank, operation “Defensive Shield,” Sharon considered evicting Gaza settlers in order to facilitate a retaliatory policy.

In 2004, unable to impose his political will on the Strip, he instead called for a series of Hamas leader assassinations. Sharon hoped to influence the future by assassinating Abdul al-Rantisi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the two top leaders (killed on March 17, 2004). Even a sober source such as Haaretz assumed that Hamas would lose its support base in the Gaza Strip and be diminished to an ineffective presence in Damascus, which Israel would attack if necessary. The newspaper was also taken aback by the US government’s support for the assassinations (although both the paper and the Americans would be much less supportive of thsi policy later on) (Pappe, “Revisiting 1967.”). These assassinations occurred prior to Hamas’s 2006 election victory and takeover of the Gaza Strip. In other words, Israeli policy did not erode Hamas’ popularity or power; on the contrary, it increased it. Sharon desired that the Palestinian Authority take control of Gaza and treat it similarly to Area A in the West Bank; however, this outcome never occurred. Thus, Sharon was forced to choose between two approaches to Gaza: either clear out the settlers in order to retaliate against Hamas without endangering Israeli citizens, or withdraw entirely from the region in order to refocus his efforts on annexing the West Bank, or portions of it.

Sharon orchestrated a charade that everyone fell for in order to ensure that the second alternative was understood internationally. As he began making noises about evicting the settlers from the Strip, Gush Emunim compared the action to the Holocaust and staged a real-time television show as they were physically evicted from their homes. There appeared to be a civil war raging in Israel between those who supported the settlers and those on the left, including Sharon’s former adversaries, who supported his plan for a peace initiative. (Ali Abunimah, “Why All the Fuss About the Bush–Sharon Meeting,” Electronic Intifada, April 14, 2014.).

This move weakened, and in some cases completely eliminated, dissenting voices within Israel. Sharon argued that with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and Hamas’ ascendancy in the territory, there was no point in advancing grandiose concepts such as the Oslo Accord. He proposed, and his successor, Ehud Olmert, agreed, that the status quo be maintained in the interim. While it was necessary to contain Hamas in Gaza, there was no rush to resolve the West Bank issue. Olmert coined the term “unilateralism” to describe this policy: in the absence of meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians in the near future, Israel should unilaterally decide which parts of the West Bank it wanted to annex and which could be run autonomously by the Palestinian Authority. Israeli policymakers believed that, if not in public declarations, then as a reality on the ground, this course of action would be acceptable to both the Quartet and the Palestinian Authority. It had appeared to work up to this point.

With no strong international pressure and a feeble PA as a neighbor, the majority of Israelis did not consider the West Bank strategy to be a priority. As demonstrated by election campaigns since 2005, Jewish society has preferred to discuss socioeconomic issues, the role of religion in society, and the war on Hamas and Hezbollah. The Labor Party, the main opposition party, has generally shared the coalition government’s vision, and has thus been both inside and outside government since 2005. When it came to the West Bank or resolving the Palestine question, it appeared as though Israeli Jewish society had reached a consensus. What solidified that sense of consensus was Sharon’s right-wing government’s eviction of Gaza settlers. For those on the left of the Likud, Sharon’s move was a gesture of peace and a courageous confrontation with the settlers. He became a leftist hero as well as a center- and moderate-right hero, similar to de Gaulle’s expulsion of the pied noir from Algeria for the sake of peace. The Palestinian reaction in the Gaza Strip and subsequent criticism of Israeli policies by the PA were interpreted as evidence of the Palestinians’ lack of a sound or reliable peace partner.

Apart from courageous journalists such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass at Haaretz and a few anti-Zionist organizations, Jewish society in Israel has been essentially silent, allowing governments to pursue any policy toward the Palestinians they see fit since 2005. This explains why, during the 2011 protest movement that mobilized half a million Israelis (out of a population of seven million) against the government’s policies, the occupation and its atrocities were not mentioned. This absence of public debate and criticism had already enabled Sharon in his final year in power, 2005, to authorize additional killings of unarmed Palestinians and to starve the occupied society through curfews and extended periods of closure. And when Palestinians in the occupied territories occasionally rebelled, the government gained the authority to respond with even greater vigour and determination.

Previous American administrations supported Israeli policies regardless of their impact on or perception by Palestinians. However, this support used to require negotiation and some back and forth. Even after the Second Intifada began in October 2000, some in Washington attempted to disassociate the US from Israel’s response to the uprising. For a time, Americans appeared uneasy about the fact that several Palestinians were being killed daily, with a disproportionate number of children among the victims. Additionally, there was some unease regarding Israel’s use of collective punishments, house demolitions, and arrests without trial or charges. However, they became accustomed to all of this, and when the Israeli Jewish consensus sanctioned the assault on the West Bank in April 2002, an unprecedented act of cruelty in the occupation’s vicious history, the US administration objected only to unilateral acts of annexation and settlement, which were expressly prohibited under the EU–American-sponsored Road Map.

Sharon received US and UK support for colonialization in the West Bank in exchange for his withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2004. His proposal for a consensual peace plan, which passed in Israel, was initially rejected by the Americans as unproductive (the rest of the world condemned it in stronger terms). The Israelis, on the other hand, hoped that the parallels between American and British conduct in Iraq and Israel’s policies in Palestine would sway the US, and they were correct. It is worth noting that Washington hesitated until the very last moment before authorizing Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza. On the tarmac of Ben-Gurion airport on April 13, 2004, a bizarre scene unfolded. For several hours after its scheduled departure, the prime minister’s jet remained stationary. Within, Sharon had refused to allow it to depart for Washington until he obtained US approval for his new “disengagement” strategy. President Bush endorsed the disengagement in its entirety. His advisors struggled to comprehend the letter Sharon had requested Bush sign as part of the US endorsement. It included an American commitment to refrain from future pressure on Israel regarding the status of the peace process and to exclude the right of return from any future negotiations. Sharon convinced Bush’s aides that without American support, he would be unable to rally the Israeli public behind his disengagement plan. (Yediot Ahronoth, 22 April 2014).

Historically, it has taken time for US officials to concede to Israeli politicians’ desire for consensus. This time, however, it only took three hours. We now know that Sharon’s sense of urgency was motivated by another factor: he was aware that he was under investigation by the police on serious corruption charges and needed to convince the Israeli public to trust him in the face of a pending court case. “The wider the investigation, the wider the disengagement,” said Yossi Sarid, a left-wing Knesset member, referring to the connection between Sharon’s legal troubles and his commitment to the withdrawal. (From the International Court of Justice’s website, “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”). The US administration’s decision-making process should have taken significantly longer than it did. In essence, Sharon was pleading with President Bush to abandon nearly every commitment made by the Americans regarding Palestine. Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and closure of a handful of settlements there, as well as several others in the West Bank, were proposed in exchange for Israel annexing the majority of West Bank settlements. Additionally, the Americans were well aware of how another critical piece fit into this puzzle. For Sharon, annexing those parts of the West Bank he desired would require the completion of the wall Israel began building in 2003, bisecting the West Bank’s Palestinian areas. He had not anticipated international opposition, and the wall became the occupation’s most iconic symbol, to the point where the international court of justice ruled that it violated human rights. (Initially opposed to the disengagement in March 2004, Beilin openly supported it beginning in July 2004. (Channel One interview, July 4, 2004)).

While Sharon waited in his jet, Washington endorsed a plan that left the majority of the West Bank in Israeli hands and all refugees in exile, as well as its tacit approval of the wall. Sharon chose the ideal President of the United States as a potential ally for his new plans. President George W. Bush was heavily influenced by Christian Zionists and may have shared their belief that the presence of Jews in the Holy Land was necessary for the fulfillment of a doomsday scenario that could herald Christ’s Second Coming. Bush’s more secular neocon advisers had been impressed by Israel’s promises of eviction and peace in conjunction with the war against Hamas. Israeli operations that appeared to be successful, most notably the targeted assassinations in 2004, served as a proxy proof that America’s own “war on terror” was destined to succeed. In reality, Israel’s “success” was a cynical distortion of the reality on the ground. Curfews and closures have resulted in a relative decline in Palestinian guerrilla and armed resistance activity, as well as the confinement of more than 2 million people in their homes for extended periods of time without work or food. Even neoconservatives should have recognized that this would not be a sustainable solution to the hostility and violence provoked by an occupying power, whether in Iraq or Palestine.

Sharon’s plan was approved by Bush’s spin doctors, who were able to spin it as another step toward peace and a way to divert attention away from the Iraq debacle. It was probably also acceptable to more even-tempered advisers, who were so desperate for progress that they convinced themselves the plan offered a chance for peace and a better future. These people have long since lost the ability to distinguish between language’s mesmerizing power and the reality it purports to describe. As long as the plan contained the magic word “withdrawal,” it was viewed as essentially a good thing by some usually level-headed journalists in the United States, by the leaders of the Israeli Labor party (dedicated to joining Sharon’s government in the name of the sacred consensus), and by Yossi Beilin, the newly elected leader of Israel’s leftist Meretz party.

Sharon realized by the end of 2004 that he had no reason to fear external pressure. The governments of Europe and the United States were either unwilling or unable to put an end to the occupation and avert further Palestinian destruction. Israelis willing to participate in anti-occupation movements found themselves outnumbered and demoralized by the new consensus. It’s unsurprising that around that time, civil societies in Europe and the United States recognized the possibility of playing a significant role in the conflict and mobilized around the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Numerous organizations, unions, and individuals committed to a new public effort, vowing to do everything possible to convince Israelis that Sharon’s policies had a cost.

Since then, the West has attempted every possible means, from academic boycotts to economic sanctions. At home, the message was equally clear: their governments were just as accountable as Israel for the Palestinian people’s past, present, and future catastrophes. The BDS movement pressed for a reversal of Sharon’s unilateral strategy, not only for moral or historical reasons, but also for the sake of the West’s security and even survival. As the violence that has erupted in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 has painfully demonstrated, the Palestine conflict weakened the multicultural fabric of Western society by driving the US and the Muslim world further apart and into a nightmare relationship. Applying pressure to Israel appeared to be a small price to pay for global peace, regional stability, and Palestinian reconciliation.

Nonetheless, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza became a favorite talking point among Israel’s defenders. They will assert that Israel has consistently done everything possible to achieve peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. They will point to alleged “sacrifices” made by Israel in pursuit of this lofty goal. Perhaps the most frequently cited example is Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza; naturally, this is always followed by an admission that such an approach failed and that Palestinians cannot be satisfied.

Putting aside the fact that adhering to international law is not a compromise, this argument has a significant flaw: the Gaza strip remains occupied.

While it is true that Israel withdrew its forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005, this does not mean that the occupation ended. How can this be?

There is widespread misunderstanding about what constitutes military occupation. Many believe that boots on the ground are required to determine whether an area is occupied, but this is no longer the case. To be considered occupied, an area must be under the occupying state’s “effective control.” This concept becomes even clearer when we consider Israeli surveillance and monitoring technology, which enables greater control of an area by controlling key positions without the need for a permanent occupation force on the ground.

Israel is without a doubt in effective control of the Gaza Strip; Israeli legal experts would naturally argue otherwise, but these same experts argued that Gaza was already unoccupied prior to Israel’s withdrawal of forces and settlers. Israel maintains complete control over virtually every aspect of life in Gaza. Israel controls Gaza’s airspace, territorial waters, no-go zones within the strip, and even the population registry, which means Israel has the authority to determine who is and is not a Palestinian inside the Gaza strip. What kind of sovereign, non-occupied entity is incapable of identifying its citizens?

This is not speculation, but the position of the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and a plethora of other international organizations specializing in human rights and international humanitarian law.

However, we must place Israel’s assertions that Gaza is not occupied in their proper historical context. As previously stated, Israel has always maintained that the Gaza strip is unoccupied, even with its troops, settlements, and military bases. Indeed, Israel continues to assert the same position regarding the West Bank. The argument is that in order for an occupation to exist, a territory must be a constituent of a sovereign state, which the West Bank and Gaza Strip were not, despite their control by other sovereign states. This same justification is used to argue that the Geneva conventions and, more broadly, international and humanitarian law do not apply to Palestinians. Of course, the world community has never accepted this argument, which continues to maintain that these areas are occupied.

Israel’s legal claims have never been made in good faith. If Israel can legally argue that an area containing thousands of soldiers and dozens of bases and settlements is not occupied, it will undoubtedly argue the same for Gaza today.

As noble as Israelis portray the withdrawal from Gaza, there were other less altruistic motives, as articulated by Dov Weisglas, a top aide to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon:

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

He went on to say:

“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde, it supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

Undeniably, he was correct. For instance, whenever the Palestinian Authority criticized Israel’s intransigence or its new settlement and colonization projects in the West Bank, Israel would respond that they had given up Gaza and made enormous sacrifices for peace. This was a successful strategy for Israel to avoid criticism for its violations of international law and shift the burden of compromise to the Palestinians. “Compromise”, in this context, came to mean consenting to the brazen colonization of the vast majority of the West Bank. Weisglas boasted:

“That is exactly what happened, you know, the term ‘peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen…. what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.”

Furthermore, Israel was well aware that it was not actually relinquishing control of the Gaza strip, but rather reshaping the occupation’s appearance and function. They recognized that, despite its new form, the occupation would continue to elicit resistance from those inside the strip. Israel could then use this resistance to demonstrate that “relinquishing” land in exchange for peace with the Palestinians was an impossible task, as the Palestinians would continue to attack it regardless of what Israel did. This has served as a major argument for Israel’s continued refusal to withdraw from any part of the West Bank.

Thus, the withdrawal from Gaza did not effectively end the occupation, and it was most emphatically not a concession made in the name of peace with the Palestinians. This is not conjecture; this is not a conspiratorial interpretation or analysis of the policy.

Gaza serves as a constant reminder of Israel’s birth: a small strip of land teeming with refugees whose homes have been seized by foreign colonists. Israel can occupy, besiege, and bomb the strip indefinitely, but it will never crush the spirit of those yearning for freedom and a return to their stolen homes. It is our responsibility to assist them in any way possible, even if that means simply refusing to allow Israel to fabricate its own false narrative and pass it off as irrefutable fact.

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Updated on يونيو 7, 2023

MYTH: The Israeli Disengagement from Gaza Was an Act of Peace.

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