In the last two weeks, many prominent figures on the right held "celebrations" marking 20 years since the Gaza Disengagement, explaining, as they do every summer, how the withdrawal from Gaza was essentially an expulsion from paradise.
However, this year, right-wing politicians did not limit themselves to the nostalgic party they hold every year about the old, pre-2005 Gaza Strip. They went further, claiming that the October 7 massacre happened because of the disengagement. There is one problem with this historical narrative: It has not even a grain of truth.
Let’s begin by examining the rewriting of history regarding the "pastoral" Gaza Strip before the disengagement. Since 2005, right-wing politicians have tried to convince the public that there was complete peace in the Gaza Strip before the disengagement — and that the settlements in the Gush Katif bloc were a place of incredible tranquility.
However, contrary to the romantic description currently promoted by the right, holding onto the Gaza Strip came at a heavy price. Since the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987, the 8,000 permanent Jewish residents in Gush Katif and the isolated settlements there were targets of thousands of terror attacks, during which dozens were killed and hundreds were injured. Daily terror attacks began with stone-throwing and Molotov cocktails, and over time escalated to bombings and shooting attacks.
Entire army units were dedicated to protecting the lives of the few Israelis living in the Strip. Soldiers patrolled day and night in armored vehicles on dangerous routes, and many of them were killed while securing women and children on their way to educational institutions, clubs, and regional activities. A full battalion of the IDF was allocated to securing the Nitzarim settlement alone.
Between the first Kassam rocket attack in April 2001 and the disengagement in the summer of 2005, approximately 6,000 mortars and Kassams were fired at Gush Katif and the communities surrounding Gaza. 113 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed in terrorist attacks organized and carried out by Gazans during these four years,
So, those telling you about a wonderful paradise that existed in Gaza before the disengagement are lying to your face — it was much closer to hell.
October 7 as a result of the disengagement
Immediately after October 7, right-wing politicians began promoting the false narrative that the massacre happened because of the disengagement, and in recent weeks, this distortion has reached new heights.
The glaring and obvious hole in this false right-wing narrative lies, of course, in the omission of the period between 2005 and 2023 — and this is no accident. After all, for most of these years, Israel was ruled by right-wing governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, so it is important for the historians of the right to erase the unwritten alliance that the right-wing camp formed with the Hamas "devil."
Let’s go back in time. In the summer of 2007, Hamas came to power while Ehud Olmert was prime minister and Netanyahu was still in opposition. Ehud Barak, then defense minister in Olmert's government, formulated the policy of "coexistence with Hamas" because he wanted peace at any cost and refused to understand that Hamas's rule should be toppled, not accommodated.
Who knows better than I do? I worked against Barak’s madness in the cabinet. During Operation Cast Lead, Israel had the opportunity to overthrow Hamas's rule, but due to Barak (with the help of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni), the government settled for delivering a blow to Hamas without defeating it.
Shortly after Cast Lead, Netanyahu won the elections, primarily because he explicitly promised to topple Hamas's rule in the Strip. "We will not stop the IDF, we will complete the job, we will destroy Hamas's terror regime," he said in the famous election ad at the entrance to Ashkelon.
Although Netanyahu promised to topple Hamas, he failed to deliver. Immediately upon returning to power, he chose to form an unwritten alliance with Hamas, aimed at maintaining the division between the West Bank and Gaza to weaken Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority and to prevent diplomatic negotiations.
In other words, not only did Netanyahu adopt Barak’s disastrous policy of coexistence with Hamas, but he also added an ideological "right-wing" component that allowed him to entrench it within the right-wing camp.
For example, in 2019, Netanyahu explained in a Likud faction meeting that his approval for Qatar to transfer money to Hamas was "part of the strategy to separate the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank" and added that "anyone who opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the transfer of money from Qatar to Hamas."
Netanyahu’s unwritten alliance with Hamas
Netanyahu’s efforts to entrench the unwritten alliance with Hamas within the right-wing camp succeeded beyond expectations, and in fact, almost the entire political system supported this policy. Over those years, prominent right-wing politicians praised the unwritten alliance formed with the Hamas "devil."
Amit Segal, who has repeatedly claimed that the disengagement led to the massacre on October 7, wrote exactly seven years ago that Israel (which is a code for Benjamin "We will topple Hamas" Netanyahu) "decided not to defeat Hamas." What was Segal’s position on this decision, you ask? "It’s not an easy choice, but it’s quite logical," he explained.
Arel Segal wrote that "there is strategic logic in Israel’s decision to prefer Hamas’s rule," and Noa Dromi explained that "there is wisdom in an arrangement with Hamas, or any other official terror group in Gaza," because the alternative, namely the Palestinian Authority, "is worse."
In 2019, I explained that Netanyahu supported transferring money to Hamas and maintaining its rule in the strip, despite all the suffering caused by the Hamas "devil" because it prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state and later allowed the right to annex the West Bank.
Segal responded, even then a popular politician of the right-wing camp, that "it makes sense" because it saves Israel from a Palestinian state in the West Bank, and added that "perhaps we should pay some prices." And indeed, we paid those prices with compound interest.
Bezalel Smotrich summarized the unwritten alliance between the right-wing camp and Hamas in one concise sentence — "Hamas is an asset, and the Palestinian Authority is a burden."
The practical consequences of the unwritten alliance with Hamas were disastrous. In September 2014, shortly after Operation Protective Edge, Netanyahu said at the UN that "Hamas is ISIS, and ISIS is Hamas," but in practice, he was so eager to preserve the local ISIS rule that during the operation, he leaked to the media the presentation that the IDF had shown the cabinet, according to which occupying Gaza would cost the lives of hundreds of our soldiers and require a budget of billions of shekels.
But Netanyahu didn’t stop at not defeating Hamas; he also worked tirelessly to preserve its rule in Gaza. When Abu Mazen decided to stop paying salaries to civil servants in Gaza because he knew the money was going to Hamas operatives, Netanyahu pressured him to continue paying them. Abu Mazen refused, so Netanyahu asked Qatar to pay the Hamas civil servants.
The Qataris explained to Netanyahu that if they did so, the US government would impose sanctions on them because Hamas is on the US terror list. Netanyahu then turned to the Trump administration and asked it to grant Qatar special permission to transfer money to Hamas. The Americans agreed to his request, and thus began the flow of Qatari cash into Gaza.
Do you understand? Abu Mazen refused to pay Hamas terrorists, so the Prime Minister of Israel arranged an alternative source of payment for them, removing any obstacle that stood in the way of this process. And for what do you think the billions that Qatar transferred to Gaza were used? Netanyahu himself explained at the time that "whoever allows Hamas to receive money — allows them to receive weapons, and the weapons will be used against us." Indeed, with the money he allowed the Hamas "devil" to receive, weapons were bought that were used in the October 7 massacre.
And now, those who nurtured the alliance with the devil are trying to retroactively justify this terrible monstrosity by shifting the blame from the "Hamas is an asset" policy of right-wing governments to the disengagement.
What comes now
The continued holding of the Gaza Strip, a demographic bomb planted with isolated settlements, was a political, security, and anti-Zionist folly. However, as then and now, the right-wing camp’s goal is to annex Gaza and the West Bank, dismantle the Palestinian Authority, rule over 5 million Palestinians, and ultimately turn Israel into a bi-national apartheid state with an Arab majority.
This was the reason why the right-wing camp supported settling 8,000 Israelis among 1.5 million Gazans (today, there are more than 2 million). The leaders of the right-wing camp and its prominent spokespeople tend to hide this goal or at least blur it because they know that the public does not support the annexation of millions of Palestinians or long-term civil control over their lives. This is a move that would cost many lives (estimated to be at least 30 billion shekels annually).
The mistake was not disengaging from Gaza but deciding not to eradicate Hamas's rule in the strip. When I was a minister in Olmert’s government, I worked tirelessly to bring down Hamas's rule, but unfortunately, Defense Minister Barak managed to convince the cabinet to adopt the "coexistence with Hamas" policy.
Even after I left the Knesset, I continued to walk between senior politicians, security officials, and the media in an attempt to convince them that Hamas’s rule must be destroyed. To my astonishment, I discovered that Netanyahu had even convinced his fiercest rivals of the logic behind the cursed alliance with Hamas.
Olmert’s government, of which I was a member, is therefore responsible for not toppling Hamas’s rule between the summer of 2007 and early 2009, but Netanyahu and the right-wing governments that ruled for most of the period since 2009 deliberately and consciously chose to preserve Hamas's rule in Gaza and even formed an unwritten alliance with it. Therefore, they bear the primary responsibility for the rise of the Hamas monster (even the Bennett-Lapid government, which continued the policy of coexistence with Hamas, shares in the blame).
I decided to write this article after realizing that the entire center-left opposition camp has been silent and disappeared in the face of the right-wing camp's historical rewriting of the disengagement. None of these failed opposition members bothered to rise from their empty chairs to explain the necessity of the disengagement and its importance, or at least to point out the historical distortions.
Poll after poll shows that most Israelis do not want to resettle Gaza, let alone control more than 2 million Gazans. In other words, even after October 7, most Israelis continue to support the rationale behind the disengagement, despite the false narrative about the disengagement that right-wing politicians are trying to instill. But this majority has no political representation.
Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid, and the rest of the empty opposition chairs are not advancing any alternative to the right-wing camp’s policy. They are not even trying to present a political vision that would ensure the downfall of Hamas's rule on the one hand, and keep Israel away from civil management of the Gaza slum and geographical and demographic entanglement with Gazans on the other hand. For this reason as well, opposition leaders must go home.
The nostalgic celebrations for the paradise that was Gaza before the disengagement and the blaming of the disengagement for the October 7 tragedy are part of the despicable attempt by the right-wing camp to erase from history the unwritten alliance it formed with Hamas.
For the fortunate right-wing government, it faces an opposition of empty chairs and a confused, directionless center-left camp. But despite all the right-wing efforts to rewrite history, Netanyahu and the right-wing camp will never be able to erase the mark of Cain of their alliance with the devil from their foreheads.