From Israel’s Gaza withdrawal in 2005 to the Gaza genocide of today

Most of the press reporting on the proposal offered by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will be treated for at least a few days, maybe a few weeks, as a hopeful moment, until the mostly likely outcome becomes too obvious to avoid: that this ceasefire deal is just another momentary diversion from the Israeli’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians.

Über-Realist Stephen Walt gives this assessment of the prospects for the proposed peace plan for Gaza under which it would be put under the rule of board headed by Donald Trump with Tony Blair as colonial viceroy: (1)

Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill in this hour-long report describes the context and many of the major provisions of the plan. (2) The best that can be said about it at this point is that it doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility that it would lead to some kind of improvement in the current situation, i.e., that it’s something more than a PR diversion from the continuation of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel is performing with full support from the US and the warmongering Trump Administration.

Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy explains the process that occurred in 2005 which appeared to many at the time to be a hopeful sign, the Israeli governments removal of the illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza, actually wound up being a framework that contributed to today’s disaster.

In other words, October 7 was seen as an opportunity to resolve the demographic question not by severing Gaza from the rest of Palestine, but by annihilating and expelling its population, before resettling the territory. We can only begin to grasp the scale of those killed and maimed, often with life-altering injuries; Gaza is now home to the highest number of child amputees anywhere in the world. And beyond the human toll, Gaza is being physically rendered to dust. These losses are transformative on a national scale, and fundamentally affect any consideration of a future for Palestine and Palestinians. (3)

Hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was considered a war hero by Israelis, took that action which was widely perceived as at least a step toward a stable peace process. After all, it was removing illegal Israeli settlements, putting Sharon’s government at odds with the hardline rightwingers in the settler movement.

But Sharon’s primary concern with that move was to shift the Israeli government’s focus to expanding illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. One of Sharon’s notable accomplishments had been inciting what became known as the Second Intifada (2000-2005), also known as the Al-Aqsa-Intifada. As Jimmy Carter described it:

In September 2000, with Prime Minister Barak's reluctant approval, Ariel Sharon and an escort of several hundred policemen went to the Temple Mount complex, site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, where he declared that the Islamic holy site would remain under permanent Israeli control. The former military leader was accused by many Israelis of purposely inflaming emotions to provoke a furious response and obstruct any potential success of ongoing peace talks. Combining their reaction to this event with their frustration over Israel's failure to implement the Oslo Agreement, the Palestinians responded with a · further outbreak of violence, which was to be known as the second intifada. [my emphasis] (4)

Sharon was particularly focused on promoting illegal settlements in the West Bank to make any possibility of the West Bank being part of an independent Palestinian state. He and other Israeli governments have succeeded in that goal, even though the failed “Oslo process” was based on the idea of an eventual two-state solution with an independent Palestine. As a practical matter, an actual peace settlement would have to be based on what Netanyahu calls Eretz Israel, the area also known as “from the river to the sea.” In other words, it would have to be a single state incorporating present-day Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (There are also related considerations around the areas of Syria that Israel has illegally occupied, including the Golan Heights.)

Kenneth Stein in 2024 paid Carter what sounds like a compliment, though he very much meant it as a criticism:

By convening a global group of senior statespeople in 2007 that came to be known as “The Elders,” [Carter] created another megaphone with which to regularly chastise Israel and speak out on a dozen other matters. He clobbered Israel and its leaders repeatedly with unbridled criticism for settlement building, human rights violations, and the fraught relationship with Palestinians living in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. More than any Middle Eastern leader or public figure anywhere, he spoke out perennially in favor of the creation of a Palestinian state and blamed the Israelis for not promoting Palestinian self-determination. [my emphasis] (5)

Levy describes the coldly cynical side of Sharon’s 2005 disengagement plan:

To understand the legacy of Israel’s Gaza disengagement, a useful starting point is to recall how Ariel Sharon himself defined the intentions behind the move in 2005. While ignored by his right-wing critics, Sharon explicitly stated that the unilateral withdrawal was conceived to offset pressure for a deeper pullback in the more biblically and strategically salient parts of the West Bank that Israel occupied.

Sharon’s vision for the Palestinians was one of permanent subjugation without political rights, modeled on the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, which he had been impressed by during a visit in the early 1980s. “The disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Sharon’s chief of staff Dov Weissglass famously commented. “You prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Disengagement supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” [my emphasis]

And in Levy’s view, liberal Zionists in Israel used the occasion to effectively drop their commitment to a meaningful long-term peace process:

Indeed, the response of the so-called liberal Zionist camp sounds rather familiar: instead of building on the disengagement to push for a wider peace with the Palestinians, they emphasized the need to reunify Jewish-Israeli ranks. The era of tzav piyus (a call for internal Jewish-Israeli reconciliation) was ushered in, Palestinians be damned. This revealed the depth of the settler-colonial mindset that traversed most of the Zionist camp, where liberal politicians serially failed to question continued Israeli settlement and Palestinian displacement in the West Bank as a matter of principle, only objecting to issues of location and degree.

Perhaps it is a mistake to impute an excess of strategic brilliance, foresight, and patience to the settler movement. Nevertheless, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In this instance, the national-religious settler class at least had a coherent ideology and a long-term strategy to back it up; liberal Zionists apparently had neither. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Can a ‘one-sided, unserious’ US plan deliver peace to Gaza? Al Jazeera English YouTube channel. <https://youtu.be/TOYP9SbSAB8?si=GdoFkBCqwk2NGno_> (Accessed: 2025-05-10).

(2) Breaking Down Trump’s 20-Point Gaza Proposal. Drop Site News YouTube channel 09/30/2025. <https://www.youtube.com/live/vthE7EgUIcI?si=j2tO4quS0V-aaDPY> (Accessed: 2025-05-10).

(3) Levy, Daniel (2025): How Israel’s Gaza ‘disengagement’ planted the seeds of today’s genocide. +972 Magazine 09/10/2025. <https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-disengagement-2005-genocide/> (Accessed: 2025-05-10).

(4) Carter, Jimmy (2006): Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, 149-150. New York: Simon & Schuster.

(5) Stein, Kenneth (2024): Jimmy Carter’s Middle East Legacies. Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 18:2, 206. <https://doi.org/10.1080/23739770.2024.2386757> (Accessed: 2025-05-10).