Israel left Gaza in 2005 and let the Palestinians build a terror machine that will take months to undo. How did Israel get here?
There is a story of a pregnant woman immediately prior to her delivery making a visit to a very famous rabbi in Poland of yore. She said that as she was about to give birth, she wanted to understand the laws of kosher food for the benefit of her child. The rabbi looked at her, smiled, and said, “My dear, you are already nine months too late.”
Gaza. After 1948, Egypt ruled it with an iron fist. One can look at contemporary stories showing that the Egyptian soldiers stationed in Gaza were ruthless with the local population, whom they held in contempt. Israel took the Sinai and Gaza in the lightning victory of 1967. Israel gave up on oil reserves and strategic bases in returning Sinai to Egypt in 1978 for peace. Israel offered Gaza and the Egyptians, not surprisingly, turned down the extra land. So Israel had Gaza and under Housing Minister Ariel Sharon, Jewish communities were built in what was referred to as “Gush Katif”. I visited my wife’s cousins once in the town of Neve Dekalim and it was beautiful. My business partner came from a neighboring town. Israel’s control of Gaza was not for free. Soldiers were at times killed, as were civilians. A young American woman visiting Gaza was killed in a Hamas bus bomb. An older Israeli woman who took Palestinians to agricultural work was stabbed to death by one of the workers she transported. An American diplomatic convoy sent from Tel Aviv to interview Palestinians for Fulbright fellowships was blown up. If Israel had stayed in Gaza, would the death toll have pushed the government to get out, as it had in southern Lebanon, where soldiers no longer wanted to patrol for fear of Hezbollah attack?
One small point on Israeli politics that is not well understood is that it would appear that Israeli generals who go into politics split between right and left. Ariel Sharon left the army and was called the “bulldozer” as he pushed development in the lands captured in 1967. For every Sharon, there is an Ehud Barak and a Moshe Dayan who break left. It would appear that some generals feel that with enough firepower, the problems with the Palestinians could be solved; their peers come to the opposite conclusion and believe that only through negotiations can the bloodshed and violence be ended once and for all.
Why did Israel leave Gaza? Ehud Olmert was one of the lowest numbers in the Likud faction in the Knesset at the time. This fact did not stop his friend, Ariel Sharon, from making him vice-premier. Olmert was the one who let the world know via a Jerusalem Post interview that Israel was unilaterally leaving Gaza and the northern portion of Samaria. Why would Israel simply pull out, especially as Gaza had 50,000 Israelis living in it, besides key IDF installations? His argument amounted to the following: peace talks were going nowhere with the Palestinians and would not improve any time soon. We will withdraw and then the world community can leave us alone for 20 years, as we did our part for “land for peace.” The concept he outlined was dead on arrival, as UN head Kofi Annan infamously noted, this withdrawal would be the first of several more withdrawals. So much for getting ahead of the international curve.
The decision to leave Gaza tore Israeli society apart. Sharon famously gave several parties hundreds of millions of shekels for their pet interests in exchange for their votes to evacuate Gush Katif. Binyamin Netanyahu quit the Knesset in protest over the withdrawal. The vote was close but it went in favor of leaving. When the actual date of departure arrived in the summer of 2005, horrible scenes were shown every night on TV of settlers who refused to leave and had to be physically removed by Jewish soldiers who tried to extricate their brothers and sisters in a dignified but firm manner. The government shamelessly put many of those removed from Gaza into glorified trailers and really made little effort to make their transition to a new life positive. My business partner today lives in a town set aside for the children of those removed from Gaza. The final scene showed IDF soldiers locking a fence, with all Israelis already evacuated.
With Israel’s departure, the Palestinians—then under Palestinian Authority rule—did not waste time in destroying whatever infrastructure the Israelis had left behind. Hot houses that had generated millions in sales to Europe (“Gush Katif” literally means the “Harvesting Block”) were dismantled by frenzied Gazans. What started as katyushas on local Israeli towns moved to bigger and more sophisticated rockets with longer range. The massive tunnel that Israel displayed yesterday was not born out of nowhere. It looks like a miniature version of the Chunnel. It is large enough to allow a car to pass through and has its own short gauge rail line. All of this was built with the Israelis long gone, and supplies brought into the strip first and foremost diverted to war production. There is a video showing Palestinians working on the massive structure, and one wonders what they could have done if they had used the same materials and efforts on something more productive, say factories or schools.
So for 20 years, unburdened Palestinians built up an arsenal that Israel has said will take minimally several more months to dismantle. Literally, under every bed is an RPG and in the incubators of a hospital were found rifles. I don’t know if they mistake grenades for avocados but the place is brimming with all kinds of weaponry, there for the purpose of killing Jews and destroying the state of Israel. So while the barbaric attack of 10/7 was planned meticulously over one or two years, the weapons, tunnels, manpower, and equipment were the work of two decades without supervision of Israel, the UN, or even the Palestinian Authority. There is no question that Israel had serious intelligence, military, and leadership failures related to the attack. The attack though was not born with Hamas’ planning but rather with the exit of Israeli soldiers in 2005.
So where does Gaza go from here? Nobody seems to know. The Arabs are smart enough to offer money but no boots on the ground. Egypt does not want it and she does not want the residents to move into Sinai. Israel has promised that it will not return to Gaza, though there are many who dream of rebuilding Gush Katif. The Palestinian Authority would just let the Gazans re-arm, as they wish to do. One terrorist told an Israeli woman prior to her release from captivity not to go back to her kibbutz as they will be coming again. One Palestinian source claims that Yitzhak Rabin wished that a large wave would come and wash Gaza away. I don’t know if the story is true but one can understand the sentiment: nobody knows what to do with it to guarantee no more rockets on Israeli towns.
Life in Israel is still bifurcated. About 100,000 Israelis from the north and south are in hotels in the middle of the country and have been away from their homes for two months while the rest of the country seems to function mostly normally. Ethiopian Airlines restarted flights to Tel Aviv and Lufthansa says that it will come back next month. The only way to get from Israel directly to the States is with El-Al, and the ticket prices are up with the planes in the stratosphere. For the past few weeks, there has not been any iceberg lettuce in the local market (“shuk”). One of the sellers said that the Hamas terrorists—again—burned down the major hot houses in the south that produce the bug-free lettuce and thus there is a major shortage. People in the south say that they are having a hard time using their car key fobs, as Israeli jamming of Gaza is interfering with these devices as well. On Friday night, we heard a warning siren here in Jerusalem and then two explosions of Iron Dome missiles over our heads. One of my boys pointed out that Israelis in the south have lived with such attacks for a decade and were ignored by the government in Jerusalem. So now the rockets come to Jerusalem.
Israel’s goal is quiet in the north and quiet in the south. While a diplomatic effort is brewing to move Hezbollah away from the border area, nobody seems to know what to do with Gaza to reach a rocket-free future. I don’t think that Israel, even after the war is ostensibly over, is going to be leaving Gaza anytime soon. They can flood the tunnels and confiscate the weapons. But as long as Israel is out of Gaza, the same events from 2005-2023 will simply repeat themselves. The Palestinians do not want a state and they don’t want the Jews to have one either.