Israeli forces fire a water cannon on residents of the settlement of Kfar Darom in Gaza, who barricaded themselves on the roof of the synagogue during its evacuation, Aug. 18, 2005. (Zamir Yossi/GPO)

In August 2005, when Israel implemented its “unilateral disengagement plan” in Gaza, it came as a rude jolt to the settler movement. The plan entailed the removal of 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and an additional four in the northern West Bank, with a total of approximately 9,000 settlers relocated. The atmosphere in the country at the time felt as if a tipping point had been reached: it was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a stalwart of the Israeli right, who ordered the withdrawal of the Israeli military and illegal settlements from occupied Palestinian territory.

Twenty years later, how Israel conducted the withdrawal of its settlements from Gaza — and subsequently narrated the fallout — can be understood as a critical juncture in the demise of the two-state paradigm. It was also a harbinger of what is now replacing it: not just separating from the Palestinians, relegated to shrinking Bantustans, but annihilating and erasing them.

In the decade after the withdrawal, Israel’s right-wing national-religious camp, with Likud at the helm, succeeded in deeply embedding the idea that a withdrawal of settlements could never be repeated. This presaged the dominance since October 7 of what were long considered extreme positions, where Israeli officials openly advocate for the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that was left unfinished in the original Nakba of 1948. And after the Hamas-led attacks, it was the national-religious camp that was the quickest to recalibrate and identify a moment of opportunity.

Very early on, the notion took hold that, tragic as it was, October 7 was a sign of “messianic times” and an “era of miracles” — a divine intervention that portends the extension of Jewish sovereignty across the biblical Land of Israel and the coming of the messiah. That belief has since been invoked by leaders of the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism factions, most notably by Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strook, as well as by rabbinical chaplains in the Israeli army, media commentators, and others.

The Likud Party and the political establishment that had been busy advancing the de facto annexation of the West Bank, with settlers conducting pogroms in West Bank villages and intensifying land theft, now saw an opportunity to reorder priorities. Gaza no longer had to be conceded; it could be resettled. Twenty-first century ethnic cleansing could be taken for a test ride in Gaza before being fully unleashed in the West Bank.

“Gaza First” once referred to the initial implementation of the original Israel-PLO “Declaration of Principles”, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) assumed its first self-governing role in what were defined as the Palestinian areas of Gaza, as well as in the West Bank city of Jericho. The second iteration of “Gaza First” referred to Sharon’s disengagement plan, with the optimistic take that Gaza would be the first of many sites of Israeli withdrawal.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tours the Yad Binyamin area of central Israel, slated to absorb settler farmers relocated from the Gaza Strip, July 5, 2005. (Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

But today, “Gaza First” has taken on a new meaning: Gaza as the opening site of messianic redemption and Palestinian annihilation, or in the current Israeli parlance, “total victory.” It is no surprise that the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem warns in its recent report that what is happening in Gaza is already being planned for the West Bank.

The path from 2005 to 2025 was not preordained, but the contours are now clear — the consequences of political choices that were made then and now need to be unmade or reshaped. Describing this trajectory brings into sharper relief the need for a new political vision for all of historic Palestine, one that will have to come from outside the Zionist consensus.

Palestinians will need to take a central role in defining that vision, and will have to do so outside of the rigid constraints of the PA that sustains itself on the status quo. Whether Israeli politics and society can move beyond this genocidal moment is crucial, and will largely depend on the interplay between internal domestic dynamics and external pressure. But as long as the latter is so limited and absent, the former is unlikely to meaningfully change.

 Strengthening the settler foothold

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.”

During the disengagement, Israel pulled out a mere 9,000 out of the approximately 430,000 Israelis then living beyond the Green Line (including in East Jerusalem), withdrawing from a territory that comprised just 6 percent of what would constitute a future Palestinian state if it were to be premised on the 1967 borders — and a mere 1.5 percent of what was British Mandatory Palestine in 1948.

Israeli soldiers close the gate of the Kissufim crossing into central Gaza after the last troops left the Gush Katif settlement bloc, Sept. 12, 2005. (Moshe Milner/GPO)

At the time, Palestinian critics drew attention to the stated goals of Israel’s leaders: disengagement was intended to entrench Israel’s control elsewhere, not advance Palestinian statehood or rights. Yet center-left Zionist circles in Israel ignored these voices and offered their full-throated support to Sharon’s plan.

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.

In the years following the disengagement, the settler movement targeted the military and the judicial system as places to strengthen its foothold, encouraging its youngsters to become the Israeli army officer class of the future. That is now bearing fruit: see, for instance, the appointment last year of Avi Bluth to head the army’s Central Command, overseeing the West Bank, or the more recent appointment of retired police chief Yoram Halevy as the new head of COGAT, the Defense Ministry unit responsible for civilian policy in the West Bank and Gaza.

Its focus was not on resettling Gaza, which seemed unrealistic, but rather on ensuring the enclave would become a cautionary tale. Territorial withdrawal could not be allowed to take hold in the Israeli public imagination as a path to a better future — it had to be branded as a disaster.

In this respect, the Israeli right enjoyed several major achievements. They ensured that the withdrawal itself was as expensive as possible by pushing for an excessive compensation package for settlers, estimated to have cost the Israeli treasury NIS 9 billion, with the goal of deterring similar withdrawal from West Bank settlements. The settler movement also created an atmosphere of impending domestic strife, mainstreaming the idea that any mass forced removal from the West Bank would lead to civil war.

Israelis view the exhibition of press photographs of the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlements in Gaza in 2005, taken by photographers of the Israeli daily newspaper, Yediot Aharnot, at the First Station in Jerusalem, July 21, 2015. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Nor is it cynical to argue that Israel deliberately created conditions to generate further armed Palestinian resistance by entrenching its matrix of control in the West Bank and tightening the blockade of Gaza, as if to say, “See, leaving Gaza made things worse.” And so a narrative took hold that Israel offered a down-payment on peace by withdrawing from Gaza and received rockets in exchange — a lie that was parroted almost verbatim, rather than challenged, by the leaders of the opposition camp, from Ehud Barak to Ehud Olmert. If one examines Israeli policy toward Palestinians since 2005 and sets it against the claim that Gaza could have become the “Singapore of the Middle East,” the maliciousness of that lie becomes unmistakably clear.

 An absence of Zionist opposition

The national-religious camp’s success owed much to the fact that they were effectively the only team with a plan, determination, and a willingness to sacrifice. By contrast, the center-left camp in Israel was already largely hollowed out by 2005. Labor Zionism had ceased to offer any pragmatic governing alternative, and there was no coherent narrative that effectively explained how unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was designed to block, not advance, peace.

Center-left politicians made no attempt to argue that Hamas, having participated in elections, could and should be integrated into the political process, as had happened with countless armed resistance movements in liberation struggles throughout history. Nor did they push back against the siege and blockade of Gaza, the collective punishment of the civilian population, or the multiple rounds of destruction and killing that preceded October 2023. Indeed, when erstwhile Israeli (so-called) opposition leader Benny Gantz launched his political career in December 2018, he sought legitimacy by highlighting his own mass killing exploits in Gaza.

When Benjamin Netanyahu was briefly replaced by the self-professed “change government” of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in June 2021, Israel continued to entrench its presence in the West Bank, criminalized Palestinian NGOs, and repeated the same tired accusations of antisemitism against leading human rights organizations that labeled Israel an apartheid state. The Bennett-Lapid government resumed extrajudicial assassinations and assaults throughout the West Bank, while continuing the blockade of Gaza. Meretz and Labor were partners in this government of no change.

Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022 with the most far-right government in Israel’s history. But in response to his judicial overhaul process, the massive pro-democracy protests that swept across Israel ignored the biggest affront of all to that concept: occupation and apartheid.

After October 7, only one narrative resonated widely in Israel, from the extremes of the fringe hilltop youth all the way up to the military establishment: whatever was done to Palestinians, they had brought upon themselves. Take former army intelligence chief Aharon Haliva’s claim that killing 50,000 Palestinians, including children, was “necessary,” or then-army chief of staff Herzi Halevi’s promise to his wife on the morning of the attacks that “Gaza will be destroyed.”

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi seen during during a visit in the Northern Command, November 28, 2023. (David Cohen/Flash90)

This is not to say that any society would have responded with forbearance to the shock and pain of an event like October 7, including the violations of international law committed by Palestinian militant groups. But it is only against this larger backdrop that one can understand how such a spectrum of the Zionist political establishment has readily embarked upon and supported a genocide.

Today, the settler colonial essence of Zionism has been exposed in its zero-sum nature. Consider the coalition guidelines of the current government, which state, “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” This is nearly a consensus position among Zionist politicians, from the ruling far-right coalition to the so-called opposition: in a Knesset vote last year, not a single Zionist MK voted to affirm Palestinian statehood, while only a handful of Jewish left-wing MKs dissented in another declarative vote in July 2025 to annex Judea and Samaria.

Look at what was being done in the West Bank prior to October 7 — the new powers assumed by civilian authorities over the occupied territories, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and the Defense Ministry — or the ongoing and close collusion between the military and armed settlers. Or recall what Israel had been doing to Gaza for almost two decades, including a blockade under which the Israeli military had already calculated the necessary caloric intake of the Palestinian population in order to maintain it at subsistence levels. It was a relatively short journey from having calculated the starving point to implementing it.

 Fragmentation by design

Seven years after the Gaza disengagement, I wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “in divesting itself of just 1.5 percent of the land, Israel significantly recalibrated the so-called ‘demographic equation’ (the ratio of Jews to Arabs in areas under its control).” Israel’s withdrawal had thereby, in its own mind, divested itself from responsibility for a significant portion of the Palestinian population, whom it now saw as forever separated from the rest of the Palestinian physical and demographic expanse.

Despite the protestations of the Zionist right against Gaza withdrawal, in so doing, it became much easier for Israel to move to absorb the rest of the territories while maintaining a Jewish demographic majority — along with fewer Palestinians to remove, confine to apartheid Bantustans, or force to “voluntarily” emigrate. In those first seven years, as I noted, nearly 94,000 settlers had moved into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with thousands of Palestinians displaced.

The West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim, Dec. 9, 2012. (Lior Mizrahi/Flash90)

That was my argument then. Now, post-October 7, Israeli settlement in Gaza is back on the agenda — and why not, if the world will stand by as Gaza is obliterated, its population kettled into a concentration camp on the Egyptian border, while the U.S. president calls for an Israeli-controlled Palestinian-rein Gaza Riviera?

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.

Equally important, though more uncomfortable, is the absence of a unified Palestinian national liberation movement with real strategy and agency. That deficiency is the most devastating legacy of the post-disengagement era, entrenching Palestinian political paralysis at a moment when unity was most needed.

For a settler-colonial regime to play divide-and-rule with a colonized indigenous population is hardly new. Indeed, Israel has a long history of assassinating or imprisoning “difficult” Palestinian leaders and empowering “cooperative” ones. By 2005, the unity and mobilization of the First Intifada had been superseded by the Oslo process, which engendered deep intra-Palestinian divisions. The Palestinian national movement lost vitality and agenda-setting capacity, stuck in Oslo’s limited and co-opted self-governing framework led by the PA. The Second Intifada was, in large measure, a response to that reality.

The Gaza disengagement deepened this fragmentation, creating an opening Israel continues to exploit. The degree of Palestinian political division and marginalization — now on terrifying display during Israel’s genocide in Gaza — can, in significant part, be understood as engineered by Zionist design, but perpetuated by Palestinian leaders themselves.

The armed resistance of the Second Intifada, led by but not restricted to Hamas, was widely seen by Palestinians to have triggered the first Israeli evacuation of settlements from occupied Palestinian territory. That stood in stark contrast to the failure of the Fatah-led PA, and Israel’s explicit and intentional exclusion of the PA negotiating class from the Gaza withdrawal process drove that message home. Unsurprisingly, when elections were subsequently held, Hamas secured a plurality of votes and the majority of parliament (a result assisted by Fatah’s internal divisions and poor candidate strategy in multimember constituencies).

Palestinians enter the Gush Katif settlement after its evacuation, Sept. 12, 2005. (Flash90)

But the most often repeated lie of the last two years is that this war is necessary to evict Hamas from governing Gaza. In reality, Hamas has been ready to hand over governance in Gaza for years. It is rather the PA leadership, by following a path laid down by Israel, the United States, and other Western allies, that has been the biggest obstacle to Palestinian unity and therefore to new governance in Gaza. It remains absent in its people’s hour of greatest need and is now thoroughly discredited in the eyes of that public.

There are, of course, other factors to account for the trajectory of Israeli and Palestinian politics over the past 20 years. Chief among them is the fact that the United States and Israel’s other Western allies have avoided holding Israel accountable and imposing sanctions for its crimes, which, coupled with the Abraham Accords, have only rewarded Israeli extremism. But on the flip side, geopolitics is shifting. U.S. primacy is waning as we move to a multipolar world in which the Global South, including mid-level powers, will assume greater influence, all of which can challenge the balance of power if Palestinians have a leadership strategy that rises to the occasion.

 A final throw of the partition dice

The disengagement of 20 years ago presaged much of what has come to the fore in the ugliest of ways over the last two years. That speaks to the need for a fundamental — not managerial — reset in both Israeli and Palestinian circles.

For instance, in vociferously opposing the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, one also has to acknowledge that Gaza cannot be made whole again after its obliteration. Equally one must acknowledge that Gaza pre-2023 was never “whole” because the already unlivable population density was itself the result of ethnic cleansing that necessitates redress.

The fate for Palestinians who survive in Gaza should not be limited to either a new beginning in a third country or residing indefinitely among rubble. There is a more natural place for the rehabilitation of many: the lands from which they and mostly their families were expelled in 1948.

The unilateral Gaza withdrawal should perhaps be understood as the final throw of the partition dice. It should have been clear already that this project was premised on the same designs that caught Ariel Sharon’s eye in apartheid South Africa — the ethno-supremacist regime of the settler colony dictating the terms of surrender and second-class existence to the colonized of the Bantustans.

This is not a call to replace one zero-sum ethnic cleansing outcome with another. Neither the Jewish-Israeli population nor the Palestinian-Arab population is going anywhere. But the choices today cannot be limited to genocide or apartheid. If settler civil disobedience was the effective response to unilateral withdrawal in 2005, then nothing less is required from those ready to oppose Israel’s annihilation of Gaza in 2025.

Daniel Levy

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