How Israel’s Gaza ‘disengagement’ planted the seeds of today’s genocide
Israeli forces fire a water cannon on residents of Kfar Darom settlement in Gaza who during its evacuation had barricaded themselves on the roof of the synagogue , 18 August 2005
Daniel Levy writes in +972 on 10 September 2025:
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.
Viewing the exhibition of press photographs of the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlements in Gaza in 2005, taken by photographers of the Israeli daily, Yediot Aharnot, at the First Station in Jerusalem, 21 July 2015
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.