On August 21, 2005, as the uprooting of the 21 settlements in Gaza that began six days earlier was still underway, I was ushered into the Aquarium – the cluster of offices behind the glass door in the Prime Minister’s Office – where the prime minister sits.
After a short wait, I was escorted into Ariel Sharon’s modest office. There he was, the man responsible for the withdrawal from Gaza, seated behind a large desk. His face betrayed neither elation from the international praise pouring in, nor stress from the bulldozers leveling homes and businesses. The man who once built the settlements was now destroying them. And he seemed at ease.
As always, Sharon offered me a drink. He was in a relaxed, almost avuncular mood, gesturing for me to sit down opposite him. He knew I lived in Ma’aleh Adumim, and reassured me there would be no further uprooting of settlements beyond Gaza. “There will be no second Disengagement,” he said firmly, as if to close the door on an idea then already being whispered in some corners.
He called it “Disengagement,” a term his adviser Dov Weisglass had coined. It was clever.
“Withdrawal” sounded weak, evoking images of Israel’s hasty retreat from Lebanon in 2000. “Evacuation” brought to mind foam-covered settlers being dragged off rooftops in Yamit. But “Disengagement” – that had a neutral, almost elegant ring to it. Israel wasn’t capitulating; it was stepping back. It was untangling itself. It was moving on.
What a misnomer.
The word was meticulously chosen, as was the framing. But the policy and its consequences? Less so. The public debate was fervent, yet some of the most fundamental elements of the plan remained murky. One of those elements was what Israel got in return for unilaterally pulling out of Gaza.
As I left Sharon’s office that day, I found myself largely persuaded by his reasoning, as I had been before. But one thought continued to gnaw at me: after physically dismantling communities, emotionally fracturing the nation, and pushing the country to what some warned apocalyptically was the brink of civil war – a characterization Sharon’s government amplified to delegitimize those protesting against the move – did Israel really get anything of value in return?
When asked what Israel received for its dramatic move, Sharon often pointed to an exchange of letters with then-US president George W. Bush from April 2004. In his eyes, this was an agreement – one endorsed by both houses of Congress and worth the political and social upheaval the move was causing in Israel.
But during our interview, when I asked whether those letters had any binding statutory significance, Sharon turned to his aides. They quickly discussed the issue, but weren’t sure. No one was.
“It is not open to interpretation,” Sharon insisted. “It was ratified by Congress. There are benefits that we got there that we could not have gotten had we not initiated the Disengagement plan.”
Those benefits, as Sharon understood them, were significant: American recognition that in any future agreement Israel would retain the large settlement blocs; an assurance that Palestinian refugees would be resettled in a future Palestinian state, not within Israel; and a general commitment to preserve and strengthen Israel’s ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threats.
But what was striking – then and now – was that even as Sharon was pulling out of Gaza and presenting this letter as a key justification, there was no consensus among his own staff on whether the document had legal weight. It was held up as proof of a strategic gain. But it was more aspiration than assurance – as, it turns out, was the entire plan.
In the end, that letter had very little standing. Just four years later, president Barack Obama entered the White House and made clear he did not view the Bush letter as binding. He certainly did not interpret it as giving Israel a green light to build in the settlement blocs.
The informal understandings on settlement activity – so critical in Sharon’s justification for withdrawal – were cast aside.
At one point, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton flatly stated, “There were no informal or oral enforceable agreements.” Elliott Abrams, who was instrumental in shaping that Bush letter, disputed her account. But it didn’t matter. Whatever strategic capital Israel thought it had banked evaporated.
And yet that letter – ambiguous and ultimately disregarded – was the cornerstone Sharon pointed to again and again when asked what Israel gained from leaving Gaza unilaterally. There was no Palestinian quid pro quo. No coordination with the Palestinian Authority, which Sharon viewed with deep distrust. No real guarantee. Just a vague promise from a friendly US administration that was soon out of office.
Why Sharon changed course
Covering Sharon at the time, one question repeatedly surfaced: What changed? How did the godfather of the settlement movement become the one to remove settlements?
One answer lies in his unwavering belief in the strategic value of Israel’s relationship with the US. When Sharon became prime minister in 2001, the Second Intifada was raging. Yasser Arafat had just rejected Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David and did not reply to an even more generous offer at Taba. Instead, he launched a terror war.
Sharon, facing mounting criticism internationally and domestically for the methods used to win that war, identified two pillars necessary to prevail: internal unity and a sympathetic ear in Washington.
But by December 2003, when Sharon first unveiled the Disengagement idea, those pillars were beginning to crack.
The Israeli public was growing uneasy with the intensity of military operations in the West Bank. Then-influential MK Avrum Burg wrote a letter condemning Israel’s policies, reserve pilots said they would not carry out certain missions, and commandos threatened not to serve in the territories. The initial solidarity that emerged when the intifada broke out in September 2000 began fraying at the seams.
At the same time, international pressure was mounting, and Sharon was concerned that specific initiatives – such as Yossi Beilin’s Geneva Accords, which were essentially a reincarnation of the Oslo Accords – were gaining support, even in Washington.
So Sharon decided to be proactive, to initiate. Disengagement, as he envisioned it, would not only remove Israel from the day-to-day burden of Gaza, it would also mute international criticism.
And, for a time, it worked. The Bush administration gave Israel a relatively free hand to suppress terror in the West Bank as it saw fit. No one stopped Sharon from reversing Oslo and sending troops back into areas Israel had previously handed over to the Palestinian Authority. The Disengagement bought the prime minister room to maneuver.
It’s also important to remember that Sharon didn’t establish the settlements out of religious or ideological zeal. He wasn’t driven by a desire to walk where Abraham slept. He built them strategically to keep missiles from being fired on Tel Aviv.
But by 2005, after seeing the full array of forces aligned against Israel – demographic, diplomatic, military – he concluded that long-term survival depended more on strategic alignment with Washington than on holding onto Netzarim or Kfar Darom.
Capitol Hill mattered more than settlements on a hill. So he sacrificed the settlements to shore up the alliance, and he believed that the letter he received from Bush did just that.
Security promise shattered and backfired
The battle-tested former general sold the plan with confidence. He assured the country that Gaza would not turn into a terrorist stronghold, and that if any rockets were fired, Israel would deal with it swiftly.
“You can’t frighten these people with the threat of terror all the time,” Sharon told me in our interview, dismissing the doom-saying of his chief political rival at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu. “You can’t continue to scare them that there will be rocket attacks on Ashdod and Kiryat Gat. You can’t scare this nation.”
He continued: “We will not allow attacks, and we will respond as forcefully as possible.”
Those words, of course, proved hollow. If anything, Netanyahu’s warnings were understated. Oct. 7 was far worse than anything imagined at the time.
What made it all the more bitter is that Disengagement was sold not just as a diplomatic move, but as a security one. Pulling out of Gaza, Sharon argued, would save lives. Israel would no longer need to defend far-flung military outposts or settlements in hostile territory. The threat, he maintained, would be reduced.
But the numbers tell a very different story.
From 1967, when Israel took control of Gaza, until the 2005 Disengagement – a span of 38 years – 230 Israelis were killed either inside Gaza or by rocket attacks emanating from it. Since the Disengagement, that number surged to nearly 1,800 – roughly eight times as many.
Disengagement was supposed to make Israel safer. It did not. It was supposed to reduce terror. It did not. Some even believed it would gain Israel long-term international goodwill. That failed.
The logic was that removing the IDF and the settlers from Gaza would remove the Palestinian incentive to attack. But the opposite happened. The void was filled not with peace, but with Hamas.
The gamble of Disengagement yielded neither the security, the legitimacy, nor the quiet that its architects promised.
The illusion didn’t survive until Oct. 7; it fractured with each rocket launched from Gaza, each cycle of violence that followed. Oct. 7 was not the beginning of the unraveling, but its brutal, crushing end. And now, two decades later, the country is still measuring the cost of trusting in a vision so tragically unmoored from this region’s harsh reality. ■