The pros and cons of the Gaza disengagement

Disengagement was a failure, but that doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do.

Twenty years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the move still creates disagreement. People use the sometimes contradictory outcomes of disengagement to back their arguments.

Some say disengagement proved that Israel could take on the settlers; and allowed it to remove over a million Palestinians from its direct or indirect control, thereby reducing the threat of the “demographic timebomb”. They argue it made things better, by removing Israeli soldiers from being killed in an occupation not vital to Israel’s existence.

Others argue that it made things worse, that it created the conditions for Hamas to take over, ultimately leading to the October 7 attacks, and everything after. Some argue that Hamas’ takeover showed the world that Israel couldn’t safely withdraw from the West Bank, and so on.

Hindsight allows us to judge Disengagement from the perspective of two decades of events: the Hamas take-over; the tens of thousands of rockets; the wars in 2006, 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021 and, of course, the horrors of October 7 and the war it sparked.