Israeli General Who Helped Evacuate Gaza in 2005 Says It was an ‘Absolute Mistake’

Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Gershon HaCohen’s grim post-mortem dates from 2020; it is worth revisiting in light of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, and the ongoing war. It is here.

The Gaza Disengagement was “an absolute mistake” that allowed Hamas to increase its rocket arsenal, the man who commanded the operation told The Jerusalem Post.

The unilateral evacuation of 8,500 Israeli civilians and soldiers and the demolition of 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip in August 2005 was ordered by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon and carried out by Maj.-Gen. Gershon HaCohen, then commander of the 36th Division.

“I was absolutely aware that the whole idea would lead to catastrophe,” HaCohen told the Post ahead of the move’s 15th anniversary….

Some thought it would bring peace. Others thought giving land would only further encourage violence and terror. Though HaCohen personally opposed the move, he still carried out his assigned duties as commanding officer.

“I had two choices: to disobey and retire or to follow and do it as per my own belief and vision,” he said….

The evacuation of settlers was followed by the bulldozing of thousands of homes and synagogues. The remains of Jews buried in the Strip were also exhumed and reburied in Israel. On September 21, the Disengagement was complete, the Gaza Strip was no longer in Israeli control and IDF troops no longer patrolled the streets protecting Jews.

With no presence in the Palestinian territory, there should be no cause for continued terrorism, some thought. With no more Israeli civilians or soldiers there they would no longer lose their lives to Palestinian terrorism emanating from the coastal enclave.

But they were wrong.

For many, the withdrawal was perceived as Israel running away from its enemies….

The Disengagement not only bolstered support for Hamas, but it gave the terror group free rein to increase its rocket arsenal to threaten deep into Israel and not only the settlements around the enclave….

For the Palestinians in Gaza, it seemed as though the Israelis were in retreat. They did not see it as a calculate move by Israel to leave them to their own devices, hoping for relative peace, but as a withdrawal forced on Israel, and thus a clear victory for Hamas and a defeat for Israel.

Israel had expected its withdrawal would calm the Gazans down, turn them toward building their own futures, and away from war-making. The opposite happened: they voted for the more bellicose of the two contending groups – Hamas rather than Fatah. Hamas came to power, determined to wage a terror war on Israel from a position of greater strength, now that Israeli forces were withdrawn from Gaza.

The rocket supply in Gaza has been constantly replenished by smuggling operations from Egypt’s Sinai. Ever more important have been the factories that, in Gaza itself, have been making thousands of these rockets. Many more such factories went into operation after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005. And despite Israel’s naval blockade, some weapons have, though rarely, also been offloaded from ships in the Mediterranean to Gazan fishing boats, and thence to Gaza.

The Disengagement – Israel’s total withdrawal of its civilians and soldiers from Gaza — did not lead to quiet, but to more violence than before, with Israel forced to go to war against Hamas (and other terror groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad) in Gaza four times, most recently after Oct. 7. Outside of those conflicts, Israelis have had to endure the launching of thousands of missiles from Gaza into southern Israel’s border towns. It’s a continuous state of warfare, punctuated by occasional periods of quiet, which naturally occur after the Gazan Palestinians have been pummeled by a real war into a temporary truce.

Maj. General HaCohen notes that just in one of the three previous wars with Hamas in Gaza, Israel lost almost as many soldiers — 68 — as died in Gaza between 2000 and 2005 — 76 — before the Jewish state’s withdrawal. Then there are also the deaths of Israeli soldiers in the other two wars with Hamas in Gaza, as well as those killed in terror attacks launched from Gaza between those wars. Several hundred Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed by Hamas since the Gaza withdrawal in 2005. HaCohen made his point: the withdrawal from Gaza did not save Israeli lives; it cost them.

Gaza has now been destroyed by the mismanagement and colossal corruption of its Hamas rulers. Just two Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshal and Mousa ibn Marzouk, managed to steal a total of $5 billion from aid money meant for the people of Gaza. And there were before the present war 600 “Hamas millionaires” living in villas in Gaza, far from the impoverished mass of the population. Gazans rebuffed all attempts by Israel to help them take over businesses in Gaza created and built by settlers. Israel turned over to the Gazans 3,000 greenhouses the settlers had built, and in which they had grown flowers and fruit for a thriving export business to Europe. Instead, the Palestinians vandalized and destroyed all of those greenhouses, leaving them with nothing to take over. In the third place, Hamas spent much of its money, and time, on war-making. It built very long and very big terror tunnels from Gaza into Israel, which the Israelis have found and destroyed in the last few months. Some of those tunnels – and there were hundreds of them – cost several million dollars apiece to construct. Hamas also amassed weapons, including rockets, in one of three ways: by receiving arms smuggled through tunnels into Gaza from supporters abroad; by buying arms, also smuggled in through those tunnels; and by manufacturing weapons in their factories in Gaza. Also, Hamas has always had a policy of hiding its arms in, and launching attacks on Israelis from, civilian structures – private homes, schools, restaurants, hospitals – which has forced Israel to bomb many of those places, leading to great destruction.

The lesson of the terror from Gaza after 2005 was that Israel could not similarly withdraw from the West Bank, for just as had happened in Gaza, there would only be more terror. That lesson seemed to have been forgotten in the run-up to Oct.7, and has not been recovered. Foreign leaders, whose people do not face constant terror attacks, have proven unable – despite HaCohen’s claim that “better conditions” now exist for those leaders to comprehend why Israel cannot afford “to create another Lebanon in the West Bank” – to sympathetically grasp Israel’s plight.

The forcible removal of Israelis from Gaza was so painful, and the results so much worse for Israel than anyone expected, that it would now be exceedingly difficult, unthinkable even, for any Israeli government to uproot Jewish settlements and settlers anywhere in the West Bank. Israelis have, Maj. General HaCohen writes, learned their lesson from the Gaza withdrawal, which merely made it easier for the local Palestinians to arm themselves, both by smuggling weapons into Gaza and by manufacturing them in local factories, and it cost more Israeli lives than were lost before the Disengagement. He is sure that Israelis have learned from “this stupid mistake” and will behave quite differently in the West Bank.

I would like to think that HaCohen is right. But based on the dispiriting response to Israel’s defensive actions since Oct. 7, I worry that he may be wrong.