From Jewish Currents, (April 16, 2026)

Ariel Sharon’s 2005 settlement withdrawal solidified a consistent policy toward Gaza: Act alone, and make negotiation impossible.

It’s August 2005, and the footage shows a bearded man in his late forties, wearing a kippah and tzitzit, being carried out of his home by four Israeli soldiers, each gripping a limb. His name, we’ve learned from an earlier shot, is Sody Naimer, and he is a prominent doctor in the Israeli settlements in Gaza, where he has lived for the past 16 years. As the soldiers drag him toward a bus that will take him out of Gaza for the last time, he screams: “A million murders will come in from Philadelphi [the Gaza–Egypt border]; there will be Katyusha rockets on Ashkelon, mortar fire on Sderot, murders in Netivot—you’re all complicit in this crime . . . You will have nightmares . . . Every child who is murdered, you will be the one to answer for it!” Soon after, we are shown body-camera footage from October 7th, 2023, of Hamas militants tearing through Israel’s south. The film’s implication is unmistakable: Naimer’s warning was not hysteria but prophecy. Israel’s departure from Gaza could lead only to the murder of Israelis.

The footage appears in Where Were You During the Disengagement?, a three-part documentary that aired in July 2025 on Israel’s public broadcast channel, Kan 11, marking 20 years since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. That summer saw a flood of similar retrospectives with similar takes: HOT8’s We, the People of Gush Katif and Channel 13’s Storm of Emotions both interviewed former residents of Israeli settlements in Gaza, the latter culminating with an erstwhile Gaza settler explaining that October 7th made her want to cry “not just because of the terrible things that happened but . . . because people hadn’t listened to us, hadn’t listened to our leaders, who had foreseen this thing.” There was even a drama called simply The Disengagement that centered on a religious military commander ordered to lead the evacuation from Gaza, which included removing his own sister from her home. As is clear from mainstream Israelis’ TV diet, the disengagement is being re-metabolized in a post-October 7th reality—as the story that the settlers want to tell, and more importantly, as the one the public wants to hear.

Missing entirely from these narratives is Gaza itself: the 18-year blockade, the repeated military assaults, and the roughly two million Palestinians who live there. Instead, the portrayals all share a focus on Israeli pain—and a sense that the uprooted settlers of Gaza have been vindicated. Repeatedly, the settlers in these documentaries argue that the Hamas massacre of October 7th was possible only because Israel exited the Strip and that the presence of settlements there would have protected those Israelis living inside the Green Line. As this narrative of the disengagement finds a new, post-October 7th audience in Israel, and Palestinians in Gaza continue to face a future in which they have no meaningful avenue to participate in crafting their political future, it is worth revisiting the 2005 withdrawal and reexamining its legacy.

When then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to dismantle Israeli settlements in Gaza and end Israel’s direct control of the Strip, Israelis, especially among the country’s largely secular political center, were optimistic. Polling done in the month prior to the disengagement showed that 62% of Israelis supported the plan, and 52% believed that Sharon would extend settlement evacuations deeper into the West Bank. Israelis largely bought the vision that the disengagement would turn Gaza into the Middle East’s Singapore—a small, poor country transformed into a major regional economic and tech center. In this view, withdrawal would spur Gazans to renounce violence, build their economy, and develop a flourishing coastal hub. When a stroke put Sharon in a long-term coma in early 2006, his successor, Ehud Olmert, won elections just two months later on a platform explicitly calling for further territorial withdrawals. Opposition to the disengagement was largely confined to the religious right and its settler movement subsector.

Twenty years on, that support has all but vanished. Even politicians who supported the disengagement in 2005 now condemn it, bringing three quarters of Israelis with them. A 2025 Pew poll showed that only one in five Israelis believe Israel could peacefully coexist alongside a Palestinian state. The reasons for this political shift are layered. In the immediate sense, they reflect Israelis’ fear and insecurity after October 7th. But this transformation was years in the making. Following the disengagement, the settler movement undertook a sustained campaign to change how the Israeli mainstream understood territorial concessions. Their disillusionment ran deep—with the politicians who had sent them to settle in Gaza in the first place, and with a public that showed little interest in their plight. “They were surprised by how little empathy” their position elicited, Israeli media scholar Ayala Panievsky explained. “They found themselves much more on the margins of Israeli society than they thought they should be.” Thelesson they drew was that they needed to change the con­versation. They rallied around the old settler slogan “l’hitnachel balevavot”—or “settling the hearts”—as shorthand for a strategy that entailed infiltrating and embedding within Israeli mainstream media, government, and public discourse. The objective was to lodge the disengagement in the Israeli psyche as a cautionary tale, something that could never be allowed to happen again.

In one sense, the disengagement from Gaza felt to many Israelis like a break—a discontinuity in Israeli policy. For years, successive Israeli governments, including that of Sharon, had opted to build and expand Israeli settlements; Sharon’s decision to uproot 21 settlements and well over 8,000 settlers flew in the face of this history. But even in 2005, the disengagement was less of a break than it appeared. Sharon had spent the previous five decades turning Gaza into a testing ground for using power as a substitute for politics. He did so first in the form of reprisal raids, military incursions, and settlement construction—and then as withdrawal, siege, and external military control. The disengagement was thus simply another stage in a project of unilateral control Sharon had been pursuing in Gaza for half a century—govern by force, decide alone, and call the result “security.” In many ways, this approach extended a much older current in Zionist thought: the conviction that decisions affecting Jews, even as they shaped Palestinian lives, ought to be made without negotiations or shared political work. It was, at bottom, a form of anti-politics—the belief that Jewish safety and dignity must ultimately rest on Jewish power alone.

Propelled by a motivated settler movement, this logic has persisted throughout the decades since the disengagement. From Sharon’s military campaigns to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy of maintaining Hamas, and up to Donald Trump’s redevelopment schemes, the underlying approach has remained strikingly consistent. Gaza, in the eyes of those who dominate it, is a place to be acted upon rather than negotiated with. The result is a conflict governed less by politics than by force—a conflict that thus returns, again and again, with increasingly devastating consequences.

Sharon developed his anti-politics during the earliest days of both the state and his career. In 1953, he was appointed the founding commander of the elite special forces Unit 101, where he zealously executed Israel’s reprisal doctrine, according to which Palestinians trying to cross armistice lines were chased back to their refugee camps and then attacked, often viciously. Soon after Israel’s 1967 occupation of Gaza, Sharon was appointed head of the military’s Southern Command, which oversees the Strip. He fulfilled this role ruthlessly: In January 1971, he was tasked with rooting out the perpetrators of an attack that had killed two Israeli children in Gaza. To do so, he divided the Strip into small squares and told his troops: “It is your job to know this square inside and out . . . and kill every terrorist in it.” He bulldozed through refugee camps and fields, destroying 2,500 homes and leaving some 16,000 people homeless, and eventually caught the killers. The campaign turned Gaza into a proving ground for Sharon’s theory of control: that overwhelming force, collective punishment, and permanent military presence could manufacture quiet; in latter-day parlance, it could “manage the conflict.”

Settlements soon followed—communities designed, funded, and protected by the state. These were part of Sharon’s “Five Finger Plan,” which laid out settlements in horizontal blocs across the Strip in order to fracture Palestinian territorial contiguity. Sharon articulated an unorthodox security logic for their existence: Civilian settlements were not liabilities, he claimed, but strategic assets. By placing Israeli civilians inside of “enemy” Palestinian territory, the army would be forced to follow, pulling the military ever deeper into Gaza. As the historian Arnon Degani has noted, Sharon viewed the threat of violence to settlers not as a bug but as a feature of his plan to expand and maintain Israeli territory. “It’s hard to determine if the logic here is more circular or perverse,” he wrote.

But Sharon’s settlement plans proved to be a tremendous liability. Soldiers often outnumbered residents. Children from certain settlements traveled to school in convoys with armored personnel carriers and bulldozers clearing routes with explo­sives. “It was a very Algerian-South African-Rhodesian scenario,” Degani told Jewish Currents. Gaza had become a place where a handful of civilians required an entire military architecture to survive.

By November 2003, two years after Sharon was elected prime minister, the settlements in Gaza were collapsing under their own weight. The Second Intifada had entered its third year and Sharon was under public pressure to bring an end, or at least a pause, to the violent uprising that had made Israeli cities a front line. Suicide bombings had become part of Israelis’ everyday reality: Buses, cafés, and markets were all targets. And while many Israelis viewed the Oslo Accords as promising security through negotiated agreements—realpolitik, not brute force—after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and the failure of Ehud Barak’s peace talks at Camp David in 2000, more Israelis than ever flocked to the Sharon doctrine of acting alone. It was in this context that Sharon met his closest adviser, Dov Weissglas, and George W. Bush’s senior Middle East adviser, Elliott Abrams, in a Rome hotel. That meeting was the first time Sharon revealed his plan to dismantle Gaza’s settlements.

This seemed to be an about-face—Sharon pulling his own project out by the roots. The settlers in Gaza certainly saw it this way. “That the decision came . . . from Ariel Sharon made it hurt more,” said former Gaza settler Dana Zelinger on Channel 13’s Storm of Emotions, explaining that Sharon had been the one to enable development in the settlement of Neve Dekalim where she had lived. But Zelinger and others had misread Sharon. Faced with Bush’s Roadmap for Peace, which was meant to set in motion a process toward Palestinian statehood and negotiations on thorny “final status” issues, including the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the future of Jerusalem, Sharon made a decision: He would change tactics, but not strategy. Journalist Akiva Eldar, who closely covered the disengagement for Haaretz, told Jewish Currents that Sharon chose to shrink the state’s borders in one place, to expand and solidify them in another. He “wanted to sacrifice a point in order to have a checkmate,” Eldar explained. It was, quite simply, a decision to give up Gaza in order to strengthen control over the West Bank. Weissglas explained Sharon’s thinking in an interview with Haaretz at the time: “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” he said—a “freezing of the peace process” in order for a Palestinian state to be “removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

Sharon’s wager worked, though not precisely in the way he’d planned. The cascade of events that followed the disengagement ensured that there would indeed be no further withdrawals, nor would there be a peace process. The Israeli army formally ended its military administration of Gaza in September 2005. Four months later, Sharon suffered a stroke, entering a coma from which he would never wake. Weeks after that, Palestinians held elections, and Hamas won a decisive majority—and with it, the mandate to form and run the Palestinian Authority (PA). Washington, which had labeled Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997, cut its funding to the PA, and Israel froze the transfer of tax revenue it collected on the PA’s behalf. Gaza’s economy collapsed almost overnight. From there, the situation deteriorated quickly. In June 2006, Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killing two soldiers and capturing a third, Gilad Shalit. Israel responded by tightening its grip on the Strip. And then, after a series of bloody and brutal skirmishes with Fatah, Hamas violently ousted their rival faction from the Strip and seized control of Gaza—this time not through elections, but through force. In response, almost exactly two years after Israeli troops left, the Israeli military again took control of the Gaza Strip—this time from the outside, by imposing a full blockade of land, sea, and air.

As policy, the siege was made possible through the particular way the Israeli military classified the Strip, con­structing what Tania Hary, the executive director of the Israeli human rights group Gisha, termed in an interview a “legal black hole.” Starting in 2005, the Israeli state no longer considered Gaza “occupied”—but it was not a sovereign state either. In 2007, it was declared “hostile territory,” a category invented by the Israeli military for the purpose of describing Gaza. As Hary explained, this allowed Israeli officials to restrict the entry of everything they deemed beyond the “humanitarian minimum”—including electricity, water, and gasoline. Even food was severely limited: As Weissglas put it in 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” The effect of these restrictions was to preserve power while shedding responsibility. Israel controlled Gaza’s borders, population registry, trade, and movement, but claimed it was not bound by the internationally recognized duties of an occupying power. This meant that Gaza never had a chance to flourish. The suffocating policies “nipped in the bud any prospects for growth or development within the Gaza Strip,” Tareq Baconi wrote in his book Hamas Contained. For Hary, controlling Gaza from the outside while expecting it to thrive within “set Palestinians up with a test that was rigged for
their failure.”

In 2009, Netanyahu was elected prime minister, promising as part of his campaign to “topple Hamas’s rule.” But he was once in office, his policy was not regime change, but containment. He pursued a tactic of regularly “mowing the lawn”—a euphemism for periodic military assaults on the Strip. These bombardments every few years—2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021—offered Israelis the Sharonian illusion that “calm” was attainable through force. Each time, the Israeli public grew more inured to Palestinian suffering, and the army more adept at warfare without Israeli casualties. Israeli politics at the time were focused on the price of cottage cheese and the housing shortage, hardly registering Gaza as a political issue at all.

For Netanyahu, containment was not merely a holding pattern; it was a political strategy. If Hamas was a terrorist organization not to be negotiated with, then dividing Palestinian leadership between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza meant that a Palestinian state could simply never emerge; the peace process would remain forever in formaldehyde, as Sharon had planned. Netanyahu thus walked a fine line, propping up Hamas by enabling the Qatari government’s monthly transfers of $30 million into their coffers, while simultaneously demonstrating just how “hard” he was on “terror.” In 2019, he named this disengagement-born policy out loud: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he said, “has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.” A diplomatic impasse was the goal.

For Israelis, this disappearance of politics was only part of a broader disappearance of Gaza—including from physical view. The Israeli military built a 20-foot-high wall embedded deep in the ground, with barriers extending into the sea. It was equipped with remote-controlled machine guns and hundreds of cameras and other sensors to detect tunnel construction and thwart attacks. Other Israeli technology was also designed to keep Gaza and its problems out of sight and out of mind: The Qassam rocket alert system, introduced in the mid-aughts and early 2010s, was a military apparatus that became so precise that when one Israeli neighborhood received a “red alert” for an incoming missile, the one next door could carry on as usual.

“Since 2005, Israelis have had almost no engagement with Palestinians in Gaza,” explained Dotan Halevy, a historian of Gaza. A generation of Israelis grew up with “little to no knowledge of what Gaza is, who lives there, or the extent to which Israel controls their lives.” Gaza flashed into Israeli consciousness only during rounds of fighting—nothing more than a source of missiles and sirens. A post-disengagement consensus crystallized: There was no partner, no one to negotiate with, only a conflict to be “managed.” The goal was to make Israelis’ lives as livable as possible by making Palestinian insurgency, and Palestinian life itself, as ignorable as possible.

Drawing on the concept of “ungrievable death” posited by the philosopher Judith Butler, military sociologist Yagil Levy calls this engineered disappearance “the dehumanization of disregard”—not active hatred or explicit degradation, but something more repressed: in Butler’s words, “a refusal of discourse that produces dehumanization as a result.” When a population is engineered to be invisible, violence against them becomes violence against people “already not quite living, that is, living in a state of suspension between life and death.” It becomes violence that “leaves a mark that is no mark.” This was the dark achievement of post-disengagement policy: not merely controlling Gaza but creating conditions under which Gazans could be subjected to repeated bombardment, starvation rations, and systematic immiseration while most Israelis went about their lives undisturbed. But while mainstream Israel was being engineered to forget Gaza, one constituency never did—and had spent 20 years working against the grain, trying to make sure no one else would either.

On January 19th, 2026, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also heads the Settlement Administration unit in the Ministry of Defense, gave a speech in front of a newly installed prefab trailer home, not far from the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem. The occasion was the inauguration of a newly legalized settlement called Yatziv, one of a crop of 19 settlements newly authorized by the government. Smotrich took the opportunity to voice his opposition—not for the first time—to Trump’s plans for Gaza, and offer his own. “It is time to tell the president that his program is bad for the State of Israel,” he began. “Gaza is ours.” He proposed storming the Strip, wiping out Hamas, and then opening the Rafah crossing to allow Gaza’s residents to leave—a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. He closed with his hope that the assembled guests would reconvene at a similar ceremony, this time to “bless new settlements in Gaza.”

Since October 7th, powerful figures within the settler movement—politicians, media figures, and former Gaza settlers turned spokespeople—have pushed aggressively for resettle­ment. Having spent two decades settling the hearts, they are ready to settle the land. Just months after the massacre of October 7th, settler leaders organized the “Conference for Israel’s Victory” in Jerusalem, attended by 11 cabinet ministers and 15 members of the coalition. The atmosphere was celebratory, with music and dancing, as speakers took to the stage to insist that “true victory” meant rebuilding settlements in Gaza. The sense for the settlers was that their time had come; this was their opportunity to revitalize the movement and finally reverse the disengagement.

Less than a year later, Daniella Weiss, the 80-year-old veteran leader of far-right settler organization Nachala, managed to enter Gaza by calling in a favor with close “associates” in the army. Her mission was to scout future settlement sites. Later, in October 2025, during the holiday of Sukkot, Weiss and Nachala organized 11 families to squat less than a mile from Gaza and demand the opportunity to celebrate where the settlement of Nisanit once stood. “The moment it’s possible—we enter,” Weiss said. “There’s a sukkah, next to the sukkah there’s a structure, next to that there’s a kitchen, next to that there are children—that’s how it advances.” Nachala now pulls similar stunts around every major Jewish holiday.

The widespread appeal of Nachala’s ambitions and those of other like-minded organizations demonstrates the settler movement’s success in transforming the disengagement in the broader Israeli psyche over the past two decades. If Weiss’s voice and methodology were once fringe, they now pervade the current ruling coalition, the media, and much of the Israeli military officer corps. What had once been viewed as a step toward peace became, to the Israeli mainstream, a cautionary tale about the dangers of territorial withdrawal. “Only settle­ments bring security” and “there are no innocents in Gaza” are turns of phrase regularly heard on Israeli mainstream television, in academic panels, and at policy conferences. Such opinions are broadly shared across the Israeli public: According to a May 2025 poll, 82% of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Gazans from the Strip.

Ron Gerlitz, a pollster at the Hebrew University’s aChord Center for social psychology, told Jewish Currents that despite his deep familiarity with Israeli society and politics, he was shocked by just how nihilistic and vengeful the public had become. “If someone had asked me on October 8th or 9th,” he said, “whether Israel would kill 20,000 kids in Gaza, I would have said no—the Israeli public would not allow it. I would have been wrong.” It’s not that Gerlitz has any special faith in Israeli empathy. “They don’t care about Palestinians. You can’t imagine how much they don’t care,” he said. But “Israeli [Jews] are looking for security.” Security is the reason, he said, that 50% of Israelis say they are interested in a regional diplomatic agreement that would include a Palestinian state in exchange for recognition and normalization with Arab states. It is also the reason that this same constituency would support the Israeli military doing to Ramallah and Nablus what it did to Jabaliya and Rafah. And only one of those avenues is being encouraged by the government, spoken of nightly on Israeli television, and operationalized by the settlers ethnically cleansing villages on the ground.

But while settlers and their most radical arguments are closer to the Israeli consensus than ever before, their vision may be drifting further from reach. The growing distance reflects a basic misalignment: Trump is committed to doing what is good for him, not what is good for the settlers. For him, Gaza is a real estate opportunity, not an occasion for winning an ideological battle. In January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser Jared Kushner unveiled the administration’s new vision for Gaza’s future. Before an audience of global elites, he presented AI-generated images of a gleaming waterfront city: high-rises, beaches, and tech and transportation infrastructure. “New Gaza,” he said. “It could be a hope, it could be a destination, have a lot of industry and really be a place that the people there can thrive, have great employment.” The language was awkwardly optimistic, self-satisfied, and almost entirely stripped of politics.

Even before Davos, Trump had begun formalizing a “Board of Peace”—a loose consortium composed largely of Gulf autocracies, opportunistic governments from Eastern Europe and South America, and the populist authoritarian regime of Hungary. Several European states declined to participate, wary that the body would undermine the United Nations. Despite the new members nominally at the table, the concept was the same as it had been for decades: Gaza as a “Singapore on the beach,” this time repackaged in Mar-a-Lago gold. But unlike earlier fantasies, this is not a plan for Gazans to build Gaza. It is a plan for others to build Gaza without them. “We think that this really gives the Gazan people an opportunity to live their aspirations,” Kushner said, as if Palestinian aspirations were not freedom and self-determination, but employment inside the latest American colony.

The goal, for the Board of Peace, is not a negotiated political agreement, nor is it Palestinian independence. Instead, peace, in Kushner’s words, is something to be “implemented.” Israel is asked only to step aside long enough for infrastructure to be built (infrastructure that Israel will likely control eventually, if not immediately). And so, while the actors and the language have changed, Gazans are once again hidden from view, their home turned into a canvas for AI delusions. The dehumanization of disregard has, in the Kushner-Trump plan, simply found a new aesthetic, but Palestinians are still offered no sovereignty, no borders, no seat at the political table—not even on the Board of Peace itself. In this sense, even while the settlers and Trump may diverge in their immediate goals, they are operating from a shared logic. Neither Smotrich nor Trump imagines Gazans as political actors—people who possess rights, agency, and valid claims.

And so Sharon’s disengagement logic survives—not in the absence of settlements, but in the conviction that Gaza’s future can be decided without Gazans. This is the disengagement’s enduring legacy: the belief that the right mix of force, control, and manipulation can make “the Palestinian problem” disappear. Sharon tried it with soldiers and settlers. Netanyahu tried it with blockade and bombardment. Now Trump wants to try it with investment portfolios and reconstruction contracts. Twenty years after disengagement, Gaza remains, in the Israeli imagination, as in the American one, not a place where people live but a security threat to manage. No matter the failure of every other path, where there are Palestinians, those in power never see politics as the answer.