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, everything got worse
Israel's security cabinet voted to approve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan for a military operation in Gaza City, leading to the eventual takeover of the entire Gaza territory by Israeli forces. Gaza City remains a Hamas bastion; Israel's object is to evacuate its civilians, then lay siege to the terrorist units remaining in the city.
"Our plan is not to occupy or annex Gaza," Netanyahu told reporters. "Our goal is to destroy Hamas and get our hostages back, and then hand over Gaza to a transitory government.… If Hamas concedes and lays down their arms and frees hostages, [the war] will be over tomorrow."
Like everything else about the Netanyahu government's conduct of the war, the cabinet decision has fueled intense opposition, both within Israel and internationally. It is a fateful, anguish-filled decision that may spell the deaths of the hostages still being held in Hamas's dungeons.
There is no way to know yet how this will turn out. But as Israel prepares to push still deeper into Gaza in what may be the cataclysmic final phase of its war to eliminate Hamas, it is worth looking back to reflect on another fateful, anguish-filled Israeli decision in Gaza — one that began the descent into the nightmare the Jewish state now faces.
It was exactly 20 years ago this week — Aug. 15, 2005 — that the Israeli government, led by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, destroyed 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip, evicting 9,000 Israelis and demolishing the homes where some of them had lived for decades. All of Gaza, denuded of its Jews, was then unilaterally surrendered to the Palestinian Authority. There was no quid pro quo. Israel relinquished the territory it had occupied in the 1967 Six Day War without requiring anything in return. Sharon labeled the operation "disengagement" — a term meant to suggest that by handing Gaza to the Palestinians, Israel could finally sever its ties to the troubled territory and its population.
Sharon's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert — who, like his boss, had always previously been known as a hawkish defender of Israeli security — offered a glowing vision of the blessings Israelis could expect from their retreat.
"It will be good for us and will be good for the Palestinians," Olmert effervesced. "It will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity, and a lot of joy for all the people that live in the Middle East." With disengagement, he foretold, "a new morning of great hope will emerge." He was sure that with the end of Israel's occupation of Gaza, "the Middle East will indeed become what it was destined to be from the outset, a paradise for all the world."
That was perilously wishful thinking, as I wrote in multiple columns at the time, but most Israelis embraced it. They persuaded themselves that to be free of the hostility and violence that plagued them in Gaza, all they had to do was — leave! Granted, uprooting several thousand families would be unpleasant. But a large majority of the Israeli public was convinced that the short-term trauma was a price worth paying to be liberated from the dangers and burdens of administering Gaza and keeping its Jewish residents safe.
"We will be on this side of the line, and the Palestinians will be on that side," I remember one Israeli journalist earnestly telling me several months before the evacuation. "They'll run their lives the way they see fit and we won't have to be involved."
The same argument was made by the commentator Yossi Klein Halevi. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, he attempted to explain what Israel could possibly gain from "destroying thriving communities, dividing Israeli society, and embittering some of our most idealistic citizens?" His answer: "What we will gain is what we will lose: We will be freeing ourselves from more than a million Palestinians."
Ambassador Meir Shlomo, who was then the Israeli consul-general in New England, urged me to support the Gaza disengagement because of the diplomatic dividends it would pay.
Israel's withdrawal was being applauded everywhere, he pointed out. The plan had the support of the George W. Bush administration and the European Union. It was being praised as "courageous" by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan. Both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah endorsed it.
But by heading out of Gaza, Israel wasn't walking into peace.
It was walking off a cliff.
The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was not interpreted by Israel's enemies as an act of magnanimity or pragmatism. It was interpreted as a surrender. Rather than a historic demonstration of Israel's desire for peace, the evacuation of those 21 communities and the departure of every Israeli soldier from Gaza were seen by the Palestinian Authority as proof that violence pays.
And so, 20 years ago this week, the IDF was sent in and Gaza's Jewish residents were escorted out. Their homes, schools, and shops were bulldozed. Only the synagogues were left standing, out of respect for their sacred status, along with 3,000 high-tech greenhouses, which had been purchased by Jewish philanthropists and donated to the Palestinians as a sign of goodwill and fraternity.
But that goodwill and fraternity were not reciprocated.
"Today you leave Gaza in humiliation," Hamas chieftain Mohammed Deif taunted the Israelis. Boasting that he and his people had made Gaza "hell" for Israel, Deif vowed: "Tomorrow, with Allah's help, all of Palestine will be hell for you."
The central error of disengagement wasn't the belief that Israel could live without Gaza. It was the belief that Gaza, left to its own devices, would choose peace over jihad.
With the Israelis out, Palestinians surged into the abandoned settlements and immediately burned down the empty synagogues. Within days, the sophisticated greenhouses had been trashed, as looters stripped them of irrigation hoses, water pumps, and plastic sheeting. Almost at once, Kassam rockets began flying over the border into nearby Israeli communities — the beginning of a terrorist torrent that would continue, off and on, for years to come. In January 2006, Hamas handily defeated Fatah (the main faction of the PLO) in Palestinian Authority elections; by 2007, Hamas had seized control in Gaza, and imposed an Islamist reign of terror.
Hamas turned Gaza into a forward operating base for terrorism: It imported Iranian rockets, dug hundreds of miles of attack tunnels, and embedded its arsenals in civilian areas to ensure any Israeli response would be politically costly. The withdrawal from Gaza didn't end the conflict; it entrenched it.
What was intended as a confidence-building measure turned out to be a confidence-destroying one. A radical concession meant to enhance Israel's security instead put many more Israelis at risk. Far from encouraging moderation, disengagement encouraged Hamas to intensify its brutal extremism.
In the years that followed, Hamas expanded its power and arsenal. Rocket fire into Israel became routine. An Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was abducted and held by Hamas for five years. Children in Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashkelon grew up with 15-second air-raid warnings to reach shelter. All the while Hamas kept expanding its terror infrastructure, dispersing arms and fighters through its underground labyrinth.
Every few years Jerusalem would respond to Hamas rocket attacks with several days or weeks of "mowing the grass" — pinpoint bombing meant to buy a spell of relative quiet.
It was never long, however, before the attacks resumed. Many ordinary Gaza residents hate Hamas; during an anti-regime protest in March, Palestinians chanted "Out, out! Hamas get out!" But with billions of foreign dollars at its disposal, Hamas remained in control.
Successive Israeli governments accepted this status quo, convinced that the alternative — reoccupying Gaza and destroying the Hamas regime — was too costly to contemplate. It was a judgment rooted in what Israelis now call the "conceptzia": the prevailing view, or "conception," that as Hamas contended with governing the Gaza Strip, it would gradually grow more tractable. Israeli policymakers from Netanyahu on down believed that economic gains would induce Hamas to moderate its jihadist mission of wiping out the Jewish state.
Daniel Pipes, the Middle East historian and analyst, writes in a new book that Israeli officials were blinded by this conceptzia — so much so that they ignored Hamas's blood-curdling genocidal threats and dismissed its open preparations for a devastating blow that would overwhelm Israel's defenses.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023.
On that day Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians. They burned homes, murdered entire families, raped and mutilated victims, and kidnapped more than 250 hostages. It was less a military operation than a pogrom. It was also the culmination of everything disengagement had made possible: a sovereign Hamas stronghold, armed and emboldened, able to commit mass atrocities with impunity.
For all the condemnation of Israel's "occupation" of Gaza, that occupation had in fact ended in 2005. Israel did not control Gaza's streets, neighborhoods, or governance. Yet after Israel left the territory became exponentially more dangerous, for Jews and for Palestinians. Disengagement may have removed Israeli settlers and soldiers — but it did nothing to remove the jihadists or lower their appetite for war.
Now, even as Israel wages what military experts like John Spencer of the Modern War Institute call the most careful urban campaign in modern history, it is accused daily of "genocide," of deliberately starving children, of crimes that echo the oldest and vilest antisemitic blood libels.
This is not honest criticism of wartime conduct. It is the inversion of morality — the recasting of a nation fighting for its life as the villain, and of a terrorist organization dedicated to extermination as the victim. Hamas has built its entire war plan around the mass endangerment of Palestinian civilians: embedding rocket launchers and command posts in hospitals and mosques, turning schools into weapons depots, using apartment buildings as shields, and blocking civilians from fleeing battle zones. It is not a byproduct of the fighting that Gazans die in large numbers — it is Hamas's strategy. It knows that every Palestinian body pulled from the rubble will be blamed on Israel, and it exploits that certainty with cynical brazenness.
At any moment, Hamas could end the war. It could release the Israeli hostages it continues to hold and abuse, stop firing rockets, and surrender its arms. That refusal confirms that the suffering of its own people is one of Hamas's weapons — and it is willing to sacrifice them without limit to achieve Israel's destruction.
Hamas's purpose is not just to wound Israel's reputation; it is to delegitimize Jews as moral actors altogether, to strip the Jewish state of the right to defend itself, and to normalize the corrosive idea that Israel's very existence is a provocation. Its defamations embolden Israel's enemies, sap the resolve of its friends, and distort the moral lens through which the world views the conflict. Just as Israel's pre-October 7 conceptzia blinded it to the scale of the physical threat from Gaza, too many in the democratic world are blind to the scale of the strategic threat in the information battlefield. In both arenas, illusions are dangerous — and the price of indulging them is paid in blood.
The only way forward is to end Hamas's rule in Gaza once and for all — not to contain it, not to conciliate it, but to destroy it as a military, political, and ideological force. History shows that cataclysmic defeat can be the gateway to renewal: After World War II, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were crushed into unconditional surrender. Their regimes were dismantled, their ideologies discredited, and their societies rebuilt on democratic foundations. That transformation ultimately benefited the vanquished even more than their victors, giving ordinary Germans and Japanese decades of peace and freedom.
Such a rebirth is devoutly to be wished for the Palestinians — but it will never be possible until Hamas, and the equally malign Palestinian Authority, are so utterly defeated that their war to destroy Israel is ended permanently. Only when Gaza is freed from leaders who glorify murder and annihilation can it begin to heal; only when there are Palestinian leaders who renounce the dream of eliminating the Jewish state can they begin to build a decent one of their own. And only when Israel prevails completely — militarily, morally, and politically — will both peoples have a chance to live side by side in the secure and mutually beneficial peace that has eluded them for so long.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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