Twenty years ago Israel exited Gaza. How has that worked out for Gazans and Israelis?
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it is also refracted in the prism of the alternative.
There is no beauty in Gaza today. It is destroyed. Its immediate fate was two-step:Hamas’ brutal aggression against Israel on Oct. 7, and Hamas’ subsequent refusal to surrender and to free all hostages. Yet, there was an alternative in Gaza, a world before Hamas.
The alternative Gaza knew no destruction. It knew everything that — after Oct. 7 — Gazans fondly remember: open-air markets, ample food, functioning hospitals, high employment. That’s all gone now. Before Hamas, there was a much better world in Gaza for Gazans.
And for Israelis. They turned barren desert land into a few lush farms producing vegetables — bug free cabbage, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes — and flowers. They perfected hydroponic farming. They made the desert bloom. They showed it could be done.
Israelis came to Gaza at the behest of their own left-wing government. They uprooted no native Gazans. They made no war.
They did not, however, bring peace between the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza and Israel. After many terrorist attacks and many failed attempt at peacemaking — starting with the Oslo “peace process” in 1993 — Israel’s prime minister in 2005, Ariel Sharon, decided on a different tack: unilateral Israeli withdrawal.
His disastrous vision was that without a single Israel resident in Gaza, Gazans would run out of reasons to sustain their terrorism against Israel, and peace would ensue. Gazans would focus on building up their own lives rather than tearing down Israeli lives. Some Israeli farmers even left behind their greenhouses for the Gazans — a goodwill gesture.
The beautiful Israeli farms, which the PLO stigmatized as “occupation,” would be abandoned. The Israelis would leave. Any impediment to peace — real or perceived — would be removed. So ran the logic in Sharon’s mind.
Ariel Sharon was a war hero. He led the fight against the terrorist attacks emanating from Gaza in the 1950s. He saved Israel by reversing its fortunes during the devastating early days of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. If a war hero was suggesting unilateral withdrawal as a blow for peace, so be it. The Israel farms would be abandoned, no more “occupation.” There would be a real opening for peace.
Did peace ensue, or was the war hero naive? Was it actually Israel’s farms and small towns in Gush Katif — in Gaza — that stood in the way of peace? Not according to Hamas and its fellow travelers. The first thing they did after Israel’s withdrawal was to tear down the greenhouses left behind for them.
Then, some two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas took over Gaza. To Hamas, all of Israel constituted an “occupation.” To Hamas, all of Israel was a legitimate target, civilians and soldiers equally. To Hamas, radical Islam had no room for Jews or Israel in Gaza or anywhere else in the Middle East. To Hamas, Sharon’s vision contradicted their fanatic faith.
But it was not just Israel that suffered from Hamas’ rule. It was Gazans. They were expected to “resist” Israel by cooperating with — or at least saluting — Hamas’ construction of hundreds of miles of terror tunnels, Hamas’ acquisition of offensive rockets and other weapons, and Hamas’ steady attacks on Israeli civilians in Sderot and elsewhere in southernIsrael.
Gaza became a totalitarian society. Obedience to Hamas was enforced. “Collaborators” were put to death. Ariel Sharon’s plan amounted to a terrible fallacy — terrible for Gazans. Terrible for Israel.
And terrible for the 10,000 Israeli farmers and other residents of Gush Katif who were rendered homeless overnight 20 years ago this summer. Hezbollah uprooted some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in northern Israel the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Israel itself uprooted the residents of Gush Katif with no more plan in mind than the mad-dash, improvised, chaotic uprooting of Israel’s North after Oct. 7.
Hostels, “caravan” homes (the Israeli version of an unplanned trailer park) and other makeshift arrangements confined the Israeli evacuees from Gaza for years — in some cases, as long as seven years.
This sordid story — based on Sharon’s premise that Palestinian terrorists are given to reason —should not be forgotten. Israel cannot simply consign 10,000 people to hell — again, people who went to Gaza at their own government’s urging — and then erase the story: Families uprooted. Children upended. Schools shut down. Livelihoods ended. Creative agriculture destroyed. Mental health be damned. Hamas left to run free.
Oh, and don’t forget the “compensation.” The uprooted Israelis would be paid to build new homes. The compensation would be based on real estate prices in Gaza in order to rebuild outside of Gaza, where real estate was much more expensive.
Some of the uprooted never recovered, whether psychologically, medically or both. (Yes, medical studies showed a higher incidence of various serious diseases among the Gaza evacuees compared to a control group.) Other evacuees rebuilt and rebuilt well, but only after years of suffering and of fighting government bureaucracy — and insensitivity. Gush Katif was composed of communities. The government’s idea was to resettle the evacuees here and there, without preserving the communities of evacuees. This, too, needed to be fought.
Not every fight succeeded. Jewish Action reports on one Gush Katif community that was allotted a mildew-infested basement for a synagogue and different floors of a high rise to families — not a culturally appropriate solution for kids used to playing together on the grounds of the Gaza communities that the residents had built with their own hands.
Success stories include new towns and kibbutzim, reflecting the pioneering spirit that built Israel to begin with, and that built Gush Katif in particular. Of particular poignance now: New plans to rebuild communities near the Gaza border that Hamas invaded on Oct. 7. In the end, it is not the well known generals and the politicians who carry Israel forward. It is the quiet heroes, sometimes mistreated by their own government, who rise up and rebuild and carry forth.
That, too, is the story of the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza 20 years ago this summer.
That, too, contrasts dramatically and sadly with the fate of the native Gazans who had to live under the rulers they elected after Israel left.
© IJN 2025
