Israel's Withdrawal from Gaza, 20 Years Later (Part 2) - with Amit Segal and Asi Shariv

You are listening to an art media podcast.

You look at the Israeli government now.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted in favor.

Defense Minister Israel Katz voted in favor.

National Security Advisor Tsakya Negbi voted in favor.

Most of the Israeli government, the Likud members, voted in favor of this plan.

You know, Sharon used to quote a lot one of his favorite sentences, and it's a good answer to what you said about Netanyahu and his support for the plan.

In Israel, the future is unclear, the present is unknown, only the past keep on changing.

It's 3 p.m.

on Tuesday, August 12th here in New York City.

It is 10 p.m.

on Tuesday, August 12th in Israel.

In yesterday's episode, we started a conversation about Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, which took place 20 years ago.

I was joined by Archimedia contributor Amit Segel and Ari Shariv, who served as senior advisor to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who led the Gaza withdrawal.

Today's episode is part two of that conversation.

Yesterday, we tried to understand how Prime Minister Sharon, as the leader of the right-wing Likud party and a lifelong supporter of Jewish settlements, ended up spearheading the dramatic move to withdraw all 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.

We left off the story right as the Knesset was about to vote on Sharon's disengagement plan on October 26, 2004.

The day started with a general consensus that the plan was dead.

In a shocking turn of events, the withdrawal passed, with even Benjamin Netanyahu voting in favor of it.

Amit still remembers it as the craziest day of his career as a journalist.

Today, we'll discuss the long-term effects of the withdrawal and whether things would have turned out differently had Sharon remained in power.

Let's get back to it.

The sense was that the disengagement plan is about to die in a few minutes.

And then the vote began.

You know, sometimes you see old videos and you see them in black and white.

So this event, even while it was happening, I saw it and it was black and white.

We knew its history back then, the same day.

It was the craziest day ever.

And for me, Sharon was back then University of Leadership because he was blackmailed.

And three hours before the vote, when everybody was running like crazy, he went up to the floor and stayed there for three hours, refusing to speak to no one.

He just sat there playing with his hands and wanted everybody to watch him.

It was live on TV, obviously.

And the ministers and Netanyahu and all of them are running and he refused to speak.

And then the vote then is alphabetically.

Now, Netanyahu is in noon.

The letter Noon.

The letter Noon.

Noon.

Like N.

yeah.

Like N.

It's the last of all the rebels, okay?

The first one to be called by name was the weakest one.

I don't want to mention his name.

A lot of pressure was put on him.

One of Sharon's advisors just yelled at him in front of everyone at the Knesset, and he just went in and voted.

And then Israel Katz, today is the defense minister.

And then came Netanyahu, and when he voted yes, everyone was shocked.

I can still quote each and every shout by Knesset members.

And it was clear to me that once it happened that the Gush Khatif, the settlements, their story is over.

I want to say something about this vote.

You look at the Israeli government now.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted in favor.

Defense Minister Israel Katz voted in favor.

National Security Advisor Tachyan Ebli voted in favor.

Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gidon Sa voted against it.

He was back then the whip of Delikud.

He didn't resign.

There were other members who resigned.

He stayed in office.

So you look at how this, the current Israeli government is based.

Well, we have Nir Barkat, the Minister of Most of the Israeli government, the Likud members, voted in favor of this plan.

But that's, you know, Sharon used to quote a lot one of his favorite sentences.

And I think it's a good answer to what you said about Netanyahu and his support for the plan.

In Israel, the future is unclear.

The present is unknown.

Only the past keep on changing.

So we are working on changing the past here.

And after this vote, as I said, Sharon walked out of

the Knesset floor and he was really excited.

He understood what Amid just said, that he wanted his plan will go through.

And he told me and another assistant, we were really young.

I want to say I had a much better haircut, but Amid was there and you know, it was the same one.

And Sharon took us and he said, you are young kids.

It's a great lesson for you.

Never yield to blackmail.

Never.

I just want to say something about it, Dan.

Politically speaking, he was right.

But now my inner settler speaks, okay?

Yes, he didn't surrender to Netanyahu, but for us, he surrendered to Tarot.

He surrendered to Hamas.

That's a different story.

But for him, we thought that he's doing the right thing.

Exactly.

This is the different argument.

I mean, the whole idea, we speak about it in a retrospect of 20 years, wasn't of something that should be glorious.

It wasn't like the peace with Egypt, that everyone was happy, that was excitement in the air because you saw your worst enemy coming to hug you and to actually hear the national anthem.

Here, it was a tragedy in the writing.

No matter what, even if there hadn't been October 7th, the idea of evacuating 10,000 people that the government had sent them was a tragedy.

I suspect that it was the case for Sharon himself as well,

but not for his newly circle of support from the press and the left.

I want to ask you about that, Asi.

Did Disharon ever doubt that he was doing the right thing?

I'm pretty sure he would.

He did.

I'm pretty sure.

It was a big thing for him.

I think he thought, is it worth it?

Because the internal problems and the war and the fact that there was a rift in Israel society, is it worth it to do it?

And regarding what Amit said, I think that day of the vote in the Knesset was probably the last happy day of the disengagement plan because during the plan itself, the 30 days, it was devastating days for him.

The day that Iqfadar almost evacuated was the worst, for me, watching here was the worst day for him ever.

I never saw him more depressed, more sad.

It was his friends, it was places that he was, that he saw, places that maybe he helped building.

So, the fact that he won on the political aspect of 2004 was a very happy day for him.

But I'm not sure the rest of it, the actual plan was something that will fill him happy.

He was happier to destroy Bibi than to destroy Gushkotiv.

That's part of being a politician.

You want to beat your opponent.

But regarding the settlers, I think it was a terrible thing.

You mean meaning what happened to the settlers?

Some of his best friends were settlers.

Azambish, we mentioned him before.

I think he might have been his best friend.

And they never came back to being the same as they used to.

So Netanyahu then at this point decides to resign from the government.

Here's the thing.

Netanyahu's political positioning was heavily damaged, not because of the disengagement, but because of his being Israel's best finance minister.

It was very painful, especially for the right-wing's political base.

Because, for instance, he actually cut all the stipends for the ultra-Orthodox families.

He reduced taxation on the top earners, whereas having higher taxation on lower-income Israelis, which were mainly right-wing supporters.

That was the reason why, following the disengagement, the Likud under Netanyahu failed to only 10% of the popular vote, not because of the disengagement, but because of the economy.

His voters were very, very angry.

So Netanyahu, at the end of July 2005, two weeks before the disengagement, he sees a disaster at sight.

He says, I'm extremely unpopular because of the economy.

And now, if I keep supporting the disengagement plan, I'm going to lose the right wing as well.

I'm going to lose the ideological right.

So he tried to actually revert to the old ideological base, saying, I am the son of an historian.

I want history to remember in 100 years from now that I opposed this thing, et cetera.

In retrospect, by the way, had he stayed in the government when the disengagement happened, I don't think he would become a prime minister three years later.

He would have been a prime minister in 2006 because Sharon fell to his illness.

Think about it.

When Sharon fell to his illness three months after the disengagement, there was no one else but Omert.

And had Bibi had been there.

But now here's the interesting question, because we spoke about the disengagement, but then Sharon decided to actually dismantle the Likud, to leave the Likud, and to form a new center party called Kadima.

That the idea was to actually clean this arbitrage gap, that he is the master of politics in Israel nationally, but is not the homeowner of Likud.

Now, I think maybe ACI thinks differently, that Sharon would have left Likud anyway to form Kadima, isn't it?

So Netanyahu initiated a referendum in Likud again, saying Sharon did the disengagement, it's not Likud way, we need to do an election in Likud, only Likud, to bring forward

the primaries.

And Sharon beat him.

Now, personally,

I hoped we lose, because I wanted Sharon to leave Likud.

I thought he will get much more seats if he will leave Likud and be a center and not right-wing.

But some of the people who worked for Sharon did a marvelous job and he beat Netanyahu after the disengagement in Likud.

People tend tend to forget it because this engagement was so popular in Israel.

It was even popular in Likud back then in 2005.

And afterwards, even though he won, he left.

I want to go fast forward here.

So, Ami, tell me how the disengagement actually unfolded.

How did it, if you were one of the 8,000 settlers living in Gaza, what was the experience?

I was there when it happened.

It was the swiftest evacuation ever.

Why?

Maybe because the settlers were noble and they didn't want to initiate civil war.

Maybe because there were so many soldiers, so it was quite clear for everyone that it's a done deal.

But statistically speaking, 8,000 people were evacuated in five business days, not even a week.

So the idea following the disengagement was, what was all the fuss about this thing?

And then new ideas emerged.

For instance, broader evacuation in Judea and Samaria.

in the West Bank.

Now, Sharon denied it.

It's not the idea.

To be honest, I didn't believe him.

I thought that once he is elected with Israel's biggest majority ever, he would evacuate dozens of settlements in Judah and Samaria, thus actually ending the 50-year conflict about the settlements.

But history wanted something else, and Sharon got the stroke and he never recovered.

And Kadima won, I don't know, Olmert was a lame duck, and it didn't happen.

These settlers, what was their future inside Israel?

So, it was the second promise that Sean broke to the settlers.

The idea was that every settler has a solution.

As we speak, there are still hundred families that live in log cabins, the Israeli version of log cabins.

Sean wanted them to have better lives, and there were many, many

initiatives to actually resettle them.

But I have to say something: had October 7th not happened, I don't think someone would still see the disengagement in the way way it is seen today.

I mean, it was a sectorial trauma for the national religious sector.

It was a failure for security reasons.

But what made it so dramatic was, of course, October 7th that came from Gaza Strip.

Otherwise, I don't think you would ever record a call-me-back episode about 20 years to the disengagement.

Well, maybe.

Because we talked a lot about disengagement and the impact on these settlers and their supporters during judicial reform because many of these people felt screwed by the system and they lost trust in the Supreme Court, which didn't have their back when they tried to head off disengagement through the courts.

I disagree with Amit on this issue.

80% of the settlers who were evacuated believed until the day of the evacuation that it's not going to happen.

And their leaders told them, don't cooperate because it's not going to happen.

We're going to stop it.

The 20% that believed that Sharon was stronger than the leadership of the settlers prepared for that day and they moved to their houses, which they built.

Now, I think for a political reason, and as a strategic consultant, I think they did the right thing.

Their leaders told them, don't cooperate, because we need to make sure that this thing will never happen again.

And if this evacuation will be smooth and everybody will have a solution, it will be much harder.

I don't underestimate the personal trauma of each and every one of them.

I'm sure they suffered.

Some of them live their whole life there.

They received a lot of money.

I think it was 2 million shekels back then to a family of settlers.

That's a lot of money in Israel 20 years ago.

They could have chosen to stay in their communities and to be built.

Some of them did that, some of them not.

There are huge success stories coming out of Gaza.

There are a lot of people who are alive now because they left Gaza.

Because when I was a young kid, the biggest curse you could tell someone is go to Gaza.

It was the most awful place on earth.

Go to Gaza is a curse.

It was the worst place, but today it's worse than it was.

And the idea of the disengagement plan was let's leave Gaza.

And it failed.

The disengagement was a security thing.

The idea was we can actually divorce Gaza once and for all and just forget about it.

And it failed.

And it was so obvious that it's going to fail because you cannot leave a place 700 meters from you, lock the key.

take all the settlers and just imagine that it disappeared.

Amit, you know, I sense that you are not a big fan of Ariel Sharon.

If Sharon would have been the prime minister since 2009 until now, you think this was the case?

You think he would

tell you

what?

And Asi, you're saying if Sharon had lived and been prime minister, he would have headed off.

I think I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think what you're saying is he, Sharon would have headed off the security threat from Gaza.

Amit, now you're disagreeing with that.

I fully agree with Asi that Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu have made many, many mistakes.

But I do think that the outcome, maybe not 1,200 victims in one day but of Gaza becoming an international terror hub was inevitable once Israel left and I'll give you two proofs why it would have happened even with Sharon as prime minister one is that Sharon was prime minister since August when the disengagement occurred till January when he collapsed with the stroke Hamas fired rockets and Sharon promised even to me in an interview that we are going to bomb the hell out of Gaza he responded proportionally thus proving Hamas that he can get away with it.

This is one thing.

Second, I have a better proof.

Sharon was the leader of the very successful and painful military operation in the Palestinian cities in the West Bank in 2002.

It cost the life of 45 Israeli soldiers.

But then, Sharon was hesitant and didn't dare to do the same thing in Gaza, although Gaza, as Asias just said, was the worst place between the river and the sea.

And because he feared the cost of, let's say, 50 soldiers before the tunnels, before the RPG missiles, the outcome is that he decided to invade the settlements and evacuate them rather than Gaza.

So I would never accept the idea that Sharon, three or four years later, would actually enter the very same Gaza Strip.

Saying that it was inevitable was

disrespect to Netanyahu, because basically it's saying that if Ahmed Tibi would have been the prime minister in 2009, nothing would have changed.

The situation in Gaza would have been the same because of the disengagement.

The disengagement was a very painful measure we had to took.

It's like somebody was amputing his leg.

But after he's doing that, he keeps on drinking and keeps on eating terrible food.

He's not exercising and he's using drugs.

And after 20 years, he's dead.

And then he said, well, the amputation was failed.

Something happened between 2005 and 2025.

And Shaon would have never in a million years would have paid money to Hamas.

Asiya, I fully agree with you.

There was a possibility to avoid October 7th,

but the idea behind the disengagement was that the level of terror was something like 10 victims a year, 15 victims a year, and we would reduce it.

So between 15 and 1200 in one day, there is a gap.

And I think that the reason Sharon avoided responding disproportionately in the September 2005 after this engagement is that unlike the explanations to to the disengagement that we now have a full legitimacy to act in Gaza, no, the international community doesn't give you this.

So you pay the price, you pay the price, the huge price, and you don't get the commodity back.

The pillar of this engagement, it was the 25 casualties, obviously a year, was the fact that Sharon thought that the day will come, we will not stay in Etsarim in these places.

And he thought that we are 8,000 people on 25% of the land and eventually we will not be there.

And in his view, Judea and Samaria, I'm not saying West Bank because I'm a student of Sharon, right?

Judea and Samaria is the most important thing and we have to keep that.

I support you.

I support this position.

I just say that even if I believe Sharon that he didn't want to evacuate Judea and Samaria, the deal he reached was a very bad one.

I'll give you an example.

President Bush signed this famous letter saying two things, three things.

One, refugees would never return to Israel.

Okay, just I want to, this is this, we're going going down a rabbit hole.

I just want people to understand.

As part of the Gaza disengagement, in the context of Gaza disengagement, there was a side letter that President Bush sent to Sharon that said, one, second and third generation descendants of Palestinian refugees from Israel will not be allowed to return.

This had always been a demand, a condition by the Palestinians for any deal that their descendants should be able to return to Israel.

And Bush said no.

But there were other two pledges.

Two was that the U.S.

recognizes the major settlement blocks.

Meaning, no going back to the 67 border.

Yes, the third thing, which I think even ASI forgot, was another pledge in this letter.

That if terror emerges from the evacuated areas, the U.S.

would feel obliged to act there and to prevent terrorist organizations from being there.

So not only the U.S., of course, did not invade Gaza.

Do you really think when you see what President Obama did during the 2014 military operation that the U.S.

really respected it?

So I believe you, Aussie, but I think Sharon had reached a very, very bad deal.

Okay, so I have no intentions of defending President Obama, but I think both sides failed in what they promised to do in this letter.

But you know what?

Let's say Sharon was wrong and he was naive and all the supporters were naive.

They didn't know.

They thought something else would happen.

Netanyahu and most of the current Israeli government, they said this is what's going to happen in 2005 and still did nothing about it for 20 years.

Because this is important, Asi, because what you're basically saying, I think, is that those who were opposed to disengagement back in 2004 and 2005,

they still had the power to try to mitigate the damage of that mistake in the subsequent years and they didn't.

But what Amit is saying is there was no mitigating it.

Once Hamas took over in Gaza and you have Hamas headquartered, you know, 40 miles from Tel Aviv, there's no mitigating it.

So if Netanyahu would have been the prime minister or Ahmedibi would have been the prime minister, it was the same same outcome, which I cannot accept.

No, I'll give you an example, Asi.

Maybe Sharon would have gone into Gaza after a terrorist attack with 100 victims.

It wouldn't take 1,200 victims a day to do it.

That's the difference between BB, TB and Sharon.

But I think it was inevitable at the level that there was no legitimacy to re-enter Gaza.

Let's admit it.

I mean, and I said in 2019,

there is a very viral video of me saying that we should enter Gaza.

But I hesitated for three long minutes, which never happens to me on channel 12, because it was perceived as a lunatic thing to say that the IDF would re-enter Gaza.

One of the most memorable moments of the disengagement, in my opinion, one of the rabbis, I forgot his name, said that we are being evacuated because we failed to get into the hearts of the Israelis.

And we'll be back in Gaza only when we'll be back in the hearts of the Israelis.

20 years have passed.

I agree with you that the public perception of the disengagement is that it failed.

But I still think that most Israelis doesn't want to go to Bushkativ.

Maybe we'll be back here in five more years to discuss.

But I think in five years, Israel will not be in Gaza and there will be no settlements in Gaza.

Okay, Asi, I want to ask you a question and then we'll wrap.

Trying to tie it to the debate now.

Okay.

I hear Israelis all the time who want an end to this war that we're in right now, that Israel's in right now, which I completely understand.

They just want it to be done for a variety of reasons.

And they say, let's get out of Gaza.

Let's let's get all our hostages back, and then we'll reboot, replenish, we'll give the army a break, and we'll live to fight another day.

And Hamas will give us, they say, the IDF in Israel, a reason to fight another day because they will do something that will justifiably, justifiably provoke a response from us.

And then we'll go back in and finish them off.

Only this time we'll have the hostages.

And when I hear that argument, it is eerily reminiscent to what Sharon was saying in 2004 and 2005, that if Hamas fires one rocket, don't worry, we will be able to go back in and obliterate them.

And the reality is, for the reasons Amit was saying, it wasn't so simple for Israel to go back in.

The international legitimacy, the U.S.

support, whatever you want to point to, it wasn't there.

And the idea that Israel can now just cut some kind of

omnibus deal and get out of Gaza and get all their hostages out of Gaza and then just come back into Gaza, this is like echoing of this discussion 20 years ago.

Just replace the word Hamas with the word Khizbalah.

This is what we are doing with Khizbalah.

We haven't dismantled them completely, but we still went out from most places and we're attacking whatever we want.

My concern is that Hamas will not accept a deal.

And eventually, what will happen, I don't know if it's going to happen in two months, in six months, in two years, we're going to go back to unilateral movements.

Because if you cannot negotiate with them and you don't agree with them, and I don't believe in total victory, I'm sorry.

But do you also believe that Hamas is not serious about a real negotiation?

I think when Hamas look at their situation now, they think they're winning, not losing.

This is different because every day Israel is losing in the international community.

It changed around March or April, but now for them,

they are ready to prolong this war.

Okay, Asi, we're going to let you go.

I have a feeling we're going to have you back on, but thank you for helping us make sense of a wildly important moment in our history.

Thank you both, and see you soon.

Thank you so much, Dan.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

That's our show for today.

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