Israel's Withdrawal From Gaza, 20 Years Later (Part 1) - with Asi Shariv and Amit Segal

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The conclusion of Israelis from the second Intifada was, of course, that marriage with the Palestinians is off the table.

War and peace, like between Germany and France.

But Israelis wanted to divorce.

So the idea of unilateral withdrawal was quite attractive to many, many Israelis because it created the illusion that we can actually build a big wall and forget about the Palestinians.

It's 4.30 p.m.

on Wednesday, August 13th here in New York City.

It is 11.30 p.m.

on Wednesday, August 13th in Israel as Israelis turn to the 20-year anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Before today's episode, a little housekeeping.

This was one of those weeks in which the conversation and the topic were so rich and so meaty and the story was so riveting that we simply had to break it into two parts.

So, in your regular Call-Me-Back feed, you will receive an episode today and an episode tomorrow.

Part one and part two of our retrospective on the 20 years since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

That conversation was between Amit Segel, who covered the Gaza withdrawal as a young journalist, and Asi Shariv, who was a top advisor to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Israeli leader who pulled Israel out of Gaza back in 2005.

Separately, if you are a subscriber to our members-only feed inside Call Me Back, make sure you're listening to this episode on your private feed because Right after part one of the conversation with Amit and Asi, Amit and I will stick around to dive into your questions, listener questions.

Some of you sent in difficult but important questions about the rise in settler violence, about future political leaders in Israel other than Netanyahu, and about Qatar's influence.

This QA is for subscribers only.

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Now on to today's conversation on the history of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

On August 15th, 2005, the IDF executed the Knesset's decision to unilaterally withdraw from all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and uproot the 8,000 Israelis living there.

This plan was spearheaded, as I mentioned earlier, by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which came as a shock to many Israelis, as he was not only the head head of the right-wing Likud party, but a lifelong supporter of expanding Jewish settlements and of the settler movement.

In the past, he even earned the nickname, the father of the settlement movement.

What happened to Sharon?

Why the change?

How did he manage to get his mostly right-wing government, including Sharon's political rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, to support his disengagement plan?

And with 20 years of hindsight, is it time to ask whether it was a mistake?

Joining me today are Asi Shariv, who served as a senior advisor to Sharon during those dramatic days, and Arc Media contributor Amit Segel, who's also the author of the newsletter It's Noon in Israel, which you can find a link to in our show notes.

I highly recommend it.

I start every day with it.

As I mentioned, Amit will stay with me after part one of the Gaza Disengagement History Conversation to answer your questions on our members-only show inside Call Me Back.

Amit Segel and Asi Shariv on Israel's withdrawal from Gaza 20 years later.

This is Call Me Back.

Amit, Asi, welcome to Call Me Back.

Thank you.

Hi, how are you?

Good.

All right, Asi, I want to start with you.

Both of you joined me from Jerusalem.

Asie, I want you to take us back to 2002.

You joined Prime Minister Ayel Sharon's office.

Tell me the story of how you ended up becoming Sharon's close advisor.

Well, I was an intern of Dov Weislass, who was one of the closest person to Sharon.

I was an intern in his law firm and then a lawyer in his office.

And Sharon was the most important client in the office.

And after one year in office, he offered Weislaus to join him as the chief of staff in the prime minister office.

Weislas asked me to join him.

Now, I wasn't a big supporter of Sharon back then.

I voted for Ehud Barak in the election that Sharon won.

The only one.

He was the only one who voted for Ehud Barak.

And Weitlas was trying to convince me.

And he said, listen, they are bringing me to do something big.

I'm not known for my management capabilities.

I'm coming to deal with the political issues, with negotiation, with strategic issues.

Come, it's going to be a great year.

He promised me that after one year, we're going to go back to the law firm.

That didn't happen.

So I joined Shawan on April 2002, immediately after it was a big military operation.

And the first big thing that happened to me there was a meeting of Likud members on May 12, 2002, when Netanyahu, who was back then, wasn't a member of the government.

And he tried to convince the Likud members that recognizing a Palestinian state or establishment of a Palestinian state is the worst thing that ever happened.

And Sharon said, it's not the time to deal with this issue.

That was May 12, 2002.

There was a vote, a big event in Tel Aviv.

And Netanyahu beat him in the Likud.

Sharon was the chairman, but Netanyahu beat him.

Yeah, yeah, like the Republican National Committee.

There were a thousand people who voted back then.

Now, even the closest person to Sharon in Likud, Ruby Rivlin, later the president, Sakhia Nekbi, was trying to be on both sides and it did a good job of trying to negotiate.

They tried to convince Sharon.

They told him most of Likud members were against the Palestinian state completely.

But Sharon insisted.

And on the same night, after he lost, he lost, I think it was 60-40% in favor of Netanyahu.

A lot of people thought, this is it, Netanyahu is going back and he will be the Prime Minister and he will make sure Sharon will no longer be the chairman of Likud.

But on the same night, Rouven Adler, who was the closest person to Sharon, and basically I would say he was the the architect of his political career, told him, this is the last time you are losing to Netanyahu.

I remember that because I was only one month in the job and I thought he's not correct, but he was.

And then the end of 2002, we were mainly dealing with President George Bush's peace initiative to go for the roadmap for peace.

And in June 24th, Bush gave his most important speech on our issues back then, saying that there should be a Palestinian state, but he gave phases and what the Palestinians should do.

Now, it's a funny story because Sharon watched watched this speech sitting in his office in jerusalem next to him was zambish the most important settler very close friend of sharon and both of them watched it together and if you would have told me back then in 2002 that the outcome of this speech will be the disengagement i would thought that you were delusional okay so just to bring our listeners back to this so this was a bush initiative that was laying out a path to some kind of peace process, bilateral peace process.

It was a path to Palestinian state.

It's important because it's the first time, the first ever government in Israel that accepted the principle that in the end of the day, there will be a Palestinian state.

And it was a right-wing government that was led by Sharon.

And that was 2002.

All right, so Meet, the political landscape at that moment was a mess.

You have Ariel Sharon as prime minister.

He called for a new election and won again in 2003.

So he had a very short period between these two elections.

Right.

What was going on there?

The political landscape is changing dramatically in this era.

Until the year 2000, a right and left in Israel give or take 50-50.

But as a result of the collapse of the Camp David summit, in which Eudbach offered give or take everything to Yasser Arafat and got a second and difad in return, and the death of more than a thousand Israelis, the left actually collapses.

Israelis got rid of the idea of the bilateral negotiation because they ceased to trust the Palestinian leadership.

Their sense was that the right wing is is about to rule forever.

And the ultimate proof is that Ariel Sharon, the infamous leader of the First Lebanon War, the one that no one thought could ever be elected to a prime minister, won the election in the largest majority in Israel's history in 2001, 63% to 37%.

And then comes Prime Minister Sharon defeating

the second Intifada, going to the military operation in 2002 reducing the level of terror meaning going into the west bank this is janine this is massive operation yes janine ramallah and he goes to election because it's a low-hanging fruit he's crushed the second intifada so he goes to the election saying i'm the one who's tamped who's gotten control of the security situation i'm in a strong political situation so he calls elections and more than this the new leader the new elected leader of the labor party amr mitzna

says in a desperate move that if he is elected, he's going to evacuate the settlement of Netsarim in central Gaza.

Only one settlement, one.

And then Prime Minister Sharon says, this is a crazy idea.

If you unilaterally withdraw, it means that terror had prevailed, and I will never ever allow such thing to happen.

And he got twice as much as the Labour Party, 38 seats to the Labours 19, and the right wing got 68 seats.

So allegedly speaking, the right wing won and nothing like a disengagement plan could possibly happen.

But what ASCII says is that the hints were back then, because you described Sharon as the father of the settlements.

He was the father of many settlements, but he was sometimes an abusive father.

For instance, in 1982, Ariel Sharon was the defense minister that evacuated the entire Yamit region.

The Yamit region consisted of one city and give or take 20 settlements in Sinai, near the Egyptian Rafach, because Begin signed the Camden Accords with the Egyptian President Sadat.

And Sharon was the contractor of the evacuation.

And in 2002, as Asi has just described, Prime Minister Sharon is the first Prime Minister to say that the Palestinians should get an independent state.

So the right wing was quite suspicious, but Prime Minister Sean was elected on a much broader political base than, for instance, Prime Minister Netanyahu.

He got 60-ish percent of the popular vote, and he was focused, in my opinion, on the center-right rather than the far-right.

I just want to stay on this point for a moment because many detractors of Sharon and many critics of disengagement sort of double-click on the point that you breezed by, which is in his election campaign in 2003, he made made it clear that he was opposed to withdrawal from Gaza.

Yes.

Correct.

The same as Begin did in 1977 when he was elected before we evacuated Sinai.

And a funny story about Sharon, in 1990, a political journalist by the name of Hanan Kristal had an off-the-record conversation with him.

And Sharon told him no Israeli prime minister will evacuate settlements until I'll be the prime minister.

And he asked him why.

And Sharon said, because I wouldn't let him.

Ami, you were, at the time you were a journalist, you were a journalist with the IDF, is that right?

With Army Radio?

Yeah, okay, yes.

So, what were you focused on at that time?

I was under the impression that withdrawals, be it unilateral or bilateral, are off the table.

The Palestinians just tried to destroy the country of Israel, so no one is going to actually give them territory.

But what I didn't understand back then was that the conclusion of Israelis from the second intifada was, of course, that marriage with the Palestinians is off the table.

War and peace, like between Germany and France.

But Israelis wanted to divorce.

So the idea of unilateral withdrawal was quite attractive to many, many Israelis because it created the illusion that we can actually build a big war and forget about the Palestinians.

I'll give you an example.

I remember dining in the Knesset restaurant one day on the first month of the newly elected Knesset with Ronnie Baroni.

He was a newly elected Knesset member, very ideological, by the way, from the ideological wing.

And all of a sudden he tells me, I find no logic in having Nitzarim and Kfardaron, the two isolated settlements in central Gaza.

I almost choked because I never heard such thing from a Likud member since the 70s when the agreement to evacuate Yamit was achieved.

He was just the first out of many, many Knesset members to come.

I just want to add that although I said what he said about Netzarim and against unilateral withdrawal, nobody believed Sharon.

Sharon ran on a slogan that said, Sharon is the only one that can bring peace.

He's the only one.

And he said, for peace, we're going to do painful concessions.

And the joke among his voters that it's going to be painful, but for the Palestinians, because nobody believed that he means that to have painful concessions.

Now, when he got into the government, immediately after he started with this vast majority, he started talking about the roadmap for peace, RAN.

and their right-wing government accept the principle that they will get the Palestinian state.

That was April 2003.

No disengagement yet.

Amit, now talk to us about the relationship between Netanyahu and Sharon.

What's his relationship with Sharon and the Likud?

It was hate from first sight.

They detested each other for many, many years.

Sharon was a minister in Netanyahu's cabinet, and then the other way around.

Netanyahu didn't want Charon to be a minister in his cabinet.

He was always under the fear that Netanyahu is going to unset him because although he was newer than Sharon, Netanyahu was perceived as a more natural leader for the Likud.

Sharon's family was part in the past of the Labour Party.

He wasn't a revisionist.

He wasn't a student of Begging or a scholar of Djabotinsky.

So Sharon was never as popular within Likud like Netanyahu, although he was way more popular than Netanyahu in the entire public.

And Netanyahu saw Sharon as an irrelevant old man.

And Sharon saw Netanyahu as a model, not as a politician.

He called him the model.

Then he called him the dog.

And then at the end of his political life, he called him this thing.

Make it sound like it's a bad thing.

Exactly.

Sharon used this term, this thing, only for two people, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Rafat.

Okay.

So then how did Sharon then wind up making Netanyahu finance minister?

Very powerful position.

Assi was there in the room where it happened, but I'll try to depict it from the outside.

One, because he knew that he cannot ignore Netanyahu.

He was a very strong part of the Likud.

Likud was not a one-man band.

It was a two-man band, Netanyahu and Sharon.

And the second thing is that to nominate someone to be a finance minister in the middle of Israel's second most severe crisis in its history was like forcing him to write his suicide letter.

By the way, Netanyahu said no when he got the offer.

The only reason Sharon became the chairman of the Likud was Netanyahu in 1999 after he lost.

He looked who can replace him and he said, this old guy who is so hated in Israeli politics is the perfect guy for me.

He will be here for one year or two years and then I'll be back and take the party like this.

So he appointed him and Sharon, he looked old and he was 70 something and very fat and everybody hated him because of the the Lebanon War.

He despised Sharon.

Now, what I wanted to say about Sharon and Netanyahu is Sharon, it's true that he despised Netanyahu as well, but he was afraid is a big word, but he had a lot of concern regarding Netanyahu because he was everything that Sharon wasn't.

He had perfect English, he looked like a politician, he was the only threat for him.

They never trusted each other.

But eventually, they had like a cold peace that allowed them to work much better than what I anticipated.

Okay.

So, Asi, when did you start hearing Sharon talk internally about the settlements out of Gaza?

The first time I heard about it was in October 2003 during a visit of Sharon to Italy.

We asked Elliot Abrams to come to Italy to meet Sharon.

I smuggled him into the hotel because the lobby was full with Israel journalists.

It was a crazy story to bring him into Sharon.

No one saw, and Sharon told him that he's thinking about doing a unilateral move.

Now, Elliot, I'm sure you know him very well, wasn't a big fan of unilateral.

Elliot's a friend.

He's been on this podcast and he's a former colleague of mine in the Bush administration.

He's the best.

And he thought that it's a trick that Sharon is trying to find a way out of the roadmap for peace.

And they said no.

Dr.

Condelisa Rice called Weisslas afterwards and said no way.

And it was a big challenge to convince them that we are not trying to run away, but to initiate something else.

What was the game plan just politically?

How did Sharon think he was going to muscle this through?

He started talking with the members of the Knesset one-on-one, including the most right-wing.

I have a list in my house.

What everyone said the first time they heard about it, who said yes, who said no, one day I'm it, I'll give it to you.

And he heard things that made him feel pretty sure that he can go forward, even though some of the Likud members were totally against it.

With the backing of the opposition, he can go on and do whatever he wanted to achieve.

But he must have been worried about Netanyahu.

In my opinion, that's my personal opinion.

If Netanyahu be the leader of the resistance to the plan in the first half of 2004, I'm not sure Sharon would have succeeded.

And the main issue there was a meeting on March 1st, 2004 of all the Likud members.

And on that meeting, Netanyahu said, if I was the prime minister, I would probably not initiated this plan.

I thought that it should be something only for the final stage of negotiation.

But once the prime minister has said it, this train has left the station and we have to back the prime minister.

And it was a huge shock to the members of Likud back then.

Okay, Amit, this is not how Netanyahu remembers the evolution of his position.

So can you, from your understanding, what was Netanyahu's position at the time?

And then how did it evolve?

I'll describe it immediately, but I just want to give a very short introduction about Netanyahu.

There is a belief among Israeli journalists that Netanyahu is like a lottery card that you scratch.

I mean, there is the surface and then you scratch it and you see something else.

He says X, but deep inside he's Y.

But you should look at Netanyahu like an onion.

That every time you take one level, you see something else.

So inside himself,

I'm sure Netanyahu detested the idea of unilateral disengagement.

But in fact, Netanyahu is the great enabler of the disengagement plan.

Had Netanyahu chosen to come out loud, to speak out loud against the disengagement, it would never have happened, at least not in 2005.

Likud would never allow Sharon to do this if Netanyahu decided to go full engines against Sharon.

But Netanyahu, in an ultimate political cowardice, decided to join forces with Prime Minister Sharon.

In the referendum, within Likud de Grassroot members, he said out loud that he's going to vote in favor of the disengagement with no conditions.

Then he ultimately voted six times in the Knesset in favor of the disengagement plan.

And then he decided to resign only a week before the army entered the settlements when he had already known that this is a done deal.

So Netanyahu wanted history, even in real time, to remember that he was against, but in fact, he was a very major part in enabling the disengagement plan happen.

Why?

What was he afraid of?

I think that Netanyahu lacked the courage of dealing with Sharon, who was a very, very strong prime minister and very popular.

Netanyahu finds himself in this time, 2003, 4005, in a position he hated of a very unpopular leader who enjoys only the support of a very small political base.

Sharon was the international leader, the well-supported leader within Israel, and Netanyahu was the leader of one segment of the right wing.

This is one thing.

Second, if you want to attribute more more altruistic motives to Netanyahu, he was the leader of the Israeli economy trying to recover from a terrible crisis, and then he didn't want to abandon it in the middle of his efforts.

Netanyahu does argue that he didn't have all the details on what Sharon's plan was.

What are the details then?

Evacuating 25 settlements.

Okay, I'm not saying I agree with this.

I'm just saying Netanyahu argues that had he resigned from the government, he would have had to give up the finance ministry, which means he wouldn't have been able to put forward the economic reforms.

Which means he had to stay in the government, which means he couldn't vote against this engagement.

I mean, if you want Netanyahu to write his own Wikipedia, he won't write.

Benjamin Netanyahu, born 1949, was a very well-known economic leader.

He wants to write, Benjamin Netanyahu was the leading force in fighting fundamentalist Muslim terrorism.

So you try to convince me, or he tries to convince you that he actually was willing to give Hamas its biggest prize in its history, evacuating 25 settlements only in order to reduce inflation from 5.6% to 3.7%.

I beg to differ.

They could have said I'm against it.

Nothing would have happened.

He would stay in office.

So this is important.

There's this internal party referendum on the disengagement.

Yes.

Can I tell a story about ASI?

Yeah.

Okay.

Two days before the referendum, Sharon said that the referendum is decisive for all of us and we would, of course, respect it.

I went on air on IDF radio and said that of course Sharon promised to respect the results.

And then Arsie called me.

I remember where I stood in the Knesset and he said, no, Sharon said that he's morally obliged to the results.

Now, there are many things that can be said about Sharon.

Moral superiority wasn't one of the virtues.

So once Asi told me that Sharon is morally obliged to respect the results, I knew that something is going to happen.

We knew we were going to lose the referendum in the last three or four days.

It was a brilliant political campaign from the settlers' leadership.

And Sharon had to make a decision that night.

He was already in the middle of the plan.

He put a lot of political efforts to convince the Americans that he's going on it.

And in the end of the day, he had to make a decision.

Does he want to be the chairman of the Likud or does he want to be the prime minister of Israel?

What's more important for him?

He believed that this engagement was the most important thing for Israel.

So should he neglect this plan?

Because 100,000 members of Likud said no.

He had to make a decision and it's a very bad option.

And he chose not to respect the referendum that he initiated.

There's no easy way to defend it.

And I just want to quote regarding my conversation with Amit, a quote by the late Prime Minister Itzchak Shamir, who said, it's true that I promised, but I didn't promise to fulfill my promise.

But it's even more than this, Sasi.

I think he knew, politically speaking, that if his flagship of initiatives collapsed, it's the end of it.

And the shadow of Netanyahu was always there.

Because once the referendum was lost for both by the way Sharon and Netanyahu Sharon was very sad and Netanyahu was very cheerful he was the most cheerful loser I've ever seen he was so happy with the defeat there was a headline in Aretz back then that said Sharon is the prime minister of Netanyahu's government

okay so October 26 2004 the Knesset set to vote on the disengagement plan Amit you have told me this was the craziest day in your career why

usually when you go to a vote at the Knesset or the Senate, you always know the result.

It almost never happens that you don't know who's going to win.

Second, the atmosphere of a historic event.

People actually felt history in the air in the Knesset.

Third, because the Knesset was packed with grassroots activists who came to convince Likud Knesset members to vote either for or against the disengagement.

Fourth, because of Netanyahu.

From noon, the vote was at 8 p.m.

Something happened.

You could actually see it happening.

The Prime Minister's office was one door next to the finance minister's office in the Knesset.

So you could see the leaders of the settlers and senior politicians coming in and out Netanyahu's office.

And then some of them went to Sharon's office.

And all of a sudden, 10 minutes before the vote, Netanyahu actually set an ultimatum for Prime Minister Sharon.

Either you agree to have a nationwide referendum about the disengagement or we vote against the disengagement.

Sharon could never accept the idea because he has just lost a referendum in Likud in the most convenient terms.

On the other hand, if he does not accept it, he might lose the vote.

Or even worse than this, win the vote when he's assisted by the non-Zionist anti-Zionist Arab parties.

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

And then the vote began.

You know what, Amit?

This is actually a great cliffhanger.

This conversation is going longer than we expected, so we're going to split it into a two-parter.

Asie will be back with us for the second part on the next Call Me Back episode.

But for those of you listening on the Inside Call Me Back feed, Amit will stay on with us to answer questions we got from our members.

This week, I'll be pitching Amit listener questions about the future of Israeli leadership, the possibility of Palestinian statehood, the extent of Qatari influence, and more.

If you are not yet subscribed to Inside Call Me Back, you can do so using the link in the show notes or by going to arcmedia.org.

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Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aredi.

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Research by Gabe Silverstein.

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Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.