Knesset debates whether Gaza disengagement helped Hamas
During the Knesset debate marking the ninth anniversary of Israel's disengagement from Gaza, conservative politicians claimed that the current Hamas attacks would not have taken place had Ariel Sharon not pulled out of the Gaza Strip.
On July 15, as the Gaza cease-fire collapsed, the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee convened for a hearing marking the ninth anniversary of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.
Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin, the committee chairman and one of the Likud Party’s hawks and most prominent critics of the disengagement, chose to focus the hearing on the diplomatic, operational and legal aspects of the plan. But the debate, which, at least according to the news release, was supposed to include “experts of different hues and views on the issue,” set out right from the start to formulate the following equation: The terrorism emanating from Gaza and the rockets hitting Tel Aviv are the direct result of the disengagement and the decision by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
And if anyone had any doubts about the matter, in his opening remarks Elkin quoted from the Cabinet decision adopted before the plan was implemented, which today appears so divorced from reality. “The State of Israel will insist that the Gaza Strip be demilitarized of weapons and the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will react to any violation,” he said.
The headline that emerged from the debate, attributed to former deputy Shin Bet chief Yitzhak Ilan, one of the experts who spoke, also fits the narrative the right wishes to imprint on the collective Israeli consciousness. Among other things, Ilan was quoted as saying, “The decision to pull out of Gaza created certain limitations on the activity of the Shin Bet in various areas such as carrying out arrests and interrogations and, no less importantly, loss of critical control over the border crossings, especially as far as the Philadelphi Route goes, which is the main source of the smuggling of weaponry and people. … We warned the political echelons about the intelligence difficulties that the disengagement would cause, but it did not accept our recommendations.”
