Enraged By The 2005 Withdrawal, The National-Religious Camp Worked To Brand Territorial Concession As A Disaster — With Ethnic Cleansing As The Only Solution.

In August 2005, when Israel implemented its “unilateral disengagement plan” in Gaza, it came as a rude jolt to the settler movement. The plan entailed the removal of 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and an additional four in the northern West Bank, with a total of approximately 9,000 settlers relocated. The atmosphere in the country at the time felt as if a tipping point had been reached: it was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a stalwart of the Israeli right, who ordered the withdrawal of the Israeli military and illegal settlements from occupied Palestinian territory.

Twenty years later, how Israel conducted the withdrawal of its settlements from Gaza — and subsequently narrated the fallout — can be understood as a critical juncture in the demise of the two-state paradigm. It was also a harbinger of what is now replacing it: not just separating from the Palestinians, relegated to shrinking Bantustans, but annihilating and erasing them.

In the decade after the withdrawal, Israel’s right-wing national-religious camp, with Likud at the helm, succeeded in deeply embedding the idea that a withdrawal of settlements could never be repeated. This presaged the dominance since October 7^th of what were long considered extreme positions, where Israeli officials openly advocate for the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that was left unfinished in the original Nakba of 1948. And after the Hamas-led attacks, it was the national-religious camp that was the quickest to recalibrate and identify a moment of opportunity.

Very early on, the notion took hold that, tragic as it was, October 7^th was a sign of “messianic times” and an “era of miracles” — a divine intervention that portends the extension of Jewish sovereignty across the biblical Land of Israel and the coming of the messiah. That belief has since been invoked by leaders of the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism factions, most notably by Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strook, as well as by rabbinical chaplains in the Israeli army, media commentators, and others.

The Likud Party and the political establishment that had been busy advancing the de facto annexation of the West Bank, with settlers conducting pogroms in West Bank villages and intensifying land theft, now saw an opportunity to reorder priorities. Gaza no longer had to be conceded; it could be resettled. Twenty-first century ethnic cleansing could be taken for a test ride in Gaza before being fully unleashed in the West Bank.

“Gaza First” once referred to the initial implementation of the original Israel-PLO “Declaration of Principles”, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) assumed its first self-governing role in what were defined as the Palestinian areas of Gaza, as well as in the West Bank city of Jericho. The second iteration of “Gaza First” referred to Sharon’s disengagement plan, with the optimistic take that Gaza would be the first of many sites of Israeli withdrawal.

But today, “Gaza First” has taken on a new meaning: Gaza as the opening site of messianic redemption and Palestinian annihilation, or in the current Israeli parlance, “total victory.” It is no surprise that the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem warns in its recent report that what is happening in Gaza is already being planned for the West Bank.

The path from 2005 to 2025 was not preordained, but the contours are now clear — the consequences of political choices that were made then and now need to be unmade or reshaped. Describing this trajectory brings into sharper relief the need for a new political vision for all of historic Palestine, one that will have to come from outside the Zionist consensus.

Palestinians will need to take a central role in defining that vision, and will have to do so outside of the rigid constraints of the PA that sustains itself on the status quo. Whether Israeli politics and society can move beyond this genocidal moment is crucial, and will largely depend on the interplay between internal domestic dynamics and external pressure. But as long as the latter is so limited and absent, the former is unlikely to meaningfully change.

Israel’s Genocidal Assault Is Deliberately Unravelling The Fabric Of Palestinian Society. Now Imagine It Is Living Under Crushing Psychological Pressure, For Nearly Two Years.

Since the beginning of this genocide, the Israeli military has targeted thousands of professors, doctors, journalists and public voices across all sectors – pursuing a calculated strategy to strip society of its intellectual and social leadership.

At the same time, the occupation devised a more insidious plan to crush those who remain. It encouraged the looting of the few food trucks allowed in under international pressure, while preventing regular deliveries to warehouses and distribution centres – a clear green light for thieves to attack the trucks, steal supplies and resell them at exorbitant prices to the desperate.

This policy has produced a new social class of looters, enriched by war and theft. And that is precisely the intended outcome: one of the mechanisms of extermination is to encourage the formation of criminal gangs, disconnected from community values or collective purpose, to dominate the new order.

Respected figures in the community – university professors, teachers, doctors, reformers – are not likely to loot trucks or chase after deadly American food drops. They therefore face starvation unless they can scavenge a few scraps to survive.

There is a particular cruelty in this humiliation. Those who once lived with social respect and professional esteem are now being forced down to the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, laboring to secure a plate of poor-quality food for themselves and their children. They find themselves in a society sliding towards savagery, where human relations are increasingly defined by a brutal struggle for survival.

The children of Gaza have changed. Distortion of childhood is not the work of nature. It is the outcome of a deliberate policy sustained by the occupation.

When food used to enter in minimal but sufficient quantities, guarded and delivered to international agencies for orderly distribution, such scenes never existed.

Israel made the decision to attack those very institutions that organized aid distribution, with the explicit aim of drowning Gaza in chaos and tearing apart the foundations of social stability – destroying people’s humanity and pushing them into savagery in an attempt to strip them of moral legitimacy.

Political actors appear unwilling to take the decisive steps needed to halt Gaza’s comprehensive collapse. The devil whispered to Israel and its allied governments the idea of airdropping aid. It was a perfect scheme, delivering a spectacle for the cameras, while having little-to-no real impact in meeting the bare minimum of people’s needs.

Each day, a few planes release their cargo somewhere in Gaza. Children watch, clapping and cheering. Yet the load of a single plane is perhaps equivalent to half a truck. Gaza’s daily minimum requirement is about 500 truckloads. If around 1,000 airdrops are needed each day, what’s the point of 10 or 20?

They serve no purpose beyond media theatre. The children’s applause and excitement can only be explained by the novelty of the experience: for once, planes pass overhead without dropping bombs or missiles. That in itself is a new phenomenon for the people of Gaza.

Before this war, the skies were monopolised by Israeli aircraft of death – and so the children clap at the sight of planes that do not kill them. In this sense, the airdrops might be seen less as offering physical relief, and more as a type of fleeting psychological release; one small way to lighten the otherwise unbearable pressure.

Who could ever measure the damage this war has done to the souls of Gaza’s children?