Why the settlers’ Gaza dream may cost Israel its future

When Israel withdrew its settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Disengagement was sold as more of a strategic necessity than a change in Jerusalem’s heart. Defending a scattering of towns in the centre of 1.5 million Palestinians had become increasingly untenable, and Israel sought to secure its own borders, rather than drain its money and strength in Gaza. The withdrawal was completed on 12 September, 2005.

Two decades on, many settlers never forgave their own state for uprooting them. They, alongside other proponents of resettlement, argue from a security perspective. The Disengagement did little other than remove the IDF’s presence in the area, and empowered Hamas to seize power two years later. The surest way to guarantee sovereignty is to plant Jewish life and boots on the ground.

And yet the opposite case is stronger. To resettle Gaza would be to place a few thousand Jewish families in the heart of one of the most densely populated Palestinian regions on earth. It would mean endless military deployments and rotations, an open-ended counterinsurgency, and yet another round of global outrage from the same protesters who chant ‘intifada’ in the streets of Europe.

Pragmatic Zionism must be the negotiator at this table: Religious-nationalist Zionism has consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to make any concessions or even agree to negotiations at all. Resettling Gaza would mean a decisive triumph of theology over pragmatism: the elevation of the symbolic Israel as the sacred inheritance, the non-negotiable, above the security of the Holy Land against enemies who would inevitably seek to exploit a weaker defence.

This would go against the very essence of Zionism: Israel was re-established in the modern era with the aim of it being a state capable of defending itself. Just this morning, the IDF reported half of Gaza City emptied as troops rolled in. Would it be able to conduct such sophisticated operations with such care for the civilian population of Gaza if it were significantly weaker?

There is also a demographic absurdity in the Gaza dream of the settlers. Israel has long been vigilant about preserving its Jewish majority within secure borders, and yet Gaza is overwhelmingly Palestinian. To insert a sliver of Jewish population into a space with two million people, smaller than Tel Aviv, would be to embrace a permanent minority status, wholly dependent on the army’s constant protection. It is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating experiment.

The timing, too, could hardly be worse. Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal have recognised the State of Palestine in the last week alone. Other allies may soon follow.

The yearning of settler families to undo the effects of disengagement and return to their homes is understandable. The images of synagogues set alight, farms ruined, and entire generations of families carried weeping from their homes are understandable. Jews uprooted by Jews was inevitably not what they expected. But it is necessary to remember why the disengagement occurred in the first place. It was not the whim of the Israeli Left, nor was it because of mounting international pressure on Jerusalem to withdraw – or, at least, not entirely. Rather, it was due to Ariel Sharon, the father of the settlement movement, who concluded quite bluntly that Gaza was an unaffordable liability.

Nostalgia, however powerfully held, is not a strategy, nor should it be. History is littered with nations that mistook their own wounded pride for a plan of action in and of itself. Even putting aside the military costs – the calling up of yet another round of reservists, the international outcry, the worsening of diplomatic ties with the few allies Israel has left in the Middle East – rebuilding settlements will only worsen tensions at home. The many deaths of soldiers that will result from conquering such a small strip of land, the cost this will have on their families, is simply unacceptable. Isolation abroad has a way of bleeding into tension at home, and diaspora communities, already facing the inevitable rise in hostility that accompanies each of Israel’s military movements, would find themselves carrying the burden in their own way as well.

The ideological basis of resettling Gaza is debatable. Regardless of how powerful the settler dream is, Israel simply cannot afford to turn emotion into its own strategy. Gaza was lost because it could not be held: to lose it again would be an even greater tragedy.