It has been 20 years since the Gaza Disengagement. Today, the event is increasingly remembered as a failed peace initiative. Some Israeli commentators even argue that the policy directly precipitated the Hamas-led attacks on October 7th 2023.
According to Rob Geist Pinfold’s new paper in Survival, however, such interpretations are historically inaccurate. He claims that the disengagement was never supposed to promote a two-state solution, but rather to freeze the peace process while further consolidating Israel’s control over the West Bank.
The paper emphasizes that it was not disengagement itself that led to attacks on October 7th. Rather, it was Benjamin Netanyahu’s containment policy (keeping Gaza isolated, blocking a Palestinian state and avoiding major peace efforts) which led to October 7th attacks. The 2005 disengagement is an example of a situation where trying to manage a conflict without resolving it can seem effective short-term, but has catastrophic implications later on.