Commentary
It seems like only yesterday that many of us were keenly glued to the dramatic events of what the news simply referred to as the “disengagement”—Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and its planned removal of nearly 9,000 Jews from the largest bloc of Jewish communities known as Gush Katif.
In July 2005, I emailed friends: “I am praying for Gaza and Gush Katif tonight. They are trying to stop the disengagement to save their homes and livelihoods—greenhouses that supply 70% of the country’s flowers, fruits, and vegetables.”
WABC radio’s “The John Batchelor Show“ had listeners including me on the edge of our seats as we regularly tuned in for live coverage from Gaza with investigative reporter Aaron Klein. Mr. Klein had moved to Gush Katif in 2004 specifically to cover events on the ground there. We heard from passionate Gaza residents who resoundingly, angrily, and often tearfully rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to demolish their communities and forcibly remove them from their homes if they resisted. (Mr. Klein went on to become a strategic adviser and the elections chief for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; currently, he continues his work as an author and journalist. John Batchelor is now a 75-year-old cancer survivor still hosting the same show.)
Without going back to Ishmael and Isaac, suffice it to say that the Israeli disengagement, or withdrawal from Gaza, was proposed by Mr. Sharon in 2003 and was approved by the Knesset nearly two years later. Ultimately it was a reaction to U.S. President George W. Bush’s “Roadmap for Peace” that he first outlined in a 2002 Rose Garden speech advocating a two-state solution.
Then as now, an American administration felt it had the right to call the shots in the life and destiny of the Middle East’s sole, sovereign democracy. (Such interventions have rarely ended well, especially with Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia willing to finance Hamas from afar, and Egypt and Jordan afraid that they’ll be stuck welcoming an extended Palestinian family that they’ve never wanted. Strangely, no one is demanding that those countries open their borders to benefit humanity.)
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So Gaza was sacrificed in the name of peace; but its residents didn’t leave without a fight of peaceful resistance.
Orange became the color of opposition to the withdrawal, and orange ribbons, t-shirts, and flags were sold across Israel and worn by supporters around the world. It was gut-wrenching to think that a modern-day democracy would be capable of forcefully removing residents from homes that they had lived in for decades.
It was impossible to think such a thing could happen, and Americans watched in horror as events unfolded. While the religious and cooperative agricultural villages of Gush Katif may have seemed a little too “utopian kibbutz” for us ruggedly independent, capitalist Americans, we saw what we perceived as an American spirit in the hardworking people who created communities out of vacant sand dunes and made the desert bloom.
In her 2018 article “Remembering Gush Katif,” writer Adina Hershberg recalled it as a Garden of Eden with “rich blue skies; lush vegetation; majestic palm trees and a large, clean pond thrown in for good measure.”
Gush Katif’s agricultural innovations were world-renowned, including greenhouses that produced bug-free produce.
A 2010 article reported: “Almost 70% of Israel’s organic produce originated in Gaza, as did nearly 15% of its agricultural exports, 90% of bug-free leafy vegetables, 45% of tomato exports, 95% of cherry tomato exports, and 60% of herb exports. Some 60% of Israel’s geranium exports came solely from one community. ... The farms employed 5,000 Jews and 5,000 Gazan Arabs. Total annual revenues were $60–70 million.”
But Mr. Sharon, President Bush, and the rest of the “quartet“ said that Gaza must be handed over to the Palestinians to bring peace after Israel had endured years of “exploding buses and suicide bombers ... unremitting horror and dread for the country’s citizens.”
The residents of Gush Katif were offered money to leave—money that none of them wanted. Some left, but others stayed, spending their final hours in their homes davening (reading Jewish liturgical prayers) or crying in synagogues. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) finally came to drag them out of their homes and places of worship—Jews expelling Jews from their own land. Some IDF soldiers cried with the residents; others refused to follow orders and stayed to pray with them. Eventually, no one was left; synagogues were stripped and Torah scrolls were taken away.
I remember those days well. I was watching the live webcam on the Western Wall at TheKotel.org. Some former residents of Gush Katif could be seen arriving at the wall in buses, easily identifiable by their orange markings. Word spread around Jerusalem that the banished Jews were coming to what they called the Kotel (“wall” in Hebrew.)
The webcam was silent, but I could see small groups of people grow to hundreds, then thousands. Some women were carrying flowers. The men were linking arms and dancing. I cried as I watched the strength of the Jewish people—their tears turning into joy knowing that nothing could separate them from their God. I could relate to that.
At the time, everyone believed that the greenhouses would survive. They’d been purchased by international donors to benefit the Palestinians, many of whom stayed behind to run them. In the end, however, they were plundered by Palestinian militias who then used bulldozers to destroy the iron framework, crush piping, and destroy irrigation computers.
In 2014, it was reported that “the green-houses of Gush Katif are now the safe-houses of Hamas.” That writer mused: “The sad, ironic truth is that the left in Israel that pushed for the expulsion from Gush Katif paved the way for the misery that population now lives in under Hamas rule. If I were a rational Palestinian living in Gaza, I’m not sure who I would be angrier at—Hamas or the Israeli left who essentially created this monster.”
In 2019, an IDF general who had helped carry out the evacuation of Gush Katif called it a “failed experiment.” The most important thing that subsequent terrorist attacks from Gaza proved was that no more land should be yielded to terrorists.
“Just imagine if Hamas would have remained quiet for several years after the disengagement, there would have been a general consensus in Israel to disengage from Judea and Samaria,” the general said. “No one in his right mind in Israel will now agree to a disengagement from Judea and Samaria except for a few left-wing radicals.”
Who would have thought that an area once so beautiful and flourishing would become the launchpad for one of the most brutal, sadistic slaughters in modern history?
Jerusalem has a Gush Katif museum to share individual stories and preserve the cultural and scientific advances that happened there. As American universities continue to side with terrorists, and massive pro-Palestinian protests continue across this country, it’s important for people everywhere to recount the story of what Israel sacrificed in the name of peace—because what we have just witnessed is one of the most massive failures of security since the storied Trojan Horse. Mythical or not, it’s the story of infiltration by the enemy. It’s the story of Gaza.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
