Ask former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert whether the 2005 plan he drove to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip was an attempt to further the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, or to avoid one, and the response is a kind of verbal shock and awe.
Unilateral disengagement was Olmert’s brainchild, developed when he was part of then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s government in the early 2000s, and implemented just before Sharon’s incapacitating stroke put Olmert in charge. The decision involved pulling all Israeli troops and Jewish settlers out of Gaza, with the aim of ending the occupation that had begun with Israel’s crushing victory over Arab neighbors in the Six-Day War of 1967.
The idea was controversial from the start. Some thought it was naive, especially after Gazans elected Hamas, a party dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was a Cabinet minister at the time, resigned in protest.
He said disengagement would lead to more attacks on Israel and the loss of its 1967 territorial gains, while others saw it as a cynical ruse for Israel to avoid having to negotiate a political settlement.
“There is only one person that can give you the answer, only one, me,” Olmert said in an hour-long interview at his Tel Aviv office. “My vision was clear-cut, explicit, without any doubts: a two-state solution.’’
Olmert believes it was Netanyahu’s decision to build up Hamas and weaken its West Bank rival, the Palestinian Authority, to eliminate any credible partner to continue settlement negotiations that changed the direction of travel.
There is reason to believe Olmert because, in 2008, three years after the disengagement, he arguably came as close as Israel and the Palestinians ever have to reaching a two-state settlement. Had they succeeded, history might have been quite different.
Who was right then matters now, because the answer could set the course for how to proceed after Israel’s military has finished a seemingly inevitable ground invasion of Gaza to crush Hamas, in the wake of its horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
For 15 years Netanyahu allowed Hamas to arm, while giving Israel’s religious and nationalist right free rein to increase settlements in the occupied West Bank, leaving non-violent Palestinians with no hope for peace, Olmert said.
Olmert said the goal of disengagement back in 2005 was to take a unilateral step toward the deoccupation of first Gaza and then the West Bank, because it seemed peace negotiations were in a stalemate and something was needed to break the logjam.
It is a topic about which he seems genuinely passionate.
He said his main motivation for disengagement is “the sour fruits of occupation, the sour fruits in terms of what we do to them and the sour fruits in terms of what it does to us, to the Israeli psyche, to Israeli attitudes, to a sense of decency, of humanity, which we are losing.’’
Olmert told the story of a handwritten letter he once received as prime minister from a Cabinet member of the Palestinian Authority who had gone to Jerusalem to meet with an Israeli counterpart.
He took his young son with him, to see al-Aqsa Mosque. They were stopped at a checkpoint, where the father was asked to submit to a strip search, which, as Olmert said “means totally naked, and they are checking all the holes in your body.”
The Palestinian official, deeply humiliated, turned around and went home to write his letter.
Olmert said he called in person to apologize for the insult, most importantly to the official’s son, “because when I talked to this guy on the telephone, I thought that the son, who witnessed what they were doing to his father, he will become a Hamas-nik.’’
“How many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been through the same experiences that have created this hatred,” he said.
A second reason behind disengagement, after the ill effects of occupation, was demography, Olmert said.
It was becoming clear that a growing number of Palestinians thought they might be better served by a single state, in which they demanded a vote, than by a two-state solution that gave them control of only part of the holy land. Due to their faster population growth, Palestinians would have by this time commanded a majority in a one-person-one-vote system across the whole of Israeli controlled territory.
That, said Olmert, meant either the end of democracy in Israel, as a Jewish minority suppressed the vote of a Palestinian majority, or the end of a Jewish state.
Disengagement from Gaza took the wind out of those sails. In Olmert’s view, a two-state solution remains the only viable way out of the dilemma that has confronted Palestinians and Israeli Jews since at least 1967, and the question is how to get it back on track.
That cannot be done until Hamas — an equivalent to Islamic State or al-Qaeda — has been erased from Gaza, Olmert said.
“You cannot negotiate with them,” he said. “You have to kill them. It is either they, OK? Or you.”
After that, Israel needs to reverse its policies and create a horizon for Palestinians, roll back the West Bank’s Jewish settler movement, accept that each side would have to make territorial concessions and build the Palestinian Authority back up as a credible partner, Olmert said.
He is aware this would not be easy. A joint Palestinian-Israeli poll in January found support for a two-state solution down to about one-third of the population on both sides, with two-thirds of Palestinians and 53 percent of Israeli Jews opposed to the idea.
That is a challenge for a strong politician.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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