The JC Debate: The Gaza pullout might look like a blunder, but the strategic reality backs it up

A responsible discussion of Israel’s national security wellbeing must consider, alongside this operational question, also two major issues. The first concerns the long-term costs of incorporating the Gaza Strip (and the West Bank) permanently into Israel. The second relates to complementary military measures, which could have been attached to the 2005 disengagement programme that would have prevented the 2023 war from inflicting such major damage on Israel.

The first is a matter of Zionist grand strategy and takes us back to the 1940s. The second may seem essentially operational; it is, however, deeply rooted in a preemptive strategic doctrine, that Israel is finally implementing as one of the major lessons of the recent war.

Zionist grand strategy, usually implicit but often overt, preferred the viable redemption of the Jewish people to the full redemption of the land of Israel. Whereas the people could be redeemed only in its ancestral homeland, the extent of Jewish presence and control was always dictated by the political and practical constraints.

In the early Zionist settlement of Palestine the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria – the West Bank – was almost uninhabited by Jews, primarily because it was densely populated by Arabs. The Zionist hope of establishing a Jewish-majority sovereign national home between the Mediterranean and the Trans-Jordanian Hijazi railway rested on the expectation of massive immigration from east European Jewish communities. Jewish life there reached a dead end in the late 19th century. As their standing in Europe dramatically worsened in the early 20th, and the gates of America were tightly closed in 1924, a major portion of them were expected to come to Palestine, change the demographic balance and allow for the settlement of land previously excluded from the Zionist project.

This was the perspective of Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership when they accepted in 1937 the British proposal for the establishment of a Jewish entity in a small part of Palestine. They assumed that if the Jews could establish themselves in a practically sovereign territory, small as it may be, they would be able to strengthen their community and, when it became demographically possible by immigration, primarily from eastern Europe, take over the rest of the land.

“The establishment of the state, even on a part [of the land of Israel]” – wrote Ben Gurion in 1937 – “will become a powerful lever in our historical efforts to redeem the land completely.” He proposed bringing in more than two million Jews, establish a robust economy, build one of the best armies in the world and then “settle all other parts of the land, either based on agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbours, or in another way”. All this was based on “the many million [Jews] that want and must settle in the land [of Israel]”.

This Zionist calculus dramatically and tragically changed in the first half of the 1940s when Ben-Gurion and others understood the full magnitude of the Holocaust. The murder of millions of Jews, primarily in eastern Europe, was not only a human and a Jewish tragedy; it was also a Zionist tragedy that obliterated the demographic reservoir of the Jews expected to immigrate to the land of Israel. Now the question was no longer would the Jewish state be strong enough to take control over all the land, but could it populate it with a Jewish majority?

The inevitable consequences of the negative answer to this question were clear even before the 1947 UN partition plan, when the Jewish Agency in 1946 outlined the desired borders of the Jewish state, excluding the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria. This was an inevitable conclusion from the priorities outlined by Ben-Gurion a decade earlier: “What we want is not that the land will be complete and uniform, but that the uniform and complete land will be Jewish. I don’t have any satisfaction from a complete land of Israel, when it is Arab.”

When Egypt signed a separate armistice agreement in February 1949, the Israeli army could have easily occupied the whole land from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan. But Ben Gurion made sure that this would not happen. Responding to his critics on both sides of the aisle, Ben-Gurion said he was certain that militarily Israel could have occupied all of the Western Land of Israel [excluding the trans-Jordanian segment].

He explained, however, that a Jewish state encompassing all that land could not be democratic, since the Arabs outnumbered the Jews and that driving the Arabs out was not morally and politically feasible. “Do you want,” he asked, “that in 1949 there will be in the land a democratic state of Israel, or do you want a Jewish state all over the land of Israel and we will expel the Arabs, or do you want a democracy inside this state? How could it be a Jewish state?” “So,” he explained again, “when the question was the full land of Israel [“Greater Israel”] without a Jewish state, or a Jewish state without all of Israel, we have chosen a Jewish state without all of Israel.”

Regarding these most fundamental considerations, nothing substantial has changed since the 1940s. When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the same demographic constraints prevented their incorporation into Israel. This persisted even during the premiership of Yitzhak Shamir, the most committed Greater Israel enthusiast, while the Golan Heights, which presented only a marginal demographic challenge, was annexed in 1981 with an overwhelming consensus.

When Ariel Sharon decided in 2005 to disengage unilaterally from the Gaza Strip, he was well aware that it was not only the least significant part of the Land of Israel not under Israeli sovereignty, in terms of its Jewish historical significance, but also the most densely populated by millions of hostile and radical Palestinians.

Even for a right-wing Israeli leader like Sharon, who only partially and hesitantly departed from his ideological commitment to Greater Israel and his conviction concerning the strategic indispensability of permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, Sharon realised that the enormous cost of incorporating Gaza into Israel dramatically outweighed its benefits.

For the more realist advocates of the incorporation of Judea and Samaria in the Jewish state who were aware of its daunting demographic implications, reducing this cost by about two million Palestinians was a major incentive when compared to the relatively minor benefits of Gaza. Given the structural impossibility of a historic compromise with the Palestinian national movement, exposed again with the predictable failure of the Oslo process, there was no other way to leave Gaza but unilaterally.

With these grand-strategy considerations in mind, it is time to discuss the operative dimension. There are two relevant questions: first, could Israel have strategically benefited from the Gaza disengagement, while, at the same time, making it extremely unlikely for a war of the October 7 kind to erupt? And second, can Israel, after the expected withdrawal from Gaza, impose a security regime that will make such a war practically impossible?

What made October 7 possible was a combination of Israel’s addiction to strategic containment and a fantasy of a long-term settlement with Hamas, based on constant improvement of the standard of living in Gaza. Almost all decision makers, senior military and intelligence officials and outside experts grossly underestimated both Hamas intentions and capabilities. Israel acquiesced in the establishment of a terror army, its sophisticated weapon-production, its infrastructure and its unprecedented underground system. Israel did not respond as long as Hamas did not take major military action, and even then with limited objectives and extreme restraint.

Had Israel pre-emptively responded, massively and aggressively preventing the establishment of this infrastructure and reacting disproportionately to every provocation, Hamas would not have had the means to launch a major war. In that event, immeasurably less intensive and destructive confrontations may have erupted much sooner and required some Israeli escalation, but the calamitous consequences of the past two years would have been avoided.

What Israel should have done since 2005 in Gaza is being done two decades later, in Lebanon, and that can be adopted as the template for the future strategic regime in Gaza. The November 2024 ceasefire in Lebanon, regardless of the wording, practically tolerates consistent Israeli pre-emptive actions, aimed at destroying terrorist facilities and killing terrorists that are threatening Israel throughout Lebanon.

The Israeli practice rests on an American side-document and could be challenged at a later stage, but it essentially allows Israel to exercise strategic damage-control without permanent presence in a hostile, violence-infected, populated territory.

Gaza is harder to control without the deterrent of escalation that Lebanon’s government – eager to reassert its sovereignty – provides Israel on its northern border. The reaction to the re-establishment of terrorist infrastructure in Gaza will have to be more massive and violent, but the principle is similar.

Only one difficult yet essential balance can meet Israel’s overriding need to remain both Jewish and democratic while safeguarding its security and physical survival: keeping Gaza, both territorially and demographically, outside of Israel, and exercising the right of pre-emptive self-defence to stop its enemies preparing for war. The first is indispensable for preserving the state’s character; the second is vital to ensuring it can remain safe in a violent and unforgiving region.

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Dr Dan Schueftan is head of the international graduate programme in National Securities Studies at Haifa University