Over the past two decades, Europe’s perverse incentives helped turn a peace overture into a prelude to the worst war of the Arab-Israeli conflict
August 12, 2025 10:03
This week marks 20 years since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The purpose here is not to debate whether that decision was strategically wise – even with the hindsight of October 7 – but how the “international community” reacted to Israel’s concession and Hamas’s subsequent takeover.
Israel dismantled every settlement, removed every civilian and soldier, even its dead, and handed over one of the two territories the world insists should form a Palestinian state. By any measure, it was a textbook case of “ending the occupation”.
Yet in the years since, Israel has endured more diplomatic censure, more legal harassment, and more hostile propaganda over Gaza than over the West Bank – where it still retains a military presence and which the world continues to call “occupied” in the conventional legal sense.
To achieve this inversion, international law was rewritten specifically and exclusively for Israel. “Occupation” was redefined, contrary to decades of jurisprudence, to apply even without a single Israeli boot on the ground. Border controls and a naval blockade – found legal by a 2011 UN panel as a “legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza” – were nevertheless treated as proof of occupation. From there, the distortions metastasised. Gaza became “the world’s largest open-air prison,” the Warsaw Ghetto, even Auschwitz – all before the current war.
It was described as perpetually on the brink of “humanitarian crisis” or “catastrophe” – despite pre-October 7 socio-economic indicators such as life expectancy, literacy rates, and hospital beds ratios being comparable to or better than those in neighbouring Egypt.
Speaking of Egypt, the Palestinians’ Arab brethren south of the border were almost never mentioned, let alone condemned, for the Gazans’ supposed plight. If Gaza truly was a prison, why was Cairo never blamed for keeping the gates shut?
This decades-old blind spot set the stage for total acquiescence, even support, when, after October 7, Egypt sealed its border to ensure no Gazan could flee the war into Sinai. There was no outcry, no moral lectures, no invocation of international law, no calls for Cairo to host Gazans in its vast, near-empty desert where they could have been safe from the war and fed, educated and cared for without risking aid workers, looting, or shortages.
Back to the pre-October 7 years: Over the previous two decades, Israel faced constant rows with the EU over its attempts to control “dual-use” goods – materials Hamas could turn into rockets, tunnels, or explosives. Europe pressed to ease restrictions; Israel eventually did. The results were plain on October 7. Hamas started the war armed with tens of thousands of rockets and a tunnel network larger than the London Underground.
In each of the previous five major conflicts Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad started since 2005, the choreography was identical: unsubstantiated accusations of Israeli war crimes, the jihadists’ real crimes ignored or sanitised, their use of human shields and civilian sites downplayed or denied.
The predictable effect of these policies contradicted the West’s stated goals of encouraging peace and a two-state solution: Europe did not reward Israeli territorial concessions, encourage Palestinian state-building, or reduce violence.
Instead, it prolonged the conflict and harmed Israel’s peace camp. It taught the Jewish state that ceding land was dangerous not only because terrorists would seize it, but because, apart from the United States, the West would not have its back. Instead, Europe would condemn Israel for defending itself against the very terrorists its peace efforts inadvertently empowered.
The Palestinians learned their own lessons: that Hamas could act with impunity. Freed from the constraints of an Israeli presence, they could amass deadlier arsenals – guaranteeing Israel’s responses would be necessarily harsher, and thus more harshly condemned.
Billions could be diverted to terror infrastructure without fear of reproach or real consequences, because the West and foreign aid agencies would feed the population regardless. The more violence Hamas unleashed, the more Israel’s global standing would suffer. Terror worked.
The West’s approach remains to this day a grotesque misalignment of incentives that worsens the conflict – entrenching extremism and punishing moderation.
Twenty years of this misguided posture helped make October 7 possible. Hamas knew that even live-streaming its sadistic massacres would not alter the basic equation: the world would quickly focus on Israel’s reaction, invent fresh blood libels, call for “restraint” and pressure Jerusalem alone. Israelis knew that post-atrocity sympathy would be fleeting.
And so, last month, when a ceasefire and hostage release seemed imminent, dozens of Western governments chose that fragile moment to condemn and pressure Israel while dangling recognition of Palestine – collapsing negotiations, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed: “The UK is like, well, if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire by September, we’re going to recognise a Palestinian state. So if I’m Hamas, I say, you know what, let’s not allow there to be a ceasefire.”
If Western leaders truly did not foresee these entirely predictable consequences, they have no business making policy in the Middle East. If they did, the verdict is worse. Either way, 20 years on, the Gaza withdrawal anniversary stands as a monument to the cost of rewarding Palestinian terror and punishing Israeli compromise.
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