“You have no idea what we would pay to have Gaza sawn off from the mainland, pushed and swept away from us into the wide open Mediterranean,” a senior Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity recently. “Not just us. The Egyptians, too, would like this to happen as would the Palestinians in Ramallah who would not touch Gaza with a ten-foot pole,” the source added, arguing that Israel’s military occupation of the Gaza Strip following the 1967 Six-Day War was one of the cardinal mistakes in the history of the state. “[Egyptian] President Anwar Sadat did not even demand the return of Gaza within the framework of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, and even had Israel tried to force him to take it back, he would have refused.”
The Gaza Strip defies military or diplomatic solutions, as everyone in Israel and everywhere else knows. That does not deter successive Israeli politicians from pledging to “solve the problem.” Late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005 and threw the keys into the sea. As head of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that once in power as prime minister, he would instruct the military to topple the Hamas regime, rid the enclave of terrorists and restore calm. Various defense ministers made similar claims. Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman declared that if appointed he would present Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with a 48-hour ultimatum to return the Israeli civilians and bodies of soldiers held by his organization, or else. Yamina leader Naftali Bennett presented grandiose plans to “pulverize” Hamas and bring it to its knees once appointed to the job. After taking office in 2019, the chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Aviv Kochavi announced a policy of “lethality” on Gaza.
