On August 15, 2005, the State of Israel committed a wound upon itself — a wound whose scars have deepened into an open, festering sore. This was the day the “Disengagement” began: Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the forced expulsion of nearly 9,000 Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and northern Samaria.
Sharon, the once “bulldozer” of Israel’s security establishment, justified the move with promises of “security, peace, and international legitimacy.” But the reality 20 years later is a bitter indictment of those illusions. Gaza, once a fertile belt of Jewish agriculture, is now an Iranian proxy base armed to the teeth, raining rockets on Israel’s south, building attack tunnels, and waging constant war. The idea that abandoning land without a peace treaty would “reduce friction” proved not just naïve but strategically suicidal.
The moral sin was not merely in the faulty strategy — it was in the method. Israel’s government turned its army against its own citizens, evicting families, bulldozing synagogues, exhuming graves, and erasing entire communities. Jewish soldiers wept as they carried out orders against Jews, a rupture in the moral fiber of the state that has yet to fully heal.
The political sin was in unilateralism itself — giving without receiving, retreating without terms, and rewarding terror without extracting commitments. Hamas took the retreat as a victory, proof that armed struggle works. The rockets that fell on Ashkelon and Sderot were born in that moment of perceived weakness. The massacre of October 7, 2023, has its ideological roots in August 2005.
And the theological sin? To relinquish part of the Land of Israel — without compulsion, without battle, without treaty — was to deny our own eternal claim, entrusted by the G-d of Israel to His people. No coalition agreement, no pressure from Washington, no clever spin can erase the fact that the Land is not ours to give away.
Today, on this anniversary, we remember not merely a policy failure, but a national act of self-betrayal. The images of Gush Katif’s orange-roofed homes being emptied remain a warning: surrender does not bring peace, only the enemy’s advance. And yet, there is also a counterpoint to despair — the resilience of those expelled. Many rebuilt their lives in new communities, their faith unshaken, their devotion to the Land unbroken.
Sharon’s sin will remain etched in history, but so will the lesson: A Jewish state cannot survive by abandoning Jewish land to those sworn to its destruction. To withdraw without victory is to invite war. To evict Jews from their homes is to erode the soul of the nation. August 15 must be remembered — not as a day of “disengagement,” but as a day of disengaging from reality.
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