Mick Hartley

A JC leader marks twenty years since Israel pulled out of Gaza:

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.

Which has, incidentally, never faced any criticism for closing its Gaza border. It's always, and only, Israel's fault.

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.

And educate their children in Jew-hatred, courtesy of the UNRWA schools. While leaving the supposed government, Hamas, to spend their resources on stockpiling weapons and building their tunnel infrastructure, carefully embedded in the civilian world of schools and hospitals. And the leaders lived in billionaire luxury in Qatar.

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.

Fleeting? It was virtually non-existent.

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.”

Hamas themselves crowed that the European response justified October 7th.

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.