“There was no advantage to this eviction. None. Zero. Nothing has changed for the better there,” said Naveh, who commanded part of the Disengagement. 

Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yair Naveh, who commanded the IDF’s withdrawal from northern Samaria in 2005, declared that Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Israeli communities in northern Samaria in 2005 was a “grave mistake.”

In an interview with the Israel Hayom daily, Naveh, who was GOC Central Command at the time of the Disengagement and later became IDF deputy chief of staff, said that reality has proven the move has failed to give Israel any security or diplomatic advantage.

“There’s no doubt that we weren’t able to create any sort of security advantage, neither in Gaza nor in Samaria,” Naveh said in the interview with Israel Hayom. “If the disengagement from Gaza contributed anything to history, it did so by proving that terrorism has nothing to do with the settlement enterprise, and by proving that an eviction of this nature cannot be carried out in such a way again.”

During the 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza, Israel evicted a bloc of 17 communities in the Strip and four communities in northern Samaria. The move, in which 8,600 Israelis lost their homes, remains highly controversial to this day, as it is directly linked to increased Palestinian terrorism and rocket fire emanating from Gaza.

“There was no advantage to this eviction. None. Zero. Nothing has changed for the better there. It had no added value to security or to anything else. It was a frustrating event that left a feeling that it was all for nothing,” Naveh said.

Naveh is now supporting the return to some of the four abandoned communities in Samaria.

A Failed Idea

Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Thursday he “absolutely agreed” with Naveh’s assessment.

“The Disengagement was a mistake. It was an adventure and a mistake for which we’re still paying a high price,” Liberman said in an interview on the Kol Hai radio station.

“The idea behind the Disengagement, that the Arabs would all of a sudden want peace and would be our subcontractors on security, collapsed,” Liberman explained.

“We wound up with an agreement signed by the European Union, and [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas got the Gaza Strip handed to him on a silver platter. Two years later, Hamas seized control [of Gaza], and today we are seeing the results,” meaning a well-armed Hamas-run terror state, which poses a threat to Israel’s existence.

By: JNS.org and World Israel News Staff

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