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TEL AVIV — While the world tries to work out what Israel’s goals are in Gaza, a prominent settler from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party is seizing on a moment of national crisis to tell him to reintroduce West Bank-style settlements in the coastal enclave as a defensive belt.
Yossi Dagan, an influential figure on Israel’s right wing who leads a settler community in the occupied West Bank, told POLITICO in an interview it was time to turn the clock back to before 2005 and rebuild settlements in Gaza. These would, he explained, act as well-guarded outposts to prevent the recurrence of attacks like the onslaught on October 7, in which Hamas Islamist militants murdered some 1,200 people.
“If you have communities and people, you have the army and you have more control, and whenever you retreat from the land, you have what happened — a Holocaust,” said Dagan, who has close ties with rightwing American Christian Evangelicals, and has been an ardent supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Lurching back to building settlements is a highly inflammatory suggestion, which Dagan’s critics contend will undermine rather than protect Israel’s national security. He has support on the Israeli right, but would set up a clash with Washington, chief guarantor of Israel’s security.
Netanyahu has traditionally been highly supportive of expanding illegal settlement on West Bank lands occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War, but a return to Gaza would be a highly escalatory step. The international community has already identified extremist settlers as a flashpoint for an expansion of the conflict in the Middle East, and U.S. President Joe Biden has warned West Bank settlers were “pouring gasoline on fire” in the Middle East conflict with violent attacks on Palestinians.
The official Israeli position is that the operation in Gaza is a temporary blitz against Hamas and not a return to occupation but many Palestinians are skeptical, particularly after remarks by Netanyahu that Israel should resume some kind of military control over the enclave for “an indefinite period.” The Palestinians are particularly alarmed by the idea that Israeli forces could now carve Gaza into zones of military control, leaving Arab communities disconnected, just as it has done around the hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers on the West Bank.
Dagan made no attempt to disguise his vision of staying on in Gaza.
“The government will have to keep a part of the land in its possession. The government cannot afford to and morally can’t go back to what it was before because we promised, ‘never again,’” Dagan said. “It won’t be possible in all parts of Gaza. But in the northern part, yes. There should be a protective belt. There should be life, there should be people, there should be the army. And it would help prevent October 7 happening again,” he adds.
Bullshit buffer
Many Israelis think Dagan’s strategy is wrong.
Tamir Pardo, who retired in 2016 as director of the Mossad intelligence agency, told POLITICO the settlers will need to be shielded rather than be the shield.
“Bullshit,” he responded, when asked whether settlements could act as a protective buffer. “They don’t defend us: we have to defend them,” he said.
Similarly, in interviews with POLITICO, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke out strongly against Netanyahu’s suggestion of a return to military control over Gaza, while former Prime Minister Ehud Barak spoke in favor of an international peacekeeping force, composed primarily of soldiers from Arab countries.
It hardly helps Dagan’s case that settlements are currently only inflaming political tensions in the West Bank, which shows potential of exploding, with fears mounting that a full-scale Palestinian uprising there could be in the offing.
In the past month, there has been an increase in violence in the West Bank. Israeli settlers say attacks are initiated by Palestinians; the Palestinians say it is the reverse and argue settlers are trying to grab more land and frighten them to leave their villages. According to the U.N., 167 Palestinians have been killed in the past month by the Israel Defense Forces and eight by settlers. They include Bilal Saleh, a father of four, who was shot harvesting olives near the West Bank city of Nablus. “He was shot several times in the chest. They killed him in cold blood,” his widow Iklas Saleh said.
Altogether, this year is turning into the deadliest in the West Bank since 2005. And there are growing fears more is to come. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli minister overseeing the police, is giving rifles to West Bank settlers to form what he describes as “security squads” to protect settlements. Palestinians say this is inflammatory.
In addition to Biden’s warning, in a subsequent call to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris “raised the need to increase stability and security in the West Bank and hold extremist settlers accountable for violent acts,” according to a White House statement.
Back to 2005
Dagan was a vociferous campaigner against Israeli disengagement from Gaza when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon oversaw the demolition of 21 settlements and ended army rule of the enclave. In the West Bank, several settlements were also demolished. Dagan barricaded himself on the roof of an ancient fort to try to stop the final evacuation of hundreds of West Bank settlers.
As far as he sees it, the events of October prove the case he was making when opposing the 2005 disengagement. He also argued the demolition of some settlements in the West Bank has exposed the 35 settlements he helps to oversee in northern Shomron. “The deadliest attacks on us come from the north,” he says, where the demolished settlements were.
“But we are still able to act as a protective belt for Israel,” Dagan insisted. “One thing is clear, if you give land, you don’t get peace,” he says.
Dagan talked with POLITICO a few days after speaking at the funeral of a settler who was killed returning home for a break after serving on the frontlines in Gaza. Elhanan Klein, a father of three, was shot while driving home. Dagan broke the news to his pregnant wife. “She started crying. She was distraught,” Dagan says.
Others outside the ranks of settlers and religious nationalists vehemently disagree with the idea of annexing or reintroducing West Bank-style settlements to post-war Gaza.
Pardo said Sharon did not disengage from Gaza to advance peace but because he believed progress on negotiations with the Palestinians was impossible. He saw the Gaza and West Bank settlements as compounding Israeli security risks as they acted as magnets for terrorism.
Hardline momentum
Still, Dagan is not a total outlier. Some in Israel’s defense establishment are also lobbying for a permanent change in Gaza. In mid-October, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank founded by former security officials, urged Netanyahu to seize the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip”.
That’s been echoed by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, a think tank within the government, which has recommended Gazans be relocated to Egypt’s northern Sinai.
The Biden administration has increasingly stressed that shouldn’t happen. President Biden has said reoccupying Gaza would be a “big mistake.”
And on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told foreign ministers from the G-7 group of industrialized democracies, in a meeting in Tokyo, that Washington opposes “forcible displacement of Palestinians.”
Blinken added: “No re-occupation of Gaza after the conflict ends, no attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza.”
Dagan is undeterred by U.S. warnings. “I respect President Biden very much for all that he’s done in the past month. He’s the leader of the free world and he’s done great and moral things to help in the past month,” he says. But he has been “getting the wrong picture from the press,” Dagan insisted, adding Biden should come to see the settlements in northern Shomron to see how important they are for Israeli security.
The prospect of the Israeli prime minister ultimately opting to reassert control over the Gaza Strip for the long haul terrifies Israel’s Western allies. There are rising fears in Washington and European capitals that Netanyahu might be unable to resist the raucous chorus for annexation, if he wants to preserve his governing coalition, which is dependent on religious nationalists and settlers.
This only adds to international unease about whether there’s a secret second goal for the war – namely the permanent uprooting of a large proportion of Gaza’s population, echoing past displacements of Palestinians, including the nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.
Remarks from members of Netanyahu’s government – though not from any ministers in the emergency war cabinet – are only fueling fears.
This week Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, said on television: “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba.”