Disengagement Law Rollback Is Political Maneuver, Not Policy Change, Expert Says

Vote by Israel’s government to repeal evacuation of four West Bank Jewish settlements, along with other recent moves, may signal that some coalition members believe elections will be held sooner than expected

Israel’s Knesset passed a repeal of clauses in the 2005 Disengagement Law which ordered the evacuation of four Jewish settlements in the northern West Bank, part of the law that saw Israel withdraw from the Gaza Strip. After Tuesday’s vote was heavily criticized by the United States, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement on Wednesday clarifying that no new settlements would be built in the area.

The statement, issued after Israeli Ambassador to the US Mike Herzog was summoned by the US State Department, said: “The decision of the Knesset to cancel parts of the Disengagement Law brings to an end discriminatory and humiliating legislation that prevented Jews from living in areas of the northern West Bank, which is part of our historic homeland.”

“However, the government has no intention of building new communities in these areas,” the statement added.

This suggests that the move is more of a political nature and, in practice, will not change much on the ground, according to Dr. Yonatan Freeman of the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“That is a sign that, really, this canceling of the law is more of a proclamation kind of thing, more of a political kind of move which, when it comes to the reality on the ground, will not change anything in terms of the presence” of Israelis in the former settlements, he told The Media Line.

If you ask me today, in 2023, why it was done in 2005, I think that for the last 18 years I’ve been asking the same question and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody really has an answer

Freeman added that the repeal will allow Israeli civilians to travel to the area, and could permit the continued operation of a yeshiva that is located on the site of the former Homesh settlement. But in terms of building a town or settlement: “There are no plans for that purpose,” he noted.

The repeal of part of the Disengagement Law, and other recent moves undertaken by coalition partners, might be indications of a weakened government, Freeman believes.

He says that recent statements made by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, as well as the repeal vote, may have to do, in part, with “the fact that members of the coalition feel that the strength of this coalition is weaker these days.”

Part of this might be because of the coalition’s current instability, Freeman says. There is debate over the judicial reforms among members of the coalition, Freeman said, which is “showing that this coalition maybe is not talking in one voice.”

“This and the disengagement law being canceled, I think, are signs that some people in this coalition feel that we may have new elections soon,” he explained.

With the November 1, 2022 elections that put the current government into office, Israelis went to the polls five times in nearly four years.

Freeman says that the quick pace of moving the legislation through the Knesset, and the very vocal and public way that all of these developments are taking place, might be an attempt by some coalition members to achieve as many of their political promises as possible to gain points for a potential new round of elections.

This, he added, “may also hint that some members of this coalition feel that the government is less likely to complete its term, so new elections may be coming even sooner than some people thought,” said Freeman.

Dr. Eyal Lewin, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science at Ariel University in the West Bank, says that the reason the four northern West Bank settlements were included in the 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip in the first place remains unclear until today.

“If you ask me today, in 2023, why it was done in 2005, I think that for the last 18 years, I’ve been asking the same question and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody really has an answer,” he told The Media Line, adding that, as opposed to the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip, the northern part of Samaria, or the West Bank, “was not in a highly populated Arab neighborhood, and there was no security problem.”

When people heard for the first time that Israel was going to evacuate four small settlements in the northern West Bank, “none of the ministers knew about it, nobody really knew about it, nobody really understood why, and the whole operation went on without any explanation,” Lewin said.

Freeman says that among the reasons the four settlements were evacuated was that the government in 2005 was “trying to remove Israeli citizens from areas where there was a lot of security needs to defend them, areas which may have been seen as an area where a future Palestinian state would take hold and control specifically that territory.” There were “also issues about the number of resources needed for just a very small number of Jewish members of that area,” he also said.

Lewin notes that even opposition lawmakers voted in favor of the repeal motion, though it would have passed even without their votes. “There is a big majority of the parliament members who think that, in the first place, it shouldn’t have been done,” he said.

The move came just days after the conference in Sharm el-Sheikh held on Sunday during which Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to establish a mechanism to curb and counter violence, incitement and inflammatory statements and actions, and where both sides agreed to stop unilateral actions that would anger the other side.

Because of those agreements, the repeal of some of the clauses in the Disengagement Law has been roundly criticized. But Freeman believes that the fact that the two events took place just days apart was a coincidence; he points out that the repeal vote was planned long ago, while the conference in Egypt was recently organized.

He explained that, when it comes to the Knesset, some processes “can’t really be controlled completely by the government. The legislative branch has its own proceedings and I think it’s really a coincidence that it happened right after that conference.” He added that Sunday’s conference was very important and it will most likely serve to lower the tension over security during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on Thursday.

Concerning international criticism, Freeman says that there have been some important international voices speaking against the repeal, but in the eyes of the Israeli government, the policy is what is really important.

“I think one of the things that Israeli policymakers and the Foreign Ministry have been conveying is that what matters is really the policy,” he said. “There is no policy that has been changed, it’s just political maneuvering that’s being done.”