the buildings in the settlements, except for the synagogues, which the cabinet decided
to leave intact for religious reasons. The four small West Bank settlements closed as
part of Sharon’s plan also were evacuated without incident, despite fears that religious
settlers in one of them would resist violently. The army completed its withdrawal from
Gaza on September 12, after which throngs of Palestinians surged into the settlements
and picked through the rubble the Israelis had left behind. The ensuing chaos under-
mined the Abbas government’s hopes of transforming the former Jewish settlements
into new zones of economic opportunity for Palestinians.
Two months after the withdrawal, Sharon announced that he was leaving the right-
ist Likud Party, his political home of many years, and forming Kadima (“forward,” in
Hebrew), a new, more centrist party. He cited the opposition of many Likud leaders to
his Gaza disengagement as influencing his decision to found Kadima. Prominent figures
joining Sharon in the new party included the center-left Labor Party’s Shimon Peres,
who had served twice as prime minister and had been a political rival of Sharon and a
close personal friend. Sharon’s leadership of the new party was to be short-lived, how-
ever. The prime minister suffered a mild stroke on December 18, 2005, and then on
January 4, 2006, suffered a much more serious stroke that put him in a long-term coma.
Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert assumed Sharon’s office and led Kadima to
a narrow victory in elections in March 2006, running on a platform of carrying out
what he said would have been Sharon’s next step concerning the Palestinians—disen-
gaging on the West Bank by closing most of the settlements and consolidating the
Jewish population there into communities around and near Jerusalem. Olmert’s base
of support would, however, prove to be uncomfortably thin, depriving him of the
political momentum he would need to move forward on this plan. The January 2006
victory by Hamas in legislative elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council com-
plicated matters even more and further undermined support among Israelis for a large-
scale withdrawal from the West Bank (The Hamas Government, p. 317).
The following is an address to the Israeli public by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on
August 15, 2005, the day Israeli forces began evacuating settlers and withdrawing
from Gaza under Sharon’s disengagement plan.DOCUMENT
Sharon Statement on
Gaza Disengagement
AUGUST15, 2005Citizens of Israel,
The day has arrived. We are beginning the most difficult and painful step of all—
evacuating our communities from the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria [the north-
ern section of the West Bank].
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 315