General who headed Gaza disengagement comes out against 2-state solution

The Israeli general who served as the commander of the withdrawal from Gaza comes out strongly against the notion of a two-state solution. He says that the removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 would have been far more difficult had he not led the mission.

“You have no idea how much worse it would have been if I weren’t there,” Maj. Gen. Gershon Hacohen (res.) says to a settler from Hebron, who charged that he should have retired from service upon receiving the order to head the withdrawal.

The son of a famous rabbi, Hacohen tells the crowd after an hour-long address at the annual Yesha Council conference that “my heart was with you” and that “I didn’t want it to happen” and that the “whole direction” of withdrawal was misguided.

Hacohen adds that settlement “is the response” to the new asymmetric wars and says that the lack of settlement was what required so many soldiers in Lebanon and what led Israel to lose control over the roads there. In the West Bank, he says, settlers save the army enormous amounts of time and manpower.

And no one should even consider a withdrawal from that patch of land, he says to cheers from the crowds. “Friends, I will conclude with a simple statement,” he says. For 22 years, since the Oslo Accords, people have tried to reach a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The starting point is the problem. The problem is that the land cannot be divided… There can be no division of the land. All the rest, all the arrangements, are an open discussion.”

Those who speak of a two-state solution, he says, “belong to the 20th century.” Whoever is “part of the 21st century understands — one state. What is done in that space? God is great.”

He adds that “there will come a day” when Israel returns to the Gush Katif settlements in Gaza, where 8,000 Jews lived amid more than 1.3 million Palestinians.

— Mitch Ginsburg