The Second Intifada and the Gaza Disengagement
Five years of suicide bombings in buses and cafés, followed by the evacuation of every Jewish community in the Gaza Strip.
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5761, after the Camp David talks collapsed, the Second Intifada began. It was unlike the first: the chief weapon was the suicide bomber. Buses, cafés, shopping centres, the Sbarro pizzeria in central Jerusalem and the Dolphinarium club in Tel Aviv were blown up. The worst attack came at the Park Hotel in Netanya on 14 Nisan 5762, when a bomber walked into a hall where some two hundred and fifty people were sitting at the Passover seder and killed thirty of them; days later Operation Defensive Shield began. In five years more than a thousand Israelis were killed — in a country of six and a half million, the scale of a war.
In 5765 the government of Ariel Sharon, long the chief builder of settlements, adopted a plan of unilateral disengagement. In Av 5765, immediately after the Ninth of Av, twenty-one communities of Gush Katif in Gaza and four in northern Samaria were evacuated — about 8,500 people. Soldiers carried Torah scrolls out of synagogues, dismantled cemeteries and moved the coffins. Many of the evacuees spent years in temporary housing.
The argument is not closed. The hope that withdrawal would end the threat failed: two years later Hamas took the Strip, and the rocket fire on the south began.