In College sophomore Zachary Evans’ recent letter to the Review (“Palestinians Have Most to Answer For in Conflict,” Dec. 2012) he writes:

“In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon evacuated every settler from the Gaza Strip and gave the territory over to Palestinian control. While the gesture was aimed at realizing peace, the evacuation has proven to have terrible consequences for both Israel and the Palestinians.”

According to top Israeli officials and the widely read Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Evan’s version of events has no grounding in reality. In 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass stated that the significance of Israel’s proposed withdrawal from Gaza is “the freezing of the peace process” and added that it “supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

Weisglass went further, specifically stating that the spectacle of Israeli disengagement from Gaza would be a politically viable way for Israel to undermine the chances of a Palestinian state and gain American approval for this scheme: “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

In other words, Israel’s Gaza policy was designed to sabotage negotiations with Palestinians and was certainly not undertaken in the interest of “realizing peace.” Anyone who doubts this interpretation of the Gaza disengagement is welcome to Google: “Top PM aide: Gaza plan aims to freeze the peace process.” Though Evans’s blatant misrepresentation of the intentions underlying Israel’s relationship to Gaza is not the only falsehood contained within their piece, it indicates a crucial and widespread misunderstanding that many defenders of the state of Israel hold true: that the Israeli government has a genuine interest in achieving peace with Palestinians. In a recent article entitled “Assassinating The Chance For Calm,” Gershon Baskin, the Israeli negotiator who secured the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and spoke at Oberlin in the spring of 2011 at the invitation of Oberlin Students for Israel, condemned the Israeli government for breaking a ceasefire with Hamas by assassinating Ahmed Jaabari. At the time of his death, Jaabari — commander of the military wing of Hamas — was considering a draft proposal for a longterm ceasefire. “When he was convinced that Israel was ready to stand down as well, Jaabari was always ready to take the orders to force the ceasefire on all of the other factions and on Hamas,” writes Baskin. Why would the Israeli government assassinate Jaabari, known to Baskin as one of the “more pragmatic elements” within Hamas in the midst of back-channel peace negotiations? Baskin concludes that the “assassintation of Jaabari was a pre-emptive strike against the possibility of a long term ceasefire.” Clearly, the Israeli government’s drive to sabotage genuine peace agreements is alive and well today. In the interest of both moral and intellectual responsibility, Evans owes the Oberlin community an apology for putting forth a damaging and wildly inaccurate representation of Israel’s 2005 “withdrawal” from Gaza.