Sounds Like a Whisper (Matt Duss & Eli Lake)

[Eli Lake]

This is an egregious misreading of what I said. Continuing with disengagement in this sense meant dismantling more settlements from the West Bank. The disengagement agenda was at the heart of the Kadima agenda, the new party formed from the faction of Likud that followed its leader Ariel Sharon as he abandoned the party's official position of a greater Israel and members of Labor that believed in unilateral disengagement. The point about Ben Gurion, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is to be understood in this context, that if Israel withdrew from the West Bank, then those places would be vulnerable to rocket attack. Finally the Dov Weisglass comments, which I think were said to placate and attract Likud members to defect to Kadima, have no baring on the disengagement policy, which was the withdrawal from territory absent negotiations or a peace process.