The vote taken this Sunday by Israel’s cabinet to reverse a previous government decision and not destroy the synagogues of Israel’s 21 evacuated Gaza Strip settlements – the sole buildings left standing in them – before turning their grounds over to the Palestinian Authority was a wise one. Unfortunately, a lot of foolishness preceded it.

Even though the synagogues’ destruction was largely prevented at the last moment by the massive intervention of Israel’s rabbinical establishment, the issue was not really, in a narrow sense, a religious one. There is, in Jewish tradition, nothing particularly sacred about a synagogue once it has been abandoned by its worshippers and emptied of its Torah scrolls, religious books, and other ritual objects. At that point, it is simply another empty building.

Nor have Jews generally made a great fuss over abandoning synagogues when they have had to. In the United States alone there have probably been hundreds of synagogues, in many cases Orthodox ones, that were sold when the neighborhoods they were in could no longer sustain Jewish congregations. Some were ripped down; others were converted into churches, or even into mosques and Buddhist temples. Nobody ever thought of this as a Jewish tragedy.

Razing the Gaza Strip’s synagogues to the ground, then, would have been – as Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yona Metzger, actually ruled – halachically permissible. But it also would have been – as Rabbi Metzger said, too – unseemly. What is the message that a Jewish state gives the world when its sends its bulldozers to tear down a former Jewish place of worship? If, to those unversed in Jewish law, this message appears to be that a Jewish state cares nothing for the sacred buildings of its own religion, it is one that should be withheld.

But there is another, deeper question, which is: Why should the government of Israel have ever decided to destroy the synagogues in the first place?

And this leads to a second question. Let’s put the synagogues aside. Why did the government of Israel have to destroy every last house – some 1,500 modern, comfortable dwellings all in all – in an area crowded with the descendants of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, and with other Palestinians made homeless by years of Israeli-Palestinian violence, most currently living in overcrowded hovels? Why couldn’t at least a small fraction of these people have benefited from the homes the settlers left behind?

Many answers have been given to this question – and as is often true in such cases, they are many bad ones trying to make up for the absence of a single good one.

It was said, for example, that Israelis should be spared the sight of jubilant Palestinians dancing around former Jewish homes. And jubilant Palestinians dancing on the ruins of former Jewish homes is better?

It was said that unless the settlers’ houses were destroyed, they would try to return to them. But how exactly were they expected to do that? In broad daylight, with moving vans full of furniture? On moonless nights, with knives between their teeth? The whole notion was preposterous.

It was said that the houses had to be destroyed because the Palestinians themselves insisted on it. But even if they did, why did Israel have to do it for them? What better PR could there have been for Israel than to have donated the settlers’ homes for the resettling of Palestinian refugees, only for these to be demolished by a Palestinian government that is constantly lamenting the refugees’ plight? What better way to expose Palestinian hypocrisy to the world?

And why, indeed, should the Palestinians’ have insisted on the demolition? Here, too, we have been given too many reasons. They did it, we are told, because they needed the land for high-density housing. Because if they gave the settlers’ homes to some refugees, others would be jealous. Because no refugees would have gotten them at all, the Palestinian Authority being so corrupt that its leaders would have divided the settlers’ houses as spoils among their families and cronies.

All this is nonsense, too. The Gaza Strip, which contrary to myth is very far from the world’s most crowded space (with roughly the same the population as Manhattan’s, it is 15 times larger), has plenty of other areas where high-density housing could be constructed, including the agricultural lands of the same evacuated settlements. Any new housing for refugees will favor some over others – does that mean no refugees should ever be re-housed? And as for corruption, when a government pleads its own venality as an excuse for its actions, it is a very sorry government indeed.

The truth, alas, is much simpler. The homes of the Gaza Strip settlers were demolished for the worst and most emotional of reasons on both sides. The Palestinians wanted to destroy every last sign of a hated Jewish presence, even if that meant depriving thousands of their own people of an immediate improvement in their lives. Israel did not want any Palestinians to have the satisfaction of living in homes built for Jews, even if these would have been Palestinians made homeless by Jews. For one of the few times in the history of their long conflict, the two sides found something to agree on: Destruction for destruction’s sake.

This is the most shameful part of the whole Gaza disengagement. The story of the synagogues is just its last chapter. Israel is right to let the Palestinians do what they want with them – turn them into mosques, into auditoriums, into stables, burn them down and plow them under if they wish. Let them use them or let them destroy them. Just let the destroyers this time not be Jews.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.