[This article is reprinted with permission of Dec Emet Productions. Henry Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and the author of the book War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom. Kopel is an honors graduate of Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is an annual guest lecturer on prosecuting hate crimes at the University of Connecticut Law School. He serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative. ]
In the Hamas-built hellscapes of Gaza, there is little doubt that Israel will ultimately win the shooting war. But a harder question is, can Israel also win the peace? That is, can Israel not only defeat Hamas, but also permanently end the recurrence of Gazan terror?
The answer to that question turns on the recognition that the war does not end when the guns fall silent. At that point the military aspect of the war may have concluded. But the equally important ideological component will remain to be fought and won.
The Ideological War
Just what is the “ideological component” of the war? In sum, and much like what faced the victorious World War II allies upon Nazi Germany’s surrender, there will remain the critically important job of expunging from Gaza’s institutions and society, Hamas’s deeply embedded genocidal ideology.
As I have written elsewhere, in both Hamas-ruled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank, there exists the world’s most powerful ideological ecosystem for the mass production of terrorists. Though often underreported, the schools, mosques, and media across those territories indoctrinate their children and citizens 24/7 in hatred and demonization of Jews and Israel and glorify suicide bombers as noble “martyrs.”
Across Gaza, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) runs 278 schools serving over 291,000 students. UNRWA schools have been shown time and again to be conduits of Nazi-like Jew hatred. A 2023 audit found that UNRWA schools in Gaza “regularly call for the murder of Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, [and] demonize Israelis…” Their textbooks lionize terrorists like “Dalal Mughrabi, murderer of 38 Israelis,” for whom an entire chapter is “dedicated to her role as a model of female empowerment.” More than 100 UNRWA educators were found to be “praising Hitler and inciting Jew-hatred” on social media.
Schools across the West Bank similarly demonize Jews and glorify mass murders of Israelis. High school textbooks “teach their children to hate Israel and vilify Israel’s existence while they glorify terror.” And when the school year ends, Palestinian children attend summer camps named after suicide bombers, which indoctrinate their campers in hatred and terror-worship.
For Palestinian adults, the incitement continues unabated in all variety of state-run media. The PA’s daily newspaper publishes a steady diet of defamations, such as: “[m]assacre is the basis of the State of Israel”; the Jew is “the disease of the century”; Israelis “are the new Nazis upon the earth” whose crimes are “worse than . . . [the] gas chambers”; “Israel . . . is . . . a cunning Satan”; and Jews are “‘Shylocks of the land, busily emptying Palestinian pockets.”
This hate propaganda is effective. Countless video recordings demonstrate that after each successful terror-murder of one or more Israelis, Palestinian communities across both Gaza and the West Bank erupt in public celebrations, with dancing in the streets, fireworks, shooting of weapons, and handing out candy to children.
For anyone seeking to understand the ideological landscape of Gaza, a compellingly intimate account is provided by journalists Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg in their book The Road to Martyr’s Square: A Journey Into the World of the Suicide Bomber. This was published in 2005, the year before Hamas ousted the PA as Gaza’s governing power. Even then, as the book abundantly documents, a tsunami of propaganda flowing through the schools, mosques, and media of Gaza raised the suicide bomber to the pinnacle of communal admiration and aspiration. And then as now, there has been no shortage of young men who respond to those powerful social incentives.
Funerals of suicide bombers regularly become occasions for mass celebration. “Martyr cards” portraying the killer are printed and distributed throughout the community, and “martyr posters” of the killer are plastered across Palestinian public spaces. Palestinian political analyst Addie Awad confirms that “the veneration of martyrs is part and parcel of the Palestinian national identity.”
Statistics validate the lethal toxicity of this hate indoctrination. In the years just before and during the “second intifada” (1997-2003), which followed Yasir Arafat’s rejection of a generous Palestinian statehood offer, calls for jihad and Jew-murder proliferated across Palestinian media. And as shown by economist Alan Kreuger, per capita terror attacks across the Palestinian territories in those years were the highest in the world. They exceeded the second highest, Sierra Leone, by more than 350 per cent.
Consistent with those statistics, Hamas leaders during that same time-frame reported that they were experiencing a surplus of “young men who beat on our doors, clamoring to be sent” on suicide missions. “Those whom we turn away again and again . . . pester[ed] us, pleading to be accepted.” The flood of hate propaganda had turned Gaza into an assembly line for the mass production of terrorists.
It is no mere coincidence that Palestinian schools, mosques, and media replicate the propaganda environment of Nazi Germany. The Palestinian national movement began in the 1930s under the leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who successfully led the effort to conclude an Arab-Nazi alliance during World War II. In 1941 al-Husseini and Hitler jointly pledged to conquer the Middle East, annex it to the Nazi empire, and build death camps across Palestine. That this second Holocaust did not happen is owed entirely to the British-American defeat of Hitler’s North African armies in 1943.
Al-Husseini also spent those years poisoning the Middle East’s political discourse, as a principal organizer of a massive Nazi propaganda campaign across the region. And unlike postwar Europe, this annihilationist ideology never was expunged from Palestinian culture. On the contrary, in subsequent decades al-Husseini and his two successors, Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, continued and expanded this genocidal indoctrination of their people.
Accordingly, even if every Hamas terrorist is killed, Gaza’s educational and media environment, if left in place, will soon plentifully produce a new generation of terrorists hell-bent on massacring every Jew across Israel. This is why a secure peace with Gaza cannot be won by military means alone.
Eradicating the Ideology Requires an Interim Occupation
Just as was done in postwar Nazi Germany, the expunging of Jew-hating terrorist indoctrination from Gaza requires a wholesale process of replacing, restaffing, and retraining its education, media, governance, and religious institutions. This cannot be done during the military phase of the war, and it will take some time afterwards to accomplish. Hence the need for an interim period of occupation.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration already has warned Israel not to undertake an occupation. If followed, this request would leave Gaza’s robust industry of terror-indoctrination intact, guaranteeing future mass murders and mayhem much like the horrors of this past October.
Accordingly, Israel’s fundamental security needs preclude compliance with a “no occupation” request. No doubt, Israel’s refusal on this will strain the US-Israel alliance. But in defense of Israel’s imperative refusal, it bears noting just what the scope of Israel’s losses have already entailed.
Israel’s population of nine million is less than one thirty-seventh that of the United States. Hence in proportionate American population figures, the more than 1,200 murdered and 240 kidnapped would equal more than 44,400 American civilians murdered in just one day, and over 8,800 kidnapped. This also follows 17 years of missile barrages from Gaza targeting Israeli schools, hospitals, and homes. If murder and mayhem on this scale were raining down on the United States, it is inconceivable that America would leave the battlefield without completing the job, namely, making absolutely certain that no such carnage could ever happen again.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent statements partially acknowledge Israel’s need to permanently end attacks from Gaza – but only while also ruling out Israel’s doing the very things needed to accomplish that. On the one hand Blinken declared, “We can’t go back to the status quo. . . with Hamas being in a position in . . . governance of Gaza to repeat what it did . . .” But then Blinken insists, “No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends,” and “No attempts to blockade . . . Gaza.” Pressed on this point, he grudgingly conceded that “there may be a need for some transition period” – an acknowledgment that will need to be pressed hard in the months ahead.
Given the paramount need for a transformative occupation of Gaza, there remain three critical questions going forward. First, what are the goals of an interim occupation of Gaza, and by whom shall this be done? Second, at the end of the occupation, to whom should governance be turned over? And third, what are the chances of success, that is, how likely is this to achieve a sustainable long-term peace?
Occupation for What and By Whom? (Not the UN)
The goals of an interim occupation are quite straightforward: to end Gaza’s status as a base for repeated terror attacks, by deradicalizing and demilitarizing its governance and population while establishing a functioning peacetime economy.
The very first task will be to rebuild critical infrastructure, consisting of core systems and structures like water, electricity, hospitals, and housing. Here is where the so-called international community could and should step up, with both financial assistance and construction/engineering teams. This includes the many Arab League nations that regularly claim to support the Gazans in their times of need.
The occupying authorities will simultaneously need to recruit, screen, and identify non-radicalized individuals to begin leading and staffing new institutions of governance, education, media, justice, and law enforcement/security. One difficult question will be whether to ban all former Hamas members from such positions, or alternatively, whether at least some of them could be individually vetted and selectively trusted to abandon their former professed ideological allegiance.
This question will be unavoidable amid the predictable shortage of both skilled and vetted (i.e. non-Hamas) individuals available to staff those several rebuilt institutions. Exactly those circumstances led the occupying authorities in post-WWII Germany not to ban all former Nazis from such positions. Conversely, the American occupation in post-Saddam Iraq has been much criticized for its wholesale disbanding of the Iraqi army, both because unemployed soldiers became easy recruits for insurgent groups, and their lesser-experienced replacements were unable to preserve order.
Hence it is likely that in rebuilding and re-staffing post-Hamas institutions in Gaza, at least some lower-level ex-Hamas members will be included. Their appointments to any position should be subject to at least three conditions: (1) that they be carefully vetted for a lack of ideological zeal; (2) that they execute a loyalty oath to Gaza’s new anti-terrorist government; and (3) that their conduct, including their personal associations, public declarations, and social media activity, be periodically reviewed for continued fidelity to that oath.
These inescapable challenges are among the reasons why an interim occupation of Gaza is so necessary, namely, to monitor, identify, and cull out pockets of postwar Hamas resurgence. Given that need, the next question becomes, occupation by whom?
The optics and perceived legitimacy of an interim occupation will be best advanced by a multilateral effort, ideally led by Israel together with its Abraham Accords partners. Those objectives would be further served by additional participation from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and/or the Arab League as a whole.
Hamas being a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s autocratic President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has a particularly strong interest in Hamas’s permanent removal from Gaza: el-Sisi won power in 2012 by means of a coup against a Muslim Brotherhood government, and he has subsequently cracked down hard against the Brotherhood’s activities across Eqypt. But Hamas’s support as “fighters for Palestine” among the Egyptian population may constrain el-Sisi’s range of action. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the broader Arab League will all face similarly conflicting interests and constraints.
Fortunately, with America and hopefully the EU facing fewer such constraints on action, they both should be able to provide much-needed financing for the Gaza rebuild, and expertise in reconstruction work, de-radicalization programs, and civil society rebuilding.
Significantly, there is one institution that must not be made part of that interim occupation, namely, the United Nations and its agencies such as UNRWA. As compellingly documented above, the UNRWA-run Gaza school system is little more than an assembly line for the mass production of terrorists. Just days before Hamas launched this latest war against Israel, U.S. Senator Jim Risch summed up the sorry state of play: “It is well known that UNRWA has a history of employing people connected to terrorist movements like Hamas, promoting anti-Semitic material in its textbooks, and allowing Hamas to use its schools to store weapons. U.S. taxpayer dollars should never be used to help fund such a corrupt organization.”
Moreover, UNRWA’s long record of cultivating, inciting, and logistically supporting terrorists bent on the destruction of Israel is by no means an exception among the various UN agencies. It is well documented that antisemitism, far from being an aberrant bug, is a consistent feature of the contemporary United Nations. Hence other than in perhaps a titular role, the UN should be kept far away from any occupation and rebuilding effort in Gaza.
Governance by Whom? (Not the Palestinian Authority)
By far the most difficult question will be determining to whom Gaza governance should be transferred after the interim occupation. For many, the default response is to bring back the Palestinian Authority (PA), which ruled Gaza until Hamas forcibly seized control in 2007. As Sen. Lindsay Graham recently stated, “The PA is the only game in town.” Secretary of State Blinken has already declared that Gaza needs “Palestinian governance, Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority . . .”
In fact, bringing back the PA would be a catastrophic error. Sen. Graham’s statement implicitly recognized this: “[The PA] need[s] to be reformed. Giving a bunch of money to the same old people is probably a waste. It’s time for a new generation of Palestinian leadership.”
The central difficulty in any discussion of whether to re-empower the PA in Gaza is the common popular misunderstanding about the PA’s actual goals and conduct as compared with Hamas. Conventional wisdom in the media and the administration holds that the PA is a moderate alternative to Hamas.
It is true that in the Oslo negotiations 30 years ago, the PA paid lip service to the concept of two states for two peoples; and that the PA does somewhat engage with Israeli and American interlocutors, unlike Hamas. But in fact, the PA’s characterization as in any way “moderate” is and always has been nothing but magical thinking. Every bit as much as Hamas, the PA seeks the annihilation of Israel.
As documented above, both the PA and Hamas produce and disseminate among their people virtually the same vast propaganda of Is
