This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

It’s hard to figure out exactly what US President Donald Trump has in mind when he talks about the need to “just clean out” Gaza. Does he mean permanently relocating its entire Palestinian population elsewhere in the region and beyond? Then enabling Israel to take it over and resettle it, as many in the current Netanyahu government dream of doing? Or temporarily evacuating the Gaza populace to enable reconstruction and their return? Is this an idea that someone suggested to him that he likes the sound of in principle, or a serious policy initiative?

Whatever Trump is contemplating, and however radically disruptive it may sound, it’s worth paying heed to, being as how he’s the most powerful figure in the free world, that he’s come into office declaring an intention to end wars and enable peace, and that his arrival consummated a Gaza hostage-prisoner-ceasefire deal that had proved beyond reach for the 13 months since a weeklong deal in November 2023.

If this is intended as a genuine and viable way forward, therefore, it is worth highlighting that moving a vast populace from one territory to others, temporarily or permanently, in the hope that this alone will somehow alleviate the single-minded murderous brutality that has characterized the Hamas governance of the Gaza Strip, is entirely unrealistic.

Sending up to two million Gazan Hamas members, Hamas loyalists and Hamas victims to Egypt, Jordan, or Indonesia would merely export the monstrous ideology and “skillset” that saw 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists invade Israel, unprovoked, on October 7, 2023, massacre 1,200 people of all ages and faiths for their crime of being in Israel, and abduct 251 more.

Worse, the relocation would profoundly destabilize Jordan, already battling Islamic extremism; Egypt, which was well on the road to an Islamic extremist takeover under former Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi; and any other country willing or compelled to play host.

The first days of Trump, however, do indicate a potential path to the only radical shift that could create true potential for the long-term resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the gradual marginalizing of the genocidal antisemitic ideology of Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian patrons: an overhaul of Palestinian education.

At the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, the representative of the Trump administration voiced unstinting support — lone support, it should be stressed, in the face of all the other wise and worldly diplomats — for Israeli laws that come into effect on Thursday to ban the operations here of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and cease all cooperation with the agency in its work in Gaza and the West Bank.

As reported by the New York Times, “the Israeli laws target a 75-year-old agency that has been a backbone of humanitarian aid delivery to two million Palestinians in Gaza, just as a fragile cease-fire is taking hold there. The agency also helps Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem.”

Except UNRWA demonstrably does not ultimately help Palestinians anywhere. In contrast to the principles and designations that apply to all the UN’s other activities on behalf of refugees, UNRWA affords refugee status to some 6 million Palestinians, and rising, because they are descended from Arabs who were displaced in the 1948 War of Independence. In so doing, it perpetuates the despicable delusion that these millions of Palestinians, rather than accepting what the Arab leadership rejected in 1947-1948 — a first-ever Palestinian state alongside the belatedly revived State of Israel — will sooner or later be able to “return” and wipe out the world’s only Jewish-majority state by sheer weight of numbers.

The Times further cited Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the UN, alleging that Israel has been battling to destroy UNRWA as part of a strategy to strip refugee status away from displaced Palestinians and thus their right to return to their old lands. But, of course, the ostensible “right to return” goes to the heart of that untenable, UNRWA-endorsed Palestinian demand that would spell suicide for Israel — that the Palestinians not only be given a state of their own but also the “right” to live in neighboring Israel, therefore achieving the goal spelled out on all those protest placards — a Palestine “From the River to the Sea.”

At the same UN Security Council session, UNRWA’s director Philippe Lazzarini protested that the Israeli legislation targeting his agency “makes a mockery of international law.” This rather begs the question of what international law has to say about the policies, activities and failures of UNRWA that helped prompt the laws in the first place.

I’m thinking, in the context of the current war, of UNRWA’s firing of nine of its employees who it reluctantly acknowledged “may have been involved” in the October 7 slaughter; of Israeli allegations that a larger number were involved, that a much larger number are Hamas members, and indeed that 10 percent of all UNRWA employees in Gaza have ties to terror groups.

Of the fact that the terrorist who abducted the slain body of Israeli Jonathan Samerano from Kibbutz Be’eri was one Faisal Ali Mussalem al-Naami, an UNRWA social worker.

Of the fact that a key Hamas subterranean data center and server farm was constructed by the terror government directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, accessed via a tunnel network under an UNRWA school, and directly powered via electricity cables from UNRWA’s own server room above.

Of the allegation by Israel, as documented by the New York Times just last month, that at least 24 people employed at 24 different UNRWA schools, most of them principals or deputy principals, were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, almost all of them gunmen. (At the time of the Hamas invasion, UNRWA ran almost 300 schools in Gaza, with thousands of its personnel employed there.)

Of the fact that, again by UNRWA’s own belated admission, Hamas’s commander in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, killed in an Israeli airstrike in September, was the principal of an UNRWA school.

Related: UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism despite pledge to remove — watchdog

Related: Report finds incitement, antisemitism still prevalent in UNRWA classrooms

While insisting that it is ready and willing to cooperate with other UN and non-UN aid agencies, Israel has failed to prepare properly for a post-UNRWA reality, as my colleague Tal Schneider reported here on Tuesday. Consequently, marginalizing UNRWA could well require Israel to fill the vacuum in East Jerusalem, create deeper strains in the West Bank, and actually benefit Hamas in Gaza, as the sole organization ostensibly capable of distributing aid — the very opposite of the result intended by the legislation.

All of this underlines the potential opportunity for the energized Trump administration, as it seeks, in the president’s words, to “measure our success… by the wars that we end,” and, specifically, to stop the violence that, he noted, has always been associated with Gaza.

UNRWA, in its pernicious handling of the refugee issue, in its schooling, its staffing and oversight, and in its own staffers’ complicity in the mass murder in Israel that caused the war and devastation in Gaza, has perpetuated a fundamental intolerance for the simple fact of Israel’s existence, and in so doing helped Hamas and by extension doomed Gaza to its current reality.

The way forward for Gaza’s Palestinians, and for everybody who interacts with them, can only be changed for the better by a very different international and local leadership, support system and, most essentially, educational system and ethos, that advocate tolerance and coexistence and a respect for the sanctity of life. And this applies wherever the people are living.

Focus on education, President Trump. Change hearts and minds. All genuinely well-intentioned leaders and nations will support you.

“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker,” you promised in your inauguration address. It won’t be achieved overnight, but that’s the way to do it.