Israel’s politics have been rent by controversy over the Gaza Strip’s future after the war with Hamas ends. The superficially easy approach, espoused by opposition leader and former War Cabinet member Benny Gantz, is to announce a post-conflict governance plan for Gaza before hostilities conclude. The Biden administration supports this view, ostensibly to minimize risk and confusion when the shooting stops.
Unfortunately, however, the superficially appealing answer is indeed superficial, dangerously so for Israel and those seeking to end both Hamas and the larger terrorist threat posed by Iran. The inescapable reality is that until Hamas’s political and military capabilities are destroyed, postwar planning is inherently sterile and unworkable.
Armed, equipped, trained, financed, and directed by Tehran, Gaza’s terrorists have dominated life there so long that, even as Israel pummels them militarily, they still oppress the imaginations of their fellow Palestinians in Gaza.
The fear that Hamas can resurrect itself infects the political thinking of every participant in Gaza’s drama: Hamas “ministries” constituting Gaza’s government; United Nations agencies, such as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, that are effectively operational arms of these “ministries,” notwithstanding their protestations; nongovernmental organizations providing humanitarian assistance there; and obviously not least, Gaza’s beleaguered residents.
Each in their own way, these actors have lived with Hamas’s perverse authoritarian rule since 2006 and under its influence for years before that. Many younger Palestinians in Gaza and expatriate personnel have never really experienced a Gaza Strip without Hamas’s brooding omnipresence. So long as Hamas continues the conflict in its incredible tunnel network and so long as its top leaders remain at large inside and outside Gaza, Hamas is not defeated. Until the mindset of Hamas inevitability is broken, postwar planning is paralyzed by the fear it will reemerge from the ashes to exact retribution on anyone who deviates from its party line.
Of course, what constitutes “destroying” Hamas sufficiently to convince even the most skeptical that it will not rise from the dead is not easily definable. There are, however, certain critical elements to help shape a framework for decision-makers.
For example, not one cubic inch of the Hamas tunnel network, including the underground transport, communications, and storage facilities, should be left unfilled by cement, rocks, or dirt. Flooding is not enough. If terrorists want tunnels in Gaza, they should have to buy new shovels.
Further, Israel should have a metric for eliminating Hamas’s top leadership until their fates are determined. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, U.S. forces created a “deck of cards” of Saddam’s top cohorts, a model Jerusalem could follow.
Most importantly, before declaring the war over, there must be widespread agreement with the Arab states, including on financing, for comprehensive “de-Hamasification.” Like the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II, Palestinians in Gaza need to be reawakened to the real world. They have been living in a pretend world since being cruelly driven there in the 1950s and ’60s by radical regional leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Nasser.
These authoritarians sought to drive Israel into the sea and saw the Palestinian refugees as a close-in force to be used as the sharp edge of their strategy. This strategy never made sense, especially after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel crossed the Suez Canal and could have marched on Cairo had a ceasefire not been imposed.
The rise of Hamas filled the void left by the demise of radical Arab leaders, including Saddam. Decency for the Palestinian people requires that the Hamas mythology, inculcated through years of propaganda and ideological education in Gaza’s schools, be remedied. While de-Hamasification will largely occur after the war, everyone must know in advance that the process is inescapable and inevitable.
Ignoring de-Hamasification ignores the central problem of postwar Gaza planning, not just for those within the Strip but for West Bank Palestinians as well. Its very complexity is daunting, but it will not go away.
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De-Hamasification answers the arguments of those who say that decimating Hamas militarily will not defeat its ideology and is, therefore, futile. They might have said the same thing about defeating Nazism in World War II. But a crushing military defeat combined with aggressive de-ideologization can do exactly what the Allies did 75 years ago.
We know the playbook. We simply need the courage to insist on it.
John Bolton served as national security adviser to then-President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.