Israeli and Western leaders keep repeating the same mantra: Israel’s war in Gaza is against Hamas, and it will be won when Hamas is defeated. Just kill enough “terrorists” and take away their guns, and the war will be won.
That framing is dangerously wrong. Hamas is not an isolated band of terrorists with its own unique ideology, separate from the people it claims to represent. Hamas is the Palestinian people. It is an accurate reflection of Palestinian culture, politics and goals as they have been taught, embraced, and passed down for generations.
It is the armed expression of Palestinian society itself—a society steeped in Jew-hatred, committed to Israel’s destruction and willing to sacrifice its own children for that cause.
Until Israel understands this, it will keep playing whack-a-mole, killing Hamas operatives who are then instantly replaced from a deep reservoir of willing Palestinians, instead of fighting the real war being waged against it.
Poll after poll by Palestinian research firms shows overwhelming support for Hamas’s goals and methods across Palestinian society, in Judea and Samaria as well as Gaza, including the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which civilians were raped, beheaded, burned alive and slaughtered.
The celebrations in Gaza and the West Bank on Oct. 7 and thereafter were not staged. They were spontaneous and sincere: sweets distributed in the streets, mosques broadcasting songs of praise, social media filled with videos glorifying the massacre. Thousands of civilians participated in the atrocities themselves. Oct. 7 was a Palestinian national event.
For decades, children across the Gaza Strip, and Judea and Samaria, have been raised on a steady diet of Jew-hatred. The supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority teaches the same messages as Hamas: that Jews are “sons of apes and pigs,” that Israel has no right to exist, and that killing Jews is a religious duty. The only differences are that P.A. operatives wear Western suits and seek Israel’s destruction in stages, while Hamas ones wear military garb and green headbands, and seek it immediately.
Gaza’s tunnels can be collapsed and its weapons destroyed, but so long as the culture that produces Hamas remains untouched, the genocidal war of the Palestinians against the Jews will continue.
If Palestinian society is the problem, there are only two paths to lasting peace: Change that society or remove it.
Israel could take direct control of Palestinian education in Gaza, and Judea and Samaria—abolishing current textbooks, dismantling curricula, and replacing them with material that teaches peace and coexistence.
This would be a generational project—at least four generations—requiring total Israeli control over schools, media and funding for the next 75 years. The P.A. and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) would be shut out entirely, as would the perfidious Europeans, and the two-faced Arab states who say one thing to the West and the opposite to their own populations. The burden would fall on Israel itself to occupy, govern and rebuild a society that despises it. Israel has tried occupation and nation-building before, and it has always failed.
If Israel cannot commit to decades of total control of Palestinian life, then it must remove the threat entirely. That means expelling Gaza’s population to other Arab states or countries willing to take them.
This is not without precedent. Under the laws of war, relocation of a hostile, irredeemable population is legal when essential for security. The international community will resist such clarity. It will accuse Israel of “collective punishment” for pointing out the collective embrace of this genocidal creed. It will insist on negotiations, “peace processes” and “two-state solutions” without ever demanding that the Palestinians abandon the dream of a Jew-free Middle East.
The outcry would be loud, but the world has condemned Israel for the past 75 years, regardless of how many “sacrifices for peace” or “confidence-building measures” it has misguidedly undertaken.
Israel has tried half-measures for decades: wars, withdrawals, skirmishes, ceasefires. In every case, the enemy has returned stronger. It will keep doing so until Israel stops fighting symptoms and starts fighting the disease: the culture of genocidal Jew-hatred that defines Palestinian society today.
Victory will not come from destroying Hamas’s weapons or killing its leaders. It will come only when the ideology that drives Palestinian society is uprooted—or when those who hold it are.
