The opening of Phase 2 of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan is being described as a case of realism. It risks reviving a dangerous illusion: that Hamas can be reasoned into relinquishing power if offered reconstruction, recognition or the promise of a “better life.”
That illusion should have died on Oct. 7.
American officials now speak of engaging and coordinating with Hamas on Gaza’s governance, as if the terror organization that planned and carried out mass murder can be separated from the political system it dominates. History suggests otherwise. Postwar peace depends less on declarations than on one decisive question: who is allowed to govern when the fighting stops.
After World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, did not imagine that Nazi officials, even supposedly “reformed” ones, could be useful partners in rebuilding Germany. The Allied military government recognized and understood that reconstruction without political exclusion was not peace but postponement. Nazis were barred from public authority because leaving the architects and enforcers of mass violence in place would have guaranteed instability and future war.
The Gaza Strip is not Germany, and Hamas is not the Third Reich. But the governing principle is the same. You do not rebuild a society by legitimizing the movement that just demonstrated, in blood, what it is. Postwar order requires the defeat not only of an armed force, but of the ideology and power structures that sustained it.
The current trajectory of the reconstruction plan, however, points in the opposite direction.
An International Stabilization Force is now widely acknowledged to be unwilling to challenge Hamas’s authority. Arab states have made it clear that they will not confront Hamas on disarmament. Instead, the United States appears to be drifting toward coordination with Hamas on “practical” governance matters, a move that confers legitimacy while demanding little in return.
This is what Israelis have come to call the “Oct. 6 mindset”: the belief that economic incentives and political inclusion can tame a jihadist movement committed, by charter and practice, to Israel’s destruction. It is the same mindset that once treated Qatari cash as a moderating influence on Hamas, only to discover that the money subsidized tunnels, rockets and terror squads.
If Hamas truly wanted only “a better economic future for their families,” as one senior U.S. official recently suggested, then it would not have launched a massacre of civilians, nor would it still be holding a hostage body in violation of a now three-month ceasefire. The problem is not poverty. It is power.
Trump has publicly recognized this reality. He has stated plainly that Gaza will see no peace as long as Hamas wields authority, and he has called for comprehensive demilitarization, including the dismantling of Hamas’s terror tunnel network. That clarity is welcome. But it must be translated into enforceable policy, not diluted through bureaucratic engagement.
Disarmament cannot mean surrendering only “heavy weapons” while leaving Hamas’s small arms, command structures, recruitment networks and intimidation apparatus intact. An organization armed with thousands of assault rifles remains able to murder dissenters, suppress rivals and guarantee its political dominance.
Nor can a “Board of Peace” succeed if it includes representatives of states that openly support Hamas, while excluding Jerusalem from meaningful enforcement authority. Governance structures that tolerate Hamas influence, even indirectly, undermine the very premise of the plan, which explicitly states that Hamas is to have no role in Gaza’s future administration.
Reconstruction, too, must be conditional. Funds released without verified disarmament, without the return of the last hostage and without the dismantling of terror infrastructure will not build schools and hospitals. They will rebuild Hamas.
The lesson of postwar history is not that reconciliation is impossible. It is that reconciliation follows defeat, not the other way around. Germany rebuilt because Nazism was barred from power, not because it was invited to help manage the transition.
If the international community is unwilling to enforce Hamas’s removal from authority, then Israel will have to do so itself. The alternative is to pretend that a terror organization responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust can be transformed into a governing partner. That is not realism. It is denial.
Peace in the Palestinian enclave will not come from trusting Hamas to change, but from ensuring that it no longer has the power to intimidate, kill or govern.
