Israel’s military effort to destroy Hamas is doomed to fail.
There are simply too many Gazans willing to join Hamas. If the Israeli army wiped out all of them, there would be worldwide condemnation.
There are an estimated 2.1 million people living in the Gaza Strip. Before October 2023, Hamas had an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in its military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas estimates between 6,000 and 7,000 members of its military wing have been killed in two years of war. Israeli and other estimates range from 8,500 militants killed (the Armed Conflict and Event Data Project) to 20,000 killed with 15,000 remaining, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The challenge for Israel and those of us who want a path to peace is to try to understand how many of the remaining 2,100,000 citizens of Gaza will be willing to help rebuild Hamas or a parallel Anti-Israeli organization.
In March 2024, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reported on a poll in which only 7 percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for the suffering they were experiencing. Some 71 percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Some 70 percent were comfortable with the role Hamas has played in the war.
As a sign of popular militancy, in a hypothetical Palestinian election, 56 percent of voters in Gaza and the West Bank would support Marwan Barghouti, who is currently imprisoned for his role in the murder of Jews during the Second Intifada. Thirty-two percent would support Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (he was subsequently killed by the Israelis in a visit to Iran), and only 11 percent would support Abbas who the West tries to pretend is the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people.
The depth of radicalism among Gaza residents runs throughout the FDD report on Gaza. Only 5 percent of Palestinians said they considered Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack a war crime. This could be because 80 percent of Palestinians said they had never seen videos of Hamas’s brutal actions and 60 percent said the media they watched didn’t show them.
“Relatedly, among those surveyed, Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera was by far the most popular television station, with 61 percent saying it was the channel they watched most over the past two months. Recent reports indicate that a number of Al-Jazeera reporters are also Hamas members. On March 21, Al-Jazeera released a video investigation seeking to minimize Hamas’s brutality on October 7. The program not only insinuated that Israeli soldiers killed Israelis on October 7 but also denied that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war,” according to the foundation’s report.
Solving the challenge of safety for Israel among its neighbors is not a military or diplomatic problem. Military force and diplomatic meetings may be necessary, but they will not be sufficient. (To be clear, I am totally for an all-out strategic Israeli effort to wipe out Hamas – including going after their leaders in Qatar.)
Ultimately, peace will come only through an intense, effective deradicalization program on a scale we have never seen.
The only successful Middle Eastern deradicalization effort has been the intense effort of the United Arab Emirates after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. However, the UAE had a much smaller, more manageable problem.
Israel and its allies need to focus resources and smart people on an historic deradicalization program for Gaza and secondarily for the West Bank. There is no other road to peace when people have been trained and conditioned to hate and want to kill their neighbors from childhood.
We need an honest, courageous public focus on the problem of radicalization – and a serious, well thought out strategy for a decade or longer deradicalization campaign.
There is no other road to peace between Israel and its immediate neighbors.
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(Featured Image Media Credit: Al Jazeera English/Creative Commons/Flickr)
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