Troops from the IDF’s 98th Division operating in Jabalia, the northern Gaza Strip, May 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces.

Part one of this article appeared here.

Indoctrination

All that happened in Germany and Japan to get rid of the Nazis and Japan’s militaristic government, brings us to de-Hamasification in Gaza — and for that matter deradicalization, in the Palestinian Authority.

The work must start with infants, children, teenagers, and young adults both in Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas, like the Palestinian Authority, values its control over all the young, as does any culture of indoctrination because it needs a large ever-renewable pool of morally pliable recruits.

This was particularly valuable to Stalin’s commissars, Mao’s revolutionaries, Nazi Germany, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Schools, youth clubs, summer camps and other institutions of child-rearing become instruments of hate. Textbooks signal what children are supposed to think. Other vectors of the genocide-pathology include children’s television, social media, and children’s songs and rhymes.

All of it is shaped and engineered to produce generations who see a specific enemy of the state as subhuman or demonic and requiring elimination. Again, Stanton’s model applies: In textbooks, provided by the Palestinian Authority in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the young are already being prepared for genocide’s first four steps. The Palestinian textbooks are worse than ever with ever more demonization, delegitimization, and glorification of terror.

Incentivization

Then, our attention must turn to civil society. All systems of genocide create a culture of compliance. Personal space, freedom, and autonomy are eliminated. Through coercion, direction, intimidation, and harsh systems of reward and punishment, messages of hate became ordinary thoughts and actions that are criminal and immoral. This is Stanton’s fifth, sixth and seventh stages.

In the case of Gaza, the ideology of Hamas has been enabled by UNRWA (UN Relief and Work Agency) schools, summer camps, and a wide variety of social programs, including some tied to health care institutions.

UNRWA is staffed by Hamas’ sympathizers and enforcers, who amplify hate. UNRWA schools adhere to jihadist indoctrination, employ Hamas members as commissars to enforce ideological conformity, and create each year a large cadre of students willing to sacrifice themselves in order to kill more Jews.

As with Nazi Germany, Hamas has many willing executioners — as we saw on October 7 and again on January 20 when a mob of many hundreds of Gazans stormed the three young female hostages just before they were turned over to the IDF.

The reward-and-punishment system enforced in Gaza and the West Bank includes stipends given to terrorists or their surviving families for attacks — stipends paid for through international aid to Palestinian organizations as well as the Palestinian Authority.

All those organizations and nations that are willing or unwitting parties to such “pay-to-slay” programs — Qatar, the United Nations, Canada, the United States, and several European nations and organizations — must confront the epidemiological implications. They are actually hurting the people they aim to help.

Confronting the Foundations

As with the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II, willing parties must take over Gaza’s legal, educational, political, religious, and cultural institutions, or reestablish them under new values and directions and with new governance.

Schools in particular will require substantial reform, with new textbooks and curricula free from Palestinian Authority control or oversight, rigorous programs focused on dignity and respect for the other in line with Muslim teachings focused on charity, kindness and self-improvement as well as respect for the other. De-Hamasification should have already started. Valuable time has already been lost. To regain momentum, de-Hamasification must use the one lever that the international community has over Hamas: Delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Right now, convoys of food, water and other necessary supplies have the perverse effect of resupplying not just Hamas but sustaining its ideological grip over Gaza and causing still more harm to the public.

Going forward, all relief aid that goes into Gaza must be linked to programs to change attitudes, mindsets, and behaviors. That will require new humanitarian organizations who pledge to end indoctrination and incitement as a part of their public health mission.

If humanitarian aid is not used as a vehicle for de-Hamasification, it will become the currency of Hamas, and the result will be no surprise: Healthier, stronger terrorists and more misery for the people of Gaza as well as Israel.

Consider that the just-announced ceasefire and hostage-release has allowed Hamas to reassert its control over all of Gaza, and that dozens of Palestinians who resisted Hamas’ rule in the past few months are now marked for summary execution.

Again, the pattern is the same: Whenever Hamas is in control, more Palestinians die. This is now an ironclad epidemiological pattern. To ignore the pattern is professional malfeasance by organizations pledged to public health and humanitarian outcomes.

De-Hamasification: Wasatia as the model

Any program of de-Hamasification must be undertaken with special awareness of the character of the traditional, conservative, and religious nature of Palestinian society. It would be foolish to expect a society that is deeply religious and traditional to embrace any of the conventions of a liberal Western secular nation like Germany or see it as a model.

In fact, the most difficult part of de-Hamasification will be to decouple Islamic theology from Islamist norms of Hamas and its leadership. But it is possible. For leadership and guidance to promote basic tolerance and moderation, within the texts and the traditions of Islam, we must consult with moderate Islamic theologians and philosophers.

One good example is Wasatia, the movement founded by Professor Mohammad Dajani. The Abraham Accords can serve as the political, legal, and institutional framework for promoting de-Hamasification in Gaza and doing the same in the Palestinian Authority. And the US’ own work in de-Baathification of Iraq may prove instructive.

Some Islamic nations, notably Saudi Arabia, have long sponsored and run counter-indoctrination programs of their own to reverse the effects of exposure to the toxic messages of radical Islamist ideologies. These programs have a solid record of restoring individuals to society. But Saudi efforts are not consistent; the nation’s textbooks continue to promote intolerance and bigotry, especially towards Shia and Sufi Islamic traditions, as well as Christianity and Judaism.

Other models exist. The Carter Center in Atlanta has researched how to counter the indoctrination efforts of ISIS during its rise and years of control over schools in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

ISIS, like Hamas, concentrated efforts on promoting its genocidal ideology in school curriculum. This curriculum, in place for three years, was doctrinal — emphasizing Salafist and Jihadist principles. The effort to remove ISIS ideology in Arab and Muslim nations is ongoing but clearly is working — and we must include those nations and organizations in the effort to de-Hamasify Gaza. Their expertise will be critical.

There will be inevitable efforts to revive Hamas in fresh garb. This must be resisted at every step. It must be stopped not only because of the danger Hamasism represents to Israel, but what it means to Palestinians. Every genocidal regime has been ruined by its own militancy and forced to confront the sources of its pain. This may happen in Gaza one day; but it will only happen if Gaza’s Palestinians are enabled to break free from the industrial level of ideological contamination that Hamas as well as the Palestinian Authority and Iran’s mullahs, who fund Hamas, have been emitting for decades.

Elihu D Richter is a retired head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Hebrew University School of Public Health and is the founder of the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention.