Ideological warfare is Israel’s biggest challenge

The Board of Peace (BOP) mandated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2083 of 17 November 2025 is the only peace mechanism available, but implementing it is as challenging a problem as the crisis itself. The fact that Hamas has categorically rejected President Donald Trump’s peace plan simply means that Israel may have to “finish the job” by itself.

Representing the five-member provisional leadership council of Hamas—which also includes Khalil al-Hayya, Zaher Jabarin, Muhammad Ismail Darwish, and Nizar Awadallah—the group’s spokesman Khaled Meshall has announced to the world that Trump’s proposal to radicalize Gaza and disarm Hamas was totally unacceptable.

Apart from Hamas’ staunch rejection, President Trump’s move to include Turkiye and Qatar on the BOP is not strategically advantageous to Israel given their lack of impartiality, even though it may be a political compromise to secure US strategic interests in the region.

This suggests that even this last-ditch peace attempt by the UN Security Council may run aground. Hamas would continue to fight even the International Stabilization Force (ISF) for which Indonesia has officially committed to deploying 20,000 troops, 8,000 of them are conducting training for engineering and medical works as well as guarding Gaza borders. They will be positioned in an area between Rafah and Khan Younis.

Disarming Hamas is problematic, albeit it having been stipulated as part of the ISF’s duties. But if this can be realized — meaning that Indonesian troops can cooperate with the IDF and Egyptian peacekeepers to persuade Hamas to disarm, because Indonesia is not in a position to fight Hamas — it could be a signal that Indonesia and Israel could cooperate further toward restoration of their diplomatic relations.

Deradicalization and disarmament of Hamas — as contained in President Trump’s 20-point peace plan — are the very provisions that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Houthi cannot accept. They want to obliterate Israel instead, to fulfill the mandate of their founding charters.

But without manifesting those provisions as prerequisites for reconstruction of Gaza, there would be no guarantee that Israel Defense Forces would ever be pulled out of the strip. This is why the presence of Indonesian troops in Gaza is crucial for creating a balanced environment whereby disarmament of Hamas could reduce threats to Israel and those resistance forces would not feel that Indonesia whose support they need badly has taken side with their enemy.

But Mr. Trump’s peace plan fails to address one crucial aspect of deradicalization — the ideological aspect — which is already a culture. Hamas is as die-hard an ideology as an armed resistance. Even if it is totally disarmed today, its deeply-rooted indoctrination of the millions in Palestine and elsewhere will still survive.

Without comprehensive deradicalization programs, deployment of the ISF would be energy-wasting. As the situation stands today, Hamas is not just those armed fighters; they are every Gazan, every Palestinian, every Arab, and everyone else in the Muslim world who has been energized by the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the destruction of the strip since October 7 tragedy.

From ideological perspective, all the attempts to crush what Israel calls terrorists give them a legitimacy to perpetuate and hand down the radical culture to their offspring. You can kill them, but you cannot kill an ideology that forms their way of life. And they are ready to die for it consciously, believing that martyrdom is the only dignified option left for their “holy struggle”.

This is the longest battle Israel has ever fought, because weapons cannot destroy a ruinous ideology that has since 1948 been threatening the nation’s existence. The reason for the recurrence of such threats is Israel’s focus on physical wars which renders it little time to confront the ideological warfare.

So long as hatred against Israel continues, weapons alone are not the right tools to overcome the menace. The battle may end, but the war will continue, until the radical culture is replaced with something better. This the BOP cannot handle, nor can the UN Security Council. Any solution to this requires decades of humanistic rather than military approach.

Almost 78 years have passed and the military approach has failed to solve the problem. “Si vis pacem para bellum” may be true in other types of war, not in an ideologically driven war. All those people fighting Israel base their struggle on the indoctrination they have received from their forefathers that Israel is occupying their land. This is where Israel’s millennia of biblical history clashes with their belief that is being endorsed by so many nations.

Over-exaggeration is the notion that the BOP can solve the problem. But it is a good attempt we need to appreciate and support, because there isn’t any better option on the table. If this attempt failed, there would be no other way to end the war. For Israel, then, the only option left is to “finish the job by itself” as Prime Minister Netanyahu terms it, doing it “the hard way”,

From security perspective, the test for BOP’s success lies in the ability of the ISF to disarm the resistance groups. The BOP cannot proceed with Mr. Trump’s 20-point peace plan so long as resistance continues and deradicalization efforts fail to tackle the breeding ground of destructive indoctrination.

Focusing on reconstruction of Gaza while paying scant attention to tackling the breeding ground of radicalism would drive the peace efforts astray. Because the root of the crisis is the ideological presumption that Israel is occupying an Islamic waqf land that should be reclaimed. That’s why they believe that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

What Israel cannot accept is involving the resistance groups in the process, given their past and present records. But totally excluding them means creating the trigger for another civil war that would complicate and prolong the crisis.

The Gaza Board of Executives, therefore, needs to draft a kind of inclusive deradicalization program that is acceptable to all parties, especially the resistance groups, to prevent a new civil war from ruining the whole peace process. This cannot be imposed by outside intervention; it must be a consensus resulting from the goodwill of all the Palestinian factions.

If they succeed in forming a deradicalization consensus, there will be hope that Mr. Trump’s peace plan can proceed. Perhaps it is useful to involve community and religious leaders from moderate Muslim countries such as Indonesia, the UAE, and Jordan, in the deradicalization process, as they can share their rich experience in the field.

Of no less importance is the need for nation building before state building. Countries that built themselves as states before building themselves as nations do not have strong foundation to remain united. Building a “Palestinian state” before building a “Palestinian nation” is a shaky ground to stand on. This must be high on the agenda of the Gaza Executive Board and the Palestinian Authority.

Any attempt to split them would presumably lead to perpetual conflagration that would paralyze all peace processes and usher in more suffering to the Palestinians. The tragic reality today is that there is no comprehensive peace plan acceptable to the competing factions and conflicting parties. And we may have to lean back in our chairs and hope for a miraculous panacea to solve all those problems. [*]