Chapter V

Hamas: The Engineering of Martyrdom

When Hamas is discussed, the conversation is often reduced to two opposing caricatures. To some, it is nothing more than a resistance movement. To others, it is simply a terrorist organization.

Both descriptions contain an element of truth. Neither is sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

Hamas is far more than an armed group. Since its emergence during the First Intifada in 1987, it has built a political, religious, social, and military network capable of influencing nearly every aspect of life in Gaza. That complexity helps explain its remarkable durability.

Hamas does not govern through force alone. It also governs through institutions, charitable organizations, religious networks, social services, symbols, and narratives.

Armed organizations can impose obedience through fear. But no movement survives for generations by fear alone. It also requires legitimacy.

And legitimacy is not created by a rifle.

It is created by a story.

Every revolutionary movement depends upon a founding narrative. Hamas is no exception. Its narrative begins with a simple yet powerful proposition: that Palestine has suffered a historic injustice that can be corrected only through resistance.

Up to this point, there is nothing unique. Many national movements build their identity around real or perceived historical grievances. The distinction emerges when resistance ceases to be understood as a political option and becomes a moral and religious obligation.

At that moment, participation in the struggle is no longer a choice. It becomes a duty. And once a duty is presented as sacred, questioning it becomes increasingly difficult.

Hamas understood early on that no long-term struggle can depend solely on adult fighters. Every movement seeking permanence must secure its own generational continuity. That is why shaping identity becomes as important as building military capability.

The real battle begins long before the battlefield. It begins when a child learns what it means to belong.

It is not enough to teach who the enemy is. One must also teach who the heroes are.

Heroes constitute the moral vocabulary of every society. They define which lives deserve admiration, which actions deserve recognition, and which sacrifices deserve honor.

Within this symbolic universe, Hamas developed a narrative in which certain fallen fighters became central figures in the collective memory. Their portraits appeared on posters. Their names were repeated during public ceremonies. Their stories circulated through speeches, songs, schools, and media.

Not every act of remembrance necessarily called for violence. But together they helped construct a symbolic world in which sacrifice occupied a privileged place.

Here an important distinction must be made. There is a profound difference between honoring those whom a community regards as its fallen and presenting their deaths as models for future generations to emulate.

The boundary between remembrance and glorification is not always obvious. That is precisely why each case must be examined through evidence rather than slogans.

Another decisive element was control over the narrative itself.

Every war is fought over territory. But every war is also fought over meaning. Every military operation, every airstrike, every terrorist attack, every victim, every destroyed building must be interpreted.

Hamas understood that whoever controls that interpretation gains an advantage extending far beyond the battlefield.

An organization may lose fighters yet still increase its influence if it persuades a new generation that those losses prove the justice of its cause.

That is the logic behind the engineering of martyrdom.

It is not merely about glorifying death. It is about assigning death a political function.

The dead cease to be only victims.

They become arguments.

Every funeral strengthens the narrative. Every photograph reinforces collective memory. Every memory becomes part of collective identity.

Over time, the conflict is no longer transmitted only through personal experience.

It becomes inherited.

Children receive a story that began before they were born, yet one that seems to impose upon them an obligation toward those who died before them.

This is one of the deepest achievements of any revolutionary movement: to persuade people who never witnessed the original events that they nevertheless bear personal responsibility for continuing the struggle.

Yet attributing this phenomenon exclusively to Hamas would be a mistake. The political use of martyrdom, national heroes, and collective memory has appeared throughout history—in revolutionary movements, wars of independence, radical nationalist projects, and totalitarian regimes across very different cultures.

What distinguishes Hamas is not that it invented these mechanisms. It is that, over decades, it integrated them into a coherent system in which social welfare, religious identity, political communication, education, and armed struggle reinforced one another.

Perhaps that is the most unsettling lesson of all.

Extremist organizations do not survive simply because they possess weapons. They survive because they occupy the space where people search for identity, protection, purpose, dignity, and hope.

As long as those needs remain unmet, another movement—with another name and another flag—can emerge to occupy the same ground.

Defeating Hamas militarily may dismantle its organizational structure. Dismantling the engineering of martyrdom is a far more demanding task.

It requires offering a new generation an identity capable of competing with the one Hamas has built.

That is a task no army can accomplish on its own.

Chapter VI

Can an Ideology Overcome a Mother’s Love?

Few human bonds appear as universal as a mother’s love for her child. It exists across cultures, across religions, across history.

Biology, psychology, and everyday experience all point to the same conclusion: protecting one’s children is among the deepest instincts of the human species.

Which leads to an uncomfortable question.

How is it that history repeatedly shows mothers sending their sons to war, fathers speaking of honor moments after losing what they cherished most, and entire communities celebrating sacrifices that, under ordinary circumstances, would be considered unbearable?

The easiest answer is to assume that such parents simply loved their children less.

But the easiest answer is often the least convincing.

There is no serious evidence to suggest that a Palestinian mother, an Israeli mother, a Ukrainian mother, a Russian mother, a German mother, or an Argentine mother loves her child any less because she belongs to a particular culture.

The love appears to be the same.

What changes is the meaning that society assigns to loss.

That is the true achievement of ideology.

It does not eliminate grief. It reorganizes it.

A mother still feels the same absence. She still experiences the same emptiness. She still wakes in the middle of the night expecting to hear footsteps that will never return.

None of that disappears.

What changes is the language available to explain the tragedy.

In open societies, grief largely belongs to the family. In societies deeply mobilized around a collective cause, grief is no longer entirely private.

The community intervenes. It comforts. It mourns. But it also interprets.

It explains why the death occurred. It defines what that loss should mean. And sometimes it even determines the socially acceptable way of expressing sorrow.

Here we encounter an extraordinarily complex human reality.

A mother may weep in private while publicly declaring pride in her son’s sacrifice. Not necessarily because pride has replaced love, but because both emotions coexist in painful tension.

Because she needs to believe that the death had meaning. Because the community expects certain words. Because religion offers a transcendent explanation. Because admitting that everything was in vain may simply be psychologically unbearable.

Ideologies understand this mechanism remarkably well.

They know that meaningless death destroys.

Meaningful death mobilizes.

That is why extremist movements rarely glorify combat alone. They glorify the meaning of combat.

They promise more than death. They promise transcendence, lasting honor, a permanent place in collective memory. They promise to transform an individual loss into a moral victory.

And the more devastating the war, the more powerful that promise becomes. For the greater the suffering, the greater the human need to make sense of it.

Here lies one of the greatest dangers.

When a society begins to measure the value of a human life by the political usefulness of that person’s death, the individual ceases to be an end in himself or herself.

He or she becomes an instrument of the cause.

That is the moment when ideology begins to prevail over the person. Not because it destroys love, but because it persuades people that the cause matters more than the individual.

Nor is this logic unique to Hamas. It appeared in the totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century Europe, among the Japanese kamikaze, during China’s Cultural Revolution, within the Khmer Rouge, in the Islamic State, and in radical nationalist movements across many continents.

The flags change.

The mechanism does not.

The promise is always the same: your death will not be a loss. It will be a contribution. An example. A seed from which the future will grow.

And that is where we must pause.

Because every civilization is ultimately defined by the answer it gives to one deceptively simple question:

What is a child for?

To serve a cause?

Or to live a life fully his or her own?

That invisible boundary separates societies that place the individual at the center from those that subordinate the individual to a collective project.

The moment a child ceases to be regarded as an end in himself or herself and instead becomes a resource for the nation, the revolution, the race, the religion, or any absolute cause, the incubator of hatred has completed its work.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson of this entire inquiry.

The most dangerous ideologies are not those that merely teach people how to kill. They are those that persuade a society that the deaths of its own children can become its greatest triumph.

That is the deepest defeat any community can suffer.

Not a military defeat.

A moral one.

Because when a mother must justify the death of her child in order to keep living, war has conquered the last territory it had left to conquer:

The human heart.