The Fantasy of a Post-Hamas Gaza

A year ago, President Trump proposed a Gaza migration plan: the relocation of Gaza’s population to other countries, or their reabsorption into the broader Arab world. The plan was greeted with moral outrage, diplomatic horror, and predictable denunciations. Yet it had one unfashionable virtue. It was an actual solution.

Gaza and Israel are not two neighbors locked in a solvable dispute. They are two trains on the same track, accelerating toward one another. Both have rapidly growing populations. Both occupy tiny, immovable slivers of land. Neither has meaningful internal room to expand. And unlike most conflicts, this one is not merely territorial or political. It is existential.

Palestinian identity, as it has been cultivated for generations, is not centered on state-building, prosperity, or coexistence. It is centered on grievance, resentment, and the religious conviction that Israel is temporary and will one day be destroyed. That belief is not incidental. It is foundational, taught, ritualized, and sanctified. There is no technocratic lever that alters it, because it is not an economic belief. It is a theological one.

Few are willing to say this plainly, but Hamas’s actions on October 7 were not aberrations. They were not distortions of Islam. They were modeled, consciously and explicitly, on early Islamic warfare as recorded in the sira and hadith literature. Muhammad personally led or authorized numerous military campaigns, which included beheadings, enslavement, mass killings, forced marriage, sexual slavery, and the eradication of entire tribes. Hamas does not see October 7 as a crime. It sees it as pious imitation.

You cannot de-radicalize a population whose central narrative is religiously sealed. You can only disperse it, contain it, or defeat it.

Trump’s migration proposal was brutal, unsentimental, and therefore serious. It acknowledged that Gaza, as currently constituted, is not a viable political entity and never has been. It offered a way to end the collision by moving one of the trains off the track.

Enter the Kushner Plan, which proposes to rebuild Gaza in place, under the assumption that prosperity will pacify theology, and infrastructure will dissolve ideology.

This is where fantasy replaces strategy.

Strip away the renderings, the glass towers, the optimistic arrows pointing toward GDP growth, and what remains is this: Gaza is to be reconstructed for the same society, the same social structures, the same internal coercions, under the hope that concrete can cure ideology. It does not. It never has.

A rebuilt Gaza without a new governing force is not a post-Hamas Gaza. It is a better-wired Hamas Gaza.

Hamas is not merely a militia that occupies territory. It is the territory’s dominant social regulator. It governs through mosques, families, charities, schools, clans, intimidation, and the quiet knowledge that dissent carries consequences. Rebuilding infrastructure without dismantling that ecosystem does not neutralize Hamas. It subsidizes it. Roads are not politically neutral. Ports are not morally agnostic. Data centers do not vote, but the men who guard them do.

Every successful Middle Eastern state that has suppressed Islamist movements has done so the same way: through a centralized, unapologetic security state. Saudi Arabia. The UAE. Egypt. Jordan. Pick one. They are not liberal democracies. They do not rely on civic trust, neighborhood councils, or the spontaneous moderation of the masses. They rely on intelligence services, surveillance, detention, coercion, and the quiet removal of people who organize the wrong kind of sermon.

That is the model. There is no other.

So the plan’s unspoken requirement is not economic investment. It is a governing authority willing to run an internal war against Islamist ideology. Not rhetorically. Practically. Arresting cousins. Monitoring imams. Breaking cells before they form. Doing violence to social peace in order to preserve political order.

And here the plan collapses under its own silence.

Who, exactly, is meant to do this?

What Gazan government would declare war on Gazans? What Gazan intelligence service would raid the home of its own uncle for attending the wrong study circle? What Gazan policeman would drag away the man who taught him Qur’an as a boy? You cannot outsource this to optimism. You cannot delegate it to development banks. You cannot PowerPoint your way past it.

The Gulf states can do this because their legitimacy does not rest on popular consent. It rests on dynastic authority, patronage, and fear. Gaza has none of these. Any local authority that attempts this role without overwhelming external backing will be assassinated within a week. Probably sooner. If the plan knows this, it declines to say it out loud.

Which means the plan quietly assumes one of two things.

Either Hamas remains, moderated by prosperity, a theory disproven by every Islamist movement that has ever received money and used it to wage war.

Or an external power governs Gaza indefinitely, policing ideology, suppressing dissent, and maintaining a security apparatus that must be authoritarian in function and totalitarian in means.

No foreign overseer can rule Gaza softly. And if that overseer is Israel, what has changed? Israel is again the occupier, grievance is renewed, legitimacy denied, and the conflict passed cleanly to the next generation.

There is no third option. There never was.

What Kushner’s plan, and every other rebuilding plan, refuses to confront is that Hamas is not the disease. It is the symptom.

The governing ideology of Gaza is not pluralistic nationalism or civic Islam. It is a single religious system rooted in Muslim Brotherhood theology, transmitted through mosques, schools, charities, clans, and social pressure. It is not local. It is a belief system shared by hundreds of millions. Hamas is but one armed expression among many. Remove one organization or ten, and the belief remains, intact and self-reproducing.

And until someone is willing to say, plainly and publicly, who will break Gaza’s governing belief system, and by what means, all talk of rebuilding is not humanitarianism. It is preparation.

Preparation for more war, fought from newer buildings, with better internet, and sons turning into their fathers.

—

Yehuda Hausman is the author of Said the Judean: A Prophetic Manifesto for a People Who Refuse to Die available through Amazon.