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The World Needs to Adopt a Real Humanitarian Goal: Removing Hamas From Gaza (PART TWO)
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.
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New York Man Pleads Guilty to Hate Crime for Antisemitic Vandalism in Front of Jewish Center
Illustrative: “Free Palestine” graffiti on display in downtown Chicago, Oct. 21, 2023. Photo: Reuters/Alexandra Buxbaum
A man from Long Island, New York pleaded guilty on Thursday to Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree as a Hate Crime, a felony, for spray-painting antisemitic phrases on fences and in front of a local Jewish center earlier this year.
In April, Sebastian Patino Caceres, 23, spray-painted “Free Palestine” on the sidewalk in front of the East Meadow Beth-El Jewish Center in East Meadow, New York, according to LongIsland.com, which reported the guilty plea. He also spray-painted “Zionism is Nazism,” “Stop the Genocide,” “Free Palestine,” and “F—k Israel” on fences in front of homes.
Caceres’s plea deal will require him to undergo six months of anti-bias training, 100 community service hours, and a guided tour of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Glen Cove, New York. If he does so then his sentence will be reduced to three years of probation and a misdemeanor. A failure to do so would result in the felony charge remaining and five years of probation.
“My prosecutors held this defendant responsible for his offensive actions with this plea to a felony hate crime today, but with the understanding that punitive measures alone will not stop this intolerant behavior,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said in a statement. “It is through education and awareness that we can teach defendants about the gravity of their words and actions, change minds, promote kindness and compassion, and heal communities. This defendant has been given the opportunity to learn and grow from this criminal conduct.”
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Trump Re-Designates Iran-Backed Houthis in Yemen as Foreign Terrorist Organization
A Houthi fighter mans a machine gun mounted on a truck during a parade for people who attended Houthi military training as part of a mobilization campaign, in Sanaa, Yemen, Dec. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday re-designating the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen as an official foreign terrorist organization (FTO).
“The Houthis’ activities threaten the security of American civilians and personnel in the Middle East, the safety of our closest regional partners, and the stability of global maritime trade,” the executive order read.
The order also calls for the destruction of the Houthis’ military capabilities, thereby ending the group’s ability to attack American and allied targets, and for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to inspect all of their partners and programs in Yemen to ensure funds are not inadvertently handed over to the Houthis.
The directive also mandates USAID to cut relations with organizations that have helped fund Houthi operations or have combated international efforts to dismantle the terrorist group. In addition, the order directs Rubio to submit a report to the president after 30 days regarding the designation and “take all appropriate action” concerning the designation within another 15 days.
In January 2021, during the final days of the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated the Houthis as an FTO. The next month, however, during the initial weeks of the Biden administration, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken reversed the designation of the Houthis as an FTO, citing a desire to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Yemen.
The official FTO designation legally prohibits American individuals and organizations from lending “material support” to the Houthis, which some critics argue could worsen humanitarian conditions in Yemen. The Biden administration’s decision to de-list the Houthis as a terrorist group drew condemnation from Republicans in the US Congress
On Tuesday, US Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) introduced the “Standing Against Houthi Aggression Act” to reclassify the Houthis as an FTO, reversing official policies of the Biden administration.
“Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Houthis have attacked US allies more than 100 times,” he said in a statement. “With the start of the Trump administration, it’s time to get serious about counterterrorism again and send a message to the Iranian regime that the US stands with Israel and will not tolerate our allies being attacked and shipping routes in the Middle East being disrupted. Designating the Houthis as an FTO will enable the Trump administration to bring the full weight of US sanctions in order to restore peace and order in the Middle East.”
Beyond banning individuals or organizations in the United States from giving “material support or resources” to the Houthis, placing the Yemeni rebels on the FTO list would also make non-citizen members and representatives of the Houthis eligible for deportation. The designation would further mandate any US financial institution with ties to the Houthis to alert the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of the Treasury.
Several countries — including Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Israel — currently designate the Houthis as terrorists.
Trump’s executive order followed repeated attacks by the Houthis against Israel since October 2023, including the launch of over 200 missiles and 170 attack drones.
Last month, for example, a ballistic missile launched by the Iran-backed group struck a playground in Tel Aviv, injuring at least 16 people and causing damage to nearby homes.
The Houthis have been waging an insurgency in Yemen for two decades in a bid to overthrow the Yemeni government. They have controlled a significant portion of the country’s land in the north and along the Red Sea since 2014, when they captured it in the midst of a civil war.
The Yemeni terrorist group began disrupting global trade in a major way with their attacks on shipping in the busy Red Sea corridor after the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, arguing their aggression was a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza.
The Houthi rebels — whose slogan is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — have said they will target all ships heading to Israeli ports, even if they do not pass through the Red Sea.
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, which launched the ongoing war in Gaza, Houthi terrorists in Yemen have also routinely launched missiles toward Israel.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released a report in July revealing how Iran has been “smuggling weapons and weapons components to the Houthis.” The report noted that the Houthis used Iranian-supplied ballistic and cruise missiles to conduct over 100 land attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and within Yemen, as well as dozens of attacks on merchant shipping.
While the Houthis have increasingly targeted Israeli soil in recent months, they have primarily attacked ships in the Red Sea, a key trade route, raising the cost of shipping and insurance. Shipping firms have been forced in many cases to re-route to longer and more expensive journeys around southern Africa to avoid passing near Yemen, having a major global economic impact.
Beyond Israeli targets, the Houthis have threatened and in some cases actually attacked US and British ships, leading the two Western allies to launch retaliatory strikes multiple times against Houthi targets in Yemen.
As a result of the Houthis’ aggression, the Biden administration in January 2024 placed the group on the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) list.
Though the SDGT designation allows for sanctions, it is considered less severe than placement on the FTO list. The Biden administration opted against reimposing the FTO designation on the Houthis, citing concerns over worsening the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
“A foreign terrorist organization designation ran the risk of having a deterrent effect on some of those aid groups continuing to provide aid — worrying that they might be charged as providing material support to a terrorist organization,” former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at th tim.
Following the recently brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to halt fighting in Gaza, the Houthis have announced they will limit their attacks on commercial vessels to Israel–linked ships provided the Gaza ceasefire is fully implemented.
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New York Times ‘Ceasefire’ Coverage Laments That Israel Will Exist
Orthodox Jewish men stand near a tank, ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The New York Times news coverage of Israel and the Middle East is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality.
A recent Times article about a ceasefire in Gaza carries five bylines — Aaron Boxerman, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Johnatan Reiss, Ephrat Livni, and Adam Rasgon. A sixth reporter, Nick Cumming-Bruce, is credited at the end of the piece for having “contributed reporting from Geneva.” With so many people involved, accuracy and accountability is more difficult.
The Times article reports, “Aid workers also hope that the cease-fire would allow for far more medical evacuations. The WHO reported that Israel had approved the evacuation of 5,405 patients since the start of the war. But the pace of evacuations slowed to a trickle after Israel closed the Rafah crossing in May.”
Actually it was not “Israel” that “closed the Rafah crossing,” which is a passage between Gaza and Egypt. The Rafah crossing was closed by Egypt after the Israelis took over the other side. That threatened to end the smuggling that reportedly brought in huge bribe revenues to powerful people in Egypt.
Another Times article about the ceasefire — this one under Rasgon’s solo byline, though with reporting contributed by Boxerman and Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley — is no more accurate. “When Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel, it had hoped to ignite a regional war that would draw in its allies and lead to Israel’s destruction. Instead, it has been left to fight Israel almost entirely alone,” the Times writes. This conveniently skips over how Israel was attacked by Hezbollah, from Iran, and by some students and faculty on US and European university campuses. Prime Minister Netanyahu has described it as a “seven-front” war — not only Gaza, but also Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).
The Times does mention attacks on Israel from Yemen, but it describes them airily as “occasional rocket and drone attacks, most of which Israel has intercepted.” If the “occasional rocket and drone attacks” had targeted, say, the New York Times bureau in Washington, or Columbia Journalism School, one doubts that the Times would be so casually dismissive of them.
The Times article concludes:
For many civilians, a future with both Israel and Hamas in the picture is bleak.
“We’re talking about a people stuck between a state ready to act with total brutality and a group ready to provoke that state to act with brutality,” said Akram Atallah, a Palestinian columnist from Gaza.
That passage draws a strange equivalence between Israel and Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group. What would the future look like without Israel in the picture? That would also be pretty bleak for the Jews who live there, who can expect to be treated with the same cruelty that Hamas treated its victims on Oct. 7, 2023.
Who is this Akram Atallah? In the past, according to Palestinian Media Watch, he’s likened Israel to Shakespeare’s caricature of Shylock. The Washington Post has reported that Atallah “was imprisoned with [former Hamas leader Ismail] Haniyeh in the early 1990s in Israel.”
This is the journalist the New York Times turns to for expert commentary?
For many civilian readers hoping for factual, reliable journalism about Israel and its neighbors, the present — with the New York Times distorting reality and indulging fantasies about wiping Israel off the map — is pretty bleak.
No one is asking the Times to be a spokesman for Netanyahu or his Likud Party. At least, that isn’t what I’m hoping for. I’d settle for just simple factual accuracy about issues such as who closed the Rafah crossing or which parties attacked Israel. Or, minimally, for the ability to draw a distinction between Israel and Hamas.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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