Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s representative for Gaza, has warned that failure to implement President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan could radicalize another generation of Palestinians and prepare the ground for the next war.
The warning gets the sequence backwards.
Gaza is not a blank slate waiting to be radicalized by the failure of another Western-designed peace formula. Hamas spent years building an armed Islamist regime there, recruiting fighters, indoctrinating children, and transforming civilian areas into a battlefield. Oct. 7 happened because Gaza had already been radicalized thanks to the international community’s failure to build on Israeli concessions by holding the Palestinians accountable.
The decisive test came in 2005. Israel uprooted every Jewish community in Gaza, removed its military presence from inside the Strip, and transferred control of the evacuated areas to the Palestinian Authority. This was not a minor gesture. Israelis were forcibly removed from their homes in the hope that disengagement would lower the temperature and create an opening for a different future.
It did not.
Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election the following year and violently seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007. Its message was unmistakable: armed pressure had achieved what diplomacy had not. Rather than discrediting terrorism, the withdrawal helped Hamas portray terrorism as effective.
That lesson should be impossible to ignore.
No serious Gaza plan can succeed while Hamas retains the means to rule and influence the next generation. Disarmament is not a technical detail to be negotiated away after reconstruction begins. It is the central condition for any future that does not simply rebuild the infrastructure Hamas will again exploit. If the international community doesn’t get this point right this time, that will be the reason for the next escalation.
As for Gaza’s population, there is no evidence it was somehow untouched by Hamas’s worldview until the current war. Hamas built a substantial fighting force before Oct. 7, readily recruiting from among Gaza’s population, and Palestinian polling after the massacre showed significant support for the attack, including among Gazans, despite the devastating consequences that followed. Such findings expose the scale of the problem facing anyone who claims that peace will arrive merely through better conditions or another international initiative.
Gaza’s civilians deserve a life beyond war and Hamas’s tyranny. But relief must not be confused with a strategy for defeating the ideology that brought Gaza to catastrophe.
Gaza is already radicalized. It needs to be de-radicalized, and the fact that it has not been is why the Trump plan stands little chance of success.
Worse still, if the Board of Peace repeats the tired claim that a lack of Israeli concessions is to blame for the next escalation, then yes, Palestinians will be further radicalized. But not because of Israeli policy. Rather, they will once again be told by the international community that intransigence and rejectionism are the keys to victory.
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It would seem that Trump and his advisors are not aware of the consequences of giving in to the ideology of Iron and Clay.