You cannot build a durable peace while teaching the next generation that hatred, martyrdom, and rejection are virtues.
Demilitarization may remove the weapons. Education has to address the worldview that keeps producing people willing to pick them back up.
If Gaza is going to have a different future, its classrooms have to help create it.
For generations, Hamas-appointed teachers turned Gazan kids against their parents, weaponizing classrooms to hijack Islam, breed division, and label anyone who disagreed as an infidel.
As Gazan researcher Hasan Jamal al-Dawoudi warns, this created a “culture of death… based on hatred and breaking bonds.” Now is the time to roll it back, he urges, by “planting seeds of love in every Palestinian child.”
Ridding Gaza of its martyrdom culture and replacing it with those seeds requires taking the schools back — because if you capture the schools, you kidnap the minds.
Demilitarization is only step one. Step two must be ripping out this ideological root.
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