https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-the-moral-rehabilitation-of-gaza/
As the war between Israel and Gaza rages on, some inevitable questions must be raised. If Hamas, an indisputable rogue organization that governs a region which exists more like a plot of land in a state of nature than as a civilized geographic entity, is not totally obliterated (which, with sentimental calls for ceasefires and daily pauses in aerial bombings and ground incursions on Israel’s part, seems unlikely), then can Hamas be politically rehabilitated? What would such rehabilitation look like? Or should we be thinking of more robust and radical solutions such as global incarceration whereby a country is evicted from the community of nations and radically contained militarily?
The most draconian form of global incarceration of a state or region is the permanent disbandment of a state into regional disembodiments, sedimentary fragments chiseled into the mortar bodies of larger states with no chance of it ever recovering its political solvency. It is the absolute disappearance of a state without necessarily terminating the lives of its former citizens. It includes but is not limited to the deracination of its political culture, the destruction of its political institutions and its mores, customs, and norms. Radical assimilation and/or extreme containment are the political concomitants and the direct corollaries of this mandate. Global incarceration of a state or region is the death of its political life and its capacity to generate and regenerate life as it was once capable of doing. An incarcerated state or region is not just a neutralized state – it is a neutered state.
On the slim chance that a heavily compromised, Hamas-governed Gaza exists, what might it look like, and how would it come about?
Here it might be helpful to look to history for political and moral guidance. Japan and Germany in World War II were countries that went through political rehabilitation and, with the aid of the United States, had their entire identities reconstituted. In the case of Japan, a heavily influenced U.S Constitution was foisted on it with great success, albeit via warfare. Sometimes rehabilitation requires war. Sometimes it requires firm diplomacy, or economic sanctions, or military intervention, or absolute regime change. What is essential about rehabilitation in the political sense is that there is adaptation to a code of normative behavior to which the rogue state must adhere. The rogue entity adapts to the norms of a civilizational order.
