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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, the grandson of Holocaust survivors.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Hamas announced this week that it was dissolving the committee that has governed Gaza since 2007.
The move is symbolic — and almost nothing on the ground has changed.
Symbolic, though, is not the same as unimportant. Treat those two as one word and you miss the whole thing, because here the symbol is the entire product.
What Hamas performed this week was not a surrender of power. It was a rebrand — and the rebrand is the weapon.
Let’s look at what really happened.
The Government Emergency Committee that ran Gaza’s ministries is gone, and its chairman resigned. Every civil servant under him keeps his desk. Hamas keeps its police and its internal security.
It keeps the racket it runs on aid, skimming up to 30 percent from the merchants who sell food that was donated to feed the hungry.
It keeps its tunnels, hundreds of miles of them, more than half the pre-war network still intact under the hospitals and the homes.
It keeps its army. The Israeli military counts some 20,000 fighters and 60,000 rifles still in its hands. And all through the ceasefire that was supposed to finish it, the group has been rearming, prying explosives out of unexploded shells, smuggling parts through the aid trucks and in across the sea, turning out hundreds of rockets and roadside bombs a month.
Hamas has offered to give up some of the heavier rockets. It will not surrender the rifles, because the rifles are the entire point, and its own commanders have said as much. The one concession that would have meant something is disarmament, and that is the single item the announcement leaves out. The committee that is supposed to replace all of this has not been allowed to set foot in Gaza in six months.
Strip the announcement down to what changed on the ground, and we are left holding a nameplate.
This is what a laundering operation looks like when it is run on a reputation instead of on money. A terrorist organization cannot sit across a table from foreign ministers, or receive reconstruction billions, or be spoken of as the legitimate authority in a territory. A technocratic committee can. So the play is to build the committee, hand it the letterhead, and let the men with the guns step one pace back behind it while keeping everything that matters in their hands.
The organization does not give up its power. It runs that power through a cleaner-looking institution and comes out the other side wearing a suit. Nothing gets disarmed in the process, and yet something quietly gets legitimized.
Remember what is being cleaned here. This organization ruled Gaza for 19 years and never once let its people vote. It took the concrete meant for their homes and the aid meant for their hospitals and sank 400 miles of tunnels beneath the wards and the classrooms.
Its operatives came through the fence on October 7, 2023, murdered 1,200 people in a single day, and dragged 251 others back into the dark as hostages. That is the body the reasonable new name is being fitted over, and the suit is being tailored to fit it exactly.
We have watched this exact move before, twice, and both times it worked. Let’s start with the original: The Palestine Liberation Organization spent the 1970s and 1980s as the working definition of international terrorism, the hijackings and the Munich massacre and all of it. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, addressed the United Nations in 1974 with a holster on his hip, telling the hall he had come carrying an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other.
Then, in 1993, that same man signed a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognizing Israel and renouncing terrorism. The organization struck the word “liberation” from its name and came back as the “Palestinian Authority,” and the man who had ordered the killings stood on the White House lawn shaking hands and collecting a Nobel Peace Prize.
But the guns did not vanish. The Second Intifada — a terrifying five-year period targeting mostly Israeli civilians via Palestinian suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, car rammings, and constant fear in the Israeli public, leaving many civilians dead or injured and deeply traumatizing Israeli society — was still to come.
And the Palestine Liberation Organization had already told anyone who bothered to read its own 1974 program exactly what the design was: Take whatever liberation you can win at each stage, and treat every stage as a step toward all of it.
The rebrand did not change the goal. It changed the letterhead, and the world agreed to deal with the letterhead.
Then there is Hezbollah, which found an even cleaner version. It simply announced that it had two wings, a political one that sat in the Lebanese parliament and a military one that fired the rockets deliberately at Israeli population centers, and it invited the world to deal with the first and look past the second.
Europe accepted the offer. The European Union, in 2013, placed only Hezbollah’s military wing on its terror list, leaving the political wing free to organize, raise money, and hold office. The distinction was a fiction, and the finest proof of that came from Hezbollah itself. Naim Qassem, then its deputy leader and today its head, had already said it in the open: We do not have a military wing and a political wing, every part of Hezbollah is in the service of the resistance. Hezbollah itself said the two wings were one body, and Europe decided to believe otherwise anyway.
Now watch the same move a third time, in Gaza, this month. Dissolve the Government Emergency Committee. Stand up the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, 15 technocrats with a respectable name. Let the fighters retreat a single step. The ministries, the police, the taxes, the tunnels, the rockets, and the aim all stay precisely where they sat the week before.
The spokesman even said the quiet part out loud: that the purpose was to remove any pretext for the “occupation,” which is to say the purpose was how the arrangement looks to outsiders. Hamas is not leaving; it is only changing costume.
The costume change is not the end of the plan. It is the setup for the next phase. Take the Hezbollah model and run it forward, because that is where this goes.
Hamas keeps a political face that can be received in foreign capitals, and pushes the fighting out to the side, onto armed groups it funds and equips and steers without ever putting its own name on the trigger. The men do not disappear. They change uniforms and come back, and the killing goes on under a label clean enough to let Hamas answer every atrocity with an alibi.
The Palestinian Authority has run this arrangement for years, condemning terror in English for its Western donors while paying the families of terrorists in Arabic, a program so brazen that U.S. Congress passed a law named for one of its American victims.1
Watch what the Palestinian Authority did when the pressure finally came. Abbas signed a decree in February 2025, a gift to the incoming Trump Administration, announcing that the martyr payments were finished.
They were not.
The U.S. State Department and Israeli investigators found the money still moving under a fresh name, and the official who let the old payments stay visible was fired for it. The Palestinian Authority did not end pay-for-slay. It rebranded it. That is the club Hamas is now applying to join, the respectable address out front and the killing subcontracted to whoever will wear the mask.
The timing gives the game away. The war Hamas started on October 7th and the proceeding isolation had cornered the terror group. Seventeen countries and the entire European Union, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Egypt and Turkey among the signatures, had for the first time condemned the seventh of October by name and told Hamas directly to disarm and get out of government.
A cornered organization that will not surrender its weapons has exactly one currency left to spend: the appearance of compliance. The dissolution is that currency. It costs nothing.
Someone might bring up the Irish Republican Army, which also traded the rifle for the committee room and which no serious person calls a fraud. That comparison fails at the implementation. The Irish Republican Army actually decommissioned its weapons, verifiably, under an independent international commission that certified the arms had been put beyond use. That act is the whole difference between a reform and a rebrand, and it is the one line Hamas has refused to go anywhere near.
A group that gives up its weapons under verification is making peace. Hamas kept every last one of them and changed the sign on the door, which is a much older and much cheaper thing.
Set all of that aside, though, and grant for a moment that the dissolution is sincere. It would still fail, for a reason that runs deeper than any committee: Hamas is a product of Gaza, but Gaza is not a product of Hamas. The organization grew out of a population and a creed that wanted something like it, and erasing the organization does nothing to the thing that produced it. The demand stays exactly where it sat, and the supply is already forming up to meet it.
A dozen other factions wait in Gaza, most of them cut from the same cloth and some of them worse. The Popular Front and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine are looking to rebuild their presence. The Palestinian Authority is angling for a foothold of its own. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is still riding high on the popularity of its aggression in the last few wars. Dissolve the word Hamas tomorrow, and the ground it grew from simply grows the next one, because the ground is the part nobody has touched.
The test of whether Hamas has left power is simple, and the needle has not moved: the guns, the tunnels, the taxes, the refusal to disarm. Everything else is stagecraft, and the stagecraft is aimed squarely at the one audience with the money and the recognition that Hamas needs in order to rule Gaza for another 19 years under a name that no longer makes anyone flinch.
The Palestine Liberation Organization got its handshake, Hezbollah got its seat, and Hamas is now reaching for the same prize: a terrorist organization asking to be received as a government, and the only thing it requires from us is that we agree to call it one.
We should decline.
A rebrand is not a reform, and a committee with a clean name is still whatever is standing behind it, holding the rifles.
The Taylor Force Act was passed by U.S. Congress in 2018. Named after Taylor Force, an American veteran killed in a 2016 stabbing attack in Jaffa, the law restricts certain U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it ends payments linked to imprisoned terrorists and their families.
The West ignores the charade because the alternative is to admit that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority have lied to and manipulated the West for decades, that the Palestinians have no interest in peace with Israel, that they are uninterested in a two-state solution, and that the destruction of Israel remains their objective. The West pays no price for the survival and rejuvenation of Hamas, and the West is growing less concerned about the price Israel will pay.
I don’t understand why Israel did not go thru street by street and fill every tunnel with cement. Whatever arms were in there would be lost. Why does Israel allow this?