Author’s Note: In recent months, both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu made similar ultimatums demanding the disarmament of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Trump was blunt: “They will disarm — or we will disarm them by force.” His warning extended to Lebanon, insisting the Lebanese state compel Hezbollah to surrender its weapons or “accept that Israel will handle it.” Netanyahu struck the same chord, telling his cabinet: “Hamas will be disarmed,” while cautioning that Lebanon must also “uphold its commitments — namely, to disarm Hezbollah.” Israeli defense officials have since underscored that dismantling Hezbollah’s arsenal could not be achieved through negotiation, but only through a major military operation.

This essay argues that these demands belong to a specific, coercive tradition of disarmament — one that has little to do with security and nothing to do with peace. Unlike processes that trade weapons for political rights, sovereignty, and dignity, this model demands unilateral surrender, institutionalizes humiliation, and guarantees future conflict by leaving every underlying grievance untouched.

History is unequivocal: this type of disarmament almost never produces stable peace. It produces a defeated population, a deepened sense of injustice, and the conditions for the next eruption. It is a form of coerced domination whose message is unmistakable: your weapons will be taken, your dignity is incidental, and no political price will be paid in exchange.

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The Spectacle of Surrender: What Coerced Disarmament Looks Like in Practice

If anyone doubts what “disarmament” means in Trump and Netanyahu’s vocabulary, they need only look at what Israel has already done in Gaza. The rituals have been enacted in the open — filmed, distributed, and defended by the Israeli government as signs of “victory.” These are spectacles of subjugation, rituals designed not to neutralize threat but to erase dignity.

Forced Mass Stripping and Kneeling

In December 2023, dozens of Palestinian men and boys from northern Gaza were rounded up by the Israel Defense Forces, ordered to strip to their underwear, blindfolded, and made to kneel in rows on a roadside in the winter cold. Images circulated globally — men shivering, some elderly, some barefoot, hands bound, bodies exposed. Israeli officials labeled them “terror suspects.” Later reporting revealed that many were civilians: teachers, medical workers, laborers, university students.
This was not counterterrorism; it was the public choreography of defeat.

The White-Flag Marches Under Gunpoint

Throughout late 2023 and early 2024, displaced Palestinians attempting to flee bombardment were ordered to march south in long columns, many holding white flags — filmed by drones and ground units of the Israel Defense Forces. Witnesses described soldiers shouting instructions through loudspeakers, firing near the feet of civilians who slowed or deviated, and detaining men at makeshift checkpoints.

Eyewitnesses and journalists also documented bodies strewn along these corridors — dismembered civilians killed by Israeli tank shells and drone strikes as they attempted to follow evacuation orders. The massacre did not occur only in hospitals or shelters; it unfolded on the open road, where the very act of obeying Israeli commands became a site of extreme vulnerability and death.

The white flag here did not signify a negotiated ceasefire; it signified a population compelled to enact, step by step, the script of its own political erasure.

Abuse and Torture in Detention Camps (“Tests of Loyalty”)

In the makeshift desert detention facility at Sde Teiman, international human rights organizations documented beatings, stress positions, sleep deprivation, sexualized threats, and forced confessions. Detainees reported being compelled to repeat scripted lines, praise interrogators, or denounce Palestinian factions on camera.

These were not security screenings — they were loyalty tests imposed on a captive population.

Bulldozed Piles of “Surrendered” Weapons

As Israel bulldozed neighborhoods in northern Gaza, Israeli media showcased footage of soldiers piling “seized” weapons in dramatic heaps — rusty rifles, misfiring pistols, old grenades, knives, even metal pipes presented as proof of “disarmament.” Cameras panned over the piles like trophies.

The theatricality was the point: the spectacle of stripping a people of the symbols of resistance, regardless of their military value.

Public Humiliation of Medical Workers and Journalists

Doctors, nurses, paramedics, and journalists were detained en masse, forced to kneel outside hospitals such as Al-Shifa, stripped of their ID badges, and photographed like prisoners of war. Many were later released without charge.

The message was unmistakable: Palestinian civic existence itself was being placed under arrest.

Home Raids Performed as Acts of Degradation

In raid after raid, soldiers filmed themselves using families’ living rooms as “victory rooms,” mocking residents, vandalizing belongings, and scrawling slogans on walls. This had nothing to do with military necessity.

It was the invasion of the private sphere as a stage for domination.

How These Rituals Function

These acts are not separate from the demand for disarmament — they are its operational meaning. Coerced disarmament is never just the confiscation of weapons; it is the stripping of dignity, the deliberate remaking of a people into something that can be managed, subdued, and ruled.

Each ritual follows the same grammar: the public exposure of the body, the imposition of helplessness, the compulsory performance of submission, the documentation of that submission by the occupying force, and its broadcast as proof of control.

This is why the disarmament Israel envisions is not a technical security measure but a form of political annihilation. Its purpose is not to prevent future attacks; it is to produce a population that cannot stand, cannot speak, cannot claim self-defense, and ultimately cannot exist as a political community.

Two Traditions of Disarmament — And Why One Ends Wars While the Other Makes Them Inevitable

Across modern conflicts, disarmament has followed two fundamentally different traditions, and confusing them is fatal. One produces durable political settlements; the other guarantees renewed war.

Tradition A treats disarmament as the final step in a negotiated political settlement. It is reciprocal, rooted in dignity, and embedded in frameworks that provide shared political power, rights, representation, security guarantees, and a visible horizon of self-determination.

This is the only model under which armed groups have ever voluntarily disbanded.

The record is well-established.

The IRA in Northern Ireland decommissioned its weapons only after power-sharing, police reform, equality guarantees, and prisoner releases. In Colombia, the FARC disarmed in exchange for amnesty, congressional seats, land reform, and reintegration. In 1979, Egypt accepted a demilitarized Sinai only because it received full sovereignty, full withdrawal, and a binding peace treaty.

In each case, the armed group traded weapons for concrete political gainsthat addressed the grievances driving the conflict.

Tradition B, by contrast, treats disarmament as pacification: an act of domination imposed by overwhelming force and outside any political process. It offers no reciprocity, no rights, no political horizon, and no address of root causes. It is disarmament as subjugation.

French colonial forces in Algeria confiscated rifles village by village with no political concession. After the 1857 revolt, the British in India imposed arms-licensing regimes designed to keep Indians permanently subordinate. In 1975, Baghdad forcibly disarmed Iraqi Kurds after abandoning them — only to face a stronger insurgency later.

Tradition B never ends wars; it merely postpones them.

Why Tradition B Always Fails (Structural, Not Circumstantial)

Tradition B collapses because of its internal architecture, not because of mismanagement. It treats armed groups as criminal syndicates rather than political-military expressions of large constituencies, ignoring the social and historical forces that sustain them. It leaves the core grievances — occupation, dispossession, blockade, demographic engineering, and the constant threat of invasion — entirely intact. And it is lived by the targeted population as collective humiliation, visible from the stripped men of Beit Lahiya to the emptied Shia villages south of the Litani.

The outcome is consistent: a power vacuum filled by more radical or more capable successors. The PLO’s forced disarmament in 1982 helped give rise to Hamas; the post-2007 attempts to fragment Gaza’s factions produced more hardened groups.

Tradition B does not eliminate resistance; it cultivates its next iteration.

Why Tradition A Succeeds

Tradition A succeeds because it restructures political incentives. It recognizes that armed groups represent real constituencies; it addresses the injustices that produced the insurgency; it gives all sides a stake in the stability of the political order; and it distributes security rather than hoarding it. This is not idealism — it is the only proven alternative to permanent occupation or mass extermination.

The 2025 Demands as Pure Tradition B

The demands placed on Hamas and Hezbollah in 2025 — total, unilateral, permanent disarmament with no rights, no sovereignty, and no political horizon — are not flawed attempts at Tradition A. They belong squarely to Tradition B.

And Tradition B has never been satisfied with taking weapons alone; its deeper purpose is the subordination of a population already pushed beyond the borders of moral concern. Demonization paves the way, humiliation accompanies the process, and domination is the intended endpoint.

Dehumanization Cleared the Way for Tradition B

Within hours of the attack, large parts of the Israeli political and military establishment — echoed by Western officials and media — collapsed the distinction between Hamas fighters and the Palestinian population as a whole. The Defense Minister called them “human animals” and imposed a total siege: no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Senior lawmakers demanded that Gaza be “flattened,” “erased,” turned into a “slaughterhouse.” The Prime Minister invoked the biblical Amalek, a people commanded to be exterminated to the last child.

This was not spontaneous rage. It was the activation of a ready-made script, long rehearsed in slogans like “there are no innocents in Gaza” and “death is their culture.” After October 7, it simply accelerated. The result was the removal of two million Palestinians from the boundaries of moral consideration. Once that threshold was crossed, the spectacle of stripped, kneeling men in Beit Lahiya no longer looked aberrant — it looked like order restored.

History is brutally consistent on this point. The atomic bombs could fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only after propaganda had rendered the Japanese a faceless, fanatical horde. Vietnam’s “free-fire zones” were possible only because civilians were pre-classified as indistinguishable from the Viet Cong. The sequence is always the same: first dehumanization, then unrestricted violence, then unconditional surrender and permanent disarmament presented as self-defense.

That is the Tradition B playbook — and that is precisely the playbook being executed against Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanese Shia in the south in 2025.

The Moral Inversion at the Core of Today’s Demands

What makes the current moment historically grotesque is not only the scale of destruction but the fact that the logic once used to punish genocidal aggressors is now being applied to the people who have endured ethnic cleansing and occupation.

Historically, punitive, unilateral disarmament coupled with public humiliation was the victor’s response to states that had waged wars of conquest and extermination — postwar Germany, imperial Japan. Germany and Japan were disarmed because they had waged exterminatory wars. Palestinians and Lebanese Shia are being asked to disarm because they have survived exterminatory violence.

Yet the same disarmament toolkit is now being deployed in reverse: the side with overwhelming military power, an undeclared nuclear arsenal, and an ongoing system of occupation and blockade casts itself as the besieged victim requiring the permanent disarmament of a far weaker party.

This inversion is possible only because a supremacist logic has taken hold — one that treats Jewish security as absolute and existential while viewing Palestinian or Shia armed resistance as inherently illegitimate, even when directed against occupation. The result is a fascist hierarchy dressed as security necessity: one people granted a permanent, unilateral right to arms and domination; the other told that its very impulse toward self-defense disqualifies it from political existence.

What Was Being Fought For — and What Is Still Being Fought For

A. The Irish Republican Army (1919–1998)

The IRA fought to end the partition of Ireland and British rule in Northern Ireland, where Catholics lived as a discriminated-against minority: gerrymandered out of power, denied fair housing and jobs, marched through their neighborhoods by triumphalist Protestant parades, and policed by a state that interned suspects without trial and whose paramilitary auxiliaries shot civilians with impunity. The IRA’s methods were frequently murderous and sectarian, but the grievance — systematic second-class citizenship inside the United Kingdom — was real and structural.

B. Palestinian National Resistance (Including Hamas): The Nakba, Occupation, and the Unresolved Right of Return

If the IRA fought to end an externally imposed partition that consigned Catholics to second-class citizenship, Palestinians are fighting a deeper and more entrenched partition — one born in 1947–48 and reinforced by military occupation, blockade, and the denial of return. What differs is not the nature of the demand — reunification and self-determination on their own land — but the balance of power and the fact that one partition (Ireland) eventually yielded a negotiated path to unity by consent, while the other has been hardened for seventy-seven years into permanent domination.

Palestinians are fighting not only against the 57-year military occupation that began in 1967 — an occupation the International Court of Justice declared unlawful in July 2024, ordering Israel to withdraw, dismantle settlements, and pay reparations — but against the foundational catastrophe of the 1948 Nakba, when approximately 750,000 Palestinians — over 80% of the Arab population in what became Israel — were expelled or fled under attack, more than 500 villages were destroyed, and they were permanently denied return. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 affirms their right to return and receive compensation; Israel has always rejected this right as an existential threat to its Jewish majority. The ICJ’s 2024 ruling explicitly links the illegality of the occupation to the ongoing denial of the right of return and the resulting apartheid-like segregation.

To my knowledge, no other occupying power has been found by the ICJ to be in an unlawful occupation and ordered to end it and dismantle settlements, while its main backer simultaneously presses the occupied population to disarm.

Layered atop the Nakba’s unresolved wounds, the 1967 occupation entrenched dispossession. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live under permanent military rule: checkpoints, night raids, arbitrary detention (over 9,000 held without charge or trial in 2023), land seizure for settlements (12,000 new units approved in 2023), and state-backed settler violence (1,229 attacks in 2023, the highest on record). In Gaza, a 16-year blockade — described by the United Nations as “the world’s largest open-air prison” — has deliberately kept the population at subsistence level. Non-violent paths, including Oslo, produced only deeper subjugation.

The Asymmetry of Grievance and Power

Hamas was born as an Islamist resistance movement during the First Intifada. Its 1988 charter undeniably contained antisemitic language — a fact it formally disavowed in its 2017 policy document, which removed all religious or ethnic references to Jews and redefined the enemy strictly as the “Zionist project.” Israel, by contrast, has never disavowed — indeed has repeatedly reaffirmed — state-level doctrines that cast the Palestinian and broader Arab presence as an existential demographic and civilizational threat.

Basic Laws (2018) enshrine Jewish settlement as a national value and Jewish self-determination as exclusive to Israel; military plans openly discuss “thinning” Gaza’s population to a “minimum required”; ministers speak of Palestinians as “human animals” or “Amalek” without sanction; and the official response to October 7 included calls from cabinet members to “erase” Gaza or turn it into a place where “no Arab can live.”

Israel demands that Palestinians permanently renounce and disarm any trace of antisemitism — real or formerly held — while itself maintaining, legally and rhetorically, an ideology of Arab exclusion and elimination. This double standard is living proof that the demanded disarmament is not about mutual security or moral consistency; it is about ensuring one side alone retains the perpetual right to arms and domination.

On October 7, Hamas and allied factions launched an operation aimed at Israeli military bases and positions along the Gaza perimeter. Once fighters breached the fence, the assault spread into nearby Israeli settlements and the Nova music festival, resulting in the mass killing of civilians and the taking of hundreds of hostages — most of whom were later released in negotiated swaps for Palestinian prisoners held without charge or trial.

Independent investigations indicate that some Israeli civilian and soldier deaths were caused by Israeli helicopter and tank fire during the chaos,

These were war crimes and atrocities. But atrocities do not arise in a political vacuum; they emerge from conditions the law itself recognizes as drivers of violent resistance when every other avenue has been sealed off.

The hostage-taking was part of this structure, not an aberration. Hamas has said openly that hostages were seized to force exchanges for the thousands of Palestinian prisoners Israel holds indefinitely — including minors, elected officials, and long-term administrative detainees. In other words, the taking of hostages mirrored Israel’s own system of mass detention: each side holding the bodies of the other because no political mechanism exists to resolve the conflict.

This is where hostage-taking links directly to the disarmament debate. A population denied every legal and political mechanism to defend itself — stripped of land, sovereignty, mobility, and the right to bear arms — will still find ways to assert leverage.

When Palestinians in the West Bank were effectively disarmed, resistance reappeared in the form of knives, cars, and improvised means — not because these were effective weapons, but because they were the only tools available. In Gaza, under siege and blocked from negotiation, Hamas turned to hostages as leverage for prisoners. Coercive disarmament does not end resistance; it forces it into more desperate and unpredictable forms.

These acts arose from a population that has endured seventy-seven years of dispossession and fifty-eight years of military occupation — whose every non-violent attempt at redress, from the First Intifada’s stones to the 2018–19 Great March of Return, was met with live fire, siege, and expanding settlements.

When legal pathways to freedom are systematically closed, when the ICJ declares the occupation illegal and orders its end, and when the occupying power responds by intensifying annexation, some segment of the occupied will inevitably conclude that armed resistance is the only remaining language.

The demand that Palestinians unilaterally disarm while those root causes remain untouched is therefore not a demand for security or morality. It is a demand that the victims of an illegal, apartheid-like regime renounce the means to say “no” to their own dispossession while the occupying power keeps every weapon, every settlement, and every veto over their future. That is the essence of Tradition B: pacification, not peace.

Israel’s response since October 7 has escalated into what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International describe as acts of genocide, extermination, and ethnic cleansing: intentional water deprivation, starvation as a method of warfare, with over 450 reported deaths from malnutrition, most of them children, and bombardment that has killed at least 66,000 Palestinians — Palestinian authorities say over 69,000 —(59% women, children, elderly) and destroyed or damaged around 80% of Gaza’s buildings.
In the West Bank, Israel has killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians since October 2023, and emptied entire refugee camps. Israel continues to violate the ICJ’s repeated orders to prevent genocide and allow aid.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia

Hezbollah emerged between 1982 and 1985 as a direct response to Israel’s invasion and 18-year occupation of south Lebanon — an occupation that killed an estimated 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, displaced entire regions, and left Shia communities living under daily military harassment.

For the historically marginalized Shia of the south, the occupation was not a geopolitical abstraction but an intimate, grinding reality of checkpoints, arbitrary detentions, cluster-bombed villages, and massacres such as Sabra and Shatila. Under these conditions, Hezbollah’s rise was not simply ideological; it was the organized, militarized expression of a population abandoned by its own state and subjected to systematic external violence.

The movement’s continued armament after Israel’s 2000 withdrawal reflects not only this historical memory but the political landscape Israel left behind. Israeli forces never fully ceased their encroachments: they continued violating Lebanese airspace daily, launched periodic cross-border raids, and refused to relinquish the Shebaa Farms, a territory Lebanon claims as occupied land.

The 2006 war reinforced the prevailing lesson among Lebanese Shia — that only a credible deterrent prevents a return to occupation, a conclusion strengthened by the fact that Hezbollah withstood the assault and forced a military stalemate despite overwhelming Israeli firepower.

That logic has only deepened since 2024. Even after the ceasefire, Israel has maintained multiple fortified outposts on strategic highlands inside southern Lebanon, expanded access roads, and continued demolishing civilian infrastructure in border villages, effectively transforming “temporary” military positions into de facto occupation zones. Many residents remain displaced; several villages have been blocked from returning; and the rebuilt fortifications signal not de-escalation but the entrenchment of Israeli military control.

In other words, Israel retains the capacity and terrain for renewed occupation at any moment — while demanding that the population it repeatedly invades give up all means of deterrence.

Hezbollah’s weapons, in this context, are not an ideological commitment to perpetual war but the predictable response of a community that has learned, repeatedly, that neither the Lebanese state nor international actors can protect it from Israeli incursions, bombings, or territorial expansion.

As long as that asymmetry persists — and as long as Israel maintains active military positions on Lebanese soil — the demand that Hezbollah disarm unilaterally belongs squarely within Tradition B: an approach that seeks to remove the only form of leverage held by a population whose security has never been guaranteed in any political framework.

What Israel Is Doing (2023–2025): Expansion, Not Prevention

Israel continues to frame its campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon as wars of prevention — operations meant to dismantle Hamas and Hezbollah while establishing “temporary” buffer zones such as the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza and an expanded security belt in southern Lebanon. In practice, however, these buffers have been transformed into mechanisms of permanent territorial expansion and demographic engineering.

By late 2025, a patchwork of buffer zones, corridors (including the former Netzarim axis), and military “no-go” areas gives Israel effective control over well over half of the Strip’s territory, with millions of Palestinians confined to shrinking, devastated enclaves., carving it into disconnected enclaves and preventing the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Entire urban areas — Beit Hanoun, Shuja’iyya, Khan Younis — have been systematically razed under the logic of “clearing” space for indefinite military access.

In southern Lebanon, the pattern is unmistakably similar. Despite the November 2024 ceasefire, Israel continues to entrench highland outposts, expand forward positions, and widen the so-called security belt beyond the Blue Line. Some areas — from Houla and Kfar Kila to the outskirts of Bint Jbeil — have been subjected to recurring “clearing” operations, with the de facto result being a creeping territorial presence reminiscent of the pre-2000 occupation. Israeli officials describe this as necessary for deterrence; the physical reality is a slow, incremental expansion of military footprint under the cover of security rhetoric.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settlement construction has surged by over 250 percent since October 2023. New outposts are legalized retroactively, existing settlements expand deep into Palestinian land, and annexation bills advance in the Knesset with open political support.

Although the language remains the language of “security,” the infrastructure on the ground — razed cities, depopulated borderlands, fortified corridors, expanding settlements — reveals a consistent trajectory. These are not temporary defenses. They are long-term instruments of domination designed to reshape the demographic and territorial landscape far beyond the horizon of any ceasefire or negotiation.

What the Trump Administration Is Doing (November 2025)

The incoming Trump plan openly adopts Israel’s demand for permanent Palestinian and Lebanese Shia disarmament while offering no reciprocal political concessions — no settlement freeze, no end to the Gaza blockade, no resolution of Shebaa Farms, and no pathway to sovereignty. In this framework, disarmament is not the outcome of negotiation; it is the precondition for being allowed to negotiate at all.

As argued earlier, this is unambiguous Tradition B elevated to doctrine: weapons must disappear while the structures that generated the conflict — occupation, blockade, annexation, demographic engineering — remain fully intact.

In every successful example of integrative disarmament, armed groups exchanged their weapons for political recognition, security guarantees, and meaningful rights. In none of those cases was one population told to disarm while the other retained its nuclear arsenal, settlements, military occupation, and unilateral freedom of action.

Objections — and Answers

“But Hamas and Hezbollah want to destroy Israel.”

The IRA’s constitution called for a 32-county socialist republic by force if necessary. The armed wing of the ANC openly sang “kill the Boer” during the struggle against apartheid. Every major national liberation movement has, at some stage, articulated maximalist or eliminationist rhetoric.Negotiation is not moral approval of an adversary’s ideology; it is the only proven alternative to endless war or mass extermination.

Nor is Israel exempt from this history. The Irgun, the Lehi, and other pre-state militias that became part of the Israeli army carried out bombings, assassinations, expulsions, and massacres — including the massacre at Deir Yassin and attacks on civilian markets in Jerusalem — because they believed violence was the only path to establishing a state. States do not come into being because their armed actors held pure or restrained ideologies; they come into being because political settlements eventually replaced armed confrontation.

The lesson is consistent across cases:

It is not ideological moderation that makes negotiation possible — it is negotiation that makes ideological moderation possible.

“But Israel cannot risk another October 7.”

Israel tried permanent domination for seventeen years in Gaza and eighteen years in south Lebanon. It got October 7 and the 2006 war.

Domination is not safety; it is only risk postponed.

The Choice

At this point, only two futures remain.

The first is the familiar illusion of pacification: continuing to demand unilateral Tradition B disarmament — periodic campaigns of overwhelming force followed by enforced submission — and accepting that such an approach leads inevitably to another war in five, ten, or fifteen years.

The second is the far more difficult path of justice: beginning the phased, verified, reciprocal work of Tradition A, where weapons are exchanged for political horizons, rights, and dignity, and where the causes of the conflict are addressed rather than buried.

Until a credible political horizon is placed on the table — one that acknowledges the Nakba’s unresolved right of return, ends the illegal occupation and settlement expansion, and resolves the Lebanese border disputes — the expectation that Hamas and Hezbollah will simply dissolve is not a peace plan. It is the continuation of war by other means.

The kneeling men of Beit Lahiya and the emptied villages of south Lebanon were not isolated abuses; they are the visual grammar of a doctrine that mistakes humiliation for security. A population cannot be stripped, starved, or degraded into peace. It can only be forced into temporary silence, and that silence always breaks. As discussed earlier, Tradition B does not produce peace; it produces intervals between wars. And that is the future being constructed today — slowly, insistently, brick by brick and demand by demand.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from the author

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