On Sept. 23, the U.S.-backed Board of Peace unveiled a six-month, $2.45 billion plan to begin Gaza’s recovery. Its 66 programs range from shelter and rubble removal to education and security. The plan estimates $35.2 billion in physical damage and $71.4 billion in recovery and reconstruction needs over the next decade.

The plan begins to answer what Gaza needs. It says far less about what Gaza must become.

Four days before its announcement, hundreds of thousands of Gazan children returned to in-person schooling, many for the first time in nearly three years. They entered tents, temporary classrooms and damaged buildings. Decisions about who will teach them, what they will learn and which institutions will supervise their schools are not questions for some distant reconstruction phase. They are being answered now.

How can we overcome Hamas' ideology?

The world is preparing Gaza’s Marshall Plan. It has not yet written Gaza’s Potsdam.

Before George Marshall proposed economic aid in June 1947, the Allies had established the political and institutional conditions for Germany’s reconstruction. The Potsdam Agreement required demilitarization, denazification and democratization. It treated education not merely as a public service, but as a matter of international security.

Gaza is not postwar Germany, and Palestinians are not Nazis. The comparison is neither between peoples nor between histories. It concerns institutional sequence. The Allies confronted a question Gaza’s future administrators and donors must now answer: What must precede permanent reconstruction when an armed ideology has captured the institutions responsible for forming children?

After Hamas seized Gaza in 2007, one of its most consequential transformations took place not underground but in schools.

Hussein al-Deek lived and studied in Gaza and has examined its educational system across a generation of Hamas rule. He saw teacher appointments become instruments of........

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