On Wednesday, a historic Israel-Somaliland Business Seminar will take place in Tel Aviv – a landmark meeting that signals a deepening relationship between two nations that understand, each in its own way, what it means to survive and rebuild.
This is not incidental to the question of Gaza. It is the model. A Muslim-majority African nation that survived genocide, rebuilt itself from rubble, nurtured its traumatized population back to stability, and now deepens its ties with Israel – while the international community still refuses it recognition. If that is not a rebuke to Mukawama – the ideology that sanctifies permanent resistance as a way of life – nothing is.
The Board of Peace recognized that sustainable security requires more than military strategy. What it has not yet addressed is the most fundamental layer of all – the developmental, by which I do not mean roads, apartments, or infrastructure, but the development of the human being itself: the formation of the self, the capacity for emotional security, the ability to live without needing to destroy, to become a fully functioning citizen.
If Gaza is ever to move beyond Hamas’s genocidal psychosis, the work must begin not in the negotiating room but in the maternity ward.
As a PTSD expert, I have spent decades studying the psychodynamics of terrorism. The jihadist does not emerge from nowhere. He is made – in the earliest years of life, in the bond between mother and infant, in what I call in Hebrew, Shnot Hanistarot, the unseen years from zero to three, when the brain is formed inside the maternal attachment.
We call them unseen because none of us can remember them – we can only see their derivatives later in life, in who we become, in what we fear, in how we attach or fail to attach to others.
During these years, the brain quadruples in size, and three crucial information processing systems must come online simultaneously: feelings, thinking, and language. As the psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist Paul C. Holinger, MD, MPH, documents in Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development (Routledge, 2025), these are messy systems – subtle disruptions in the earliest relational environment produce insecure children who experience the world as perpetually threatening, and who grow into adults who feel the world is attacking them.
They never develop the internal emotional security to simply live. This is precisely why Hamas will not give up its weapons. It is not strategy. It is terror – the original terror, never metabolized, never named, acted out on the bodies of others.
Traumatized mothers transmit traumatized nervous systems. Terrorized infants become the next generation’s recruits. No disarmament program addresses this. None has tried.
The maternal model of rebuilding Somaliland
The model exists. In Hargeisa, Somaliland, Edna Adan Ismail – nurse, midwife, former foreign minister, 2023 Templeton Prize laureate – did something extraordinary.
Ismail not only built a maternity hospital brick by brick on a former rubbish dump. She built an entire university – Edna Adan University (ednaadanuniversity.com) – with faculties of medicine, nursing, midwifery, dentistry, pharmacy, and public health, now serving over 20,000 students.
Somaliland’s secret weapon against the legacy of the Isaaq genocide – which killed tens of thousands of Isaaq civilians – was not military but maternal. Nurturing mothers and infants helped build a stable, democratic, and peaceful society.
Gaza needs its own Ismail. This is not a naive proposal. Hamas has already demonstrated with clinical precision what Mukawama does to medicine – hiding behind hospitals, embedding weapons in maternity wards, turning the infrastructure of life into the infrastructure of death.
That perversion is its purest expression: the consecration of death over life beginning in the very place where life begins. Any serious reconstruction initiative must be built on the explicit understanding that a maternity hospital is a sanctuary, not a military asset, and that those who treat it otherwise forfeit their place in any future Gaza.
The Board of Peace should include a dedicated maternal health and prenatal care initiative, coupled with a serious PTSD treatment program drawn from a global community of experts who do not bring to that work an ideological agenda of hatred toward the Jewish state.
Two further proposals. First, the current Board of Peace includes only one woman. That is insufficient for an initiative whose core challenge is developmental and maternal. The number must increase substantially. Women who understand the unseen years must be at the table where policy about those years is made.
Second, a distinction that must be named directly. In Arabic, the term Mukawama means resistance, but in Islamist jihadist ideology it signifies far more than opposition to an occupier. It is a total worldview: the permanent sanctification of armed struggle as a religious obligation, the transformation of violence into virtue, and the reduction of every human being – including the Palestinian child – into an instrument of that struggle.
In Hamas’s hands, Mukawama is not a means to an end. It is the end. It swallows everything it touches: medicine, education, childhood, motherhood. It is the reason children are raised to die rather than to live.
The Arabic term Tamkeen means empowerment: the building of capacity, the nurturing of the self, the creation of conditions in which a person can act rather than only react.
Mukawama produces martyrs. Tamkeen produces citizens. The choice is developmental – in the deepest human sense. It is made in the unseen years, before the child has words for what is being transmitted.
The Gazans who wish to move away from Hamas exist. They are not few. A maternal health initiative does not impose Israel’s will. It creates the conditions under which Gazans themselves can build something different – one brain, one bond, one unseen year at a time.
Disarmament and demilitarization must proceed. That is not negotiable. But strategy and tactics are not enough. We must also think and act developmentally – for the human being, not only the territory – for the generations to come. The maternity ward is not soft power. It is the hardest work there is.
The writer is a former military contractor and a psychoanalyst/counterterrorism expert based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her latest book is A Soldier’s Guide to Hamas’s Genocidal Psychosis: Beyond Ideology, Before Words, Atzmaut Press, 2025. https://nancykobrin.org and nancyharteveltkobrin.substack