Only a major educational shift will make Israel safe from Gaza – and this can only potentially start to happen when the war ends, Reichman University president Boaz Ganor told the Magazine in a recent interview.
Ganor is partially ready to end the war in order to return the hostages – partially because he thinks that what is left of Hamas is no longer a serious national threat.
But it would also seem that the Reichman University president believes that ending the war will allow Israel to move on from “fantasies” of a massive Gaza population transfer, which he would oppose, even if it were possible, out of a concern that it would lead to a new global wave of Palestinian terror.
In other words, Ganor, who once opposed the Oslo Accords because he didn’t trust then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, is no wide-eyed pacifist.
Rather, he views himself – a former senior Israeli intelligence officer and now a decades-long academic expert on terror – as seeing the Gaza dangers clearly and without the fantasy-influenced ideologies of some of the political class.
His starting point is important for understanding his conclusions.
“I don’t think this war is existential for Israel,” Ganor began. “It is the hardest war since the 1948 War of Independence and the most justified since then, equal to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But an existential threat means endangering our existence.
“This wasn’t the case on Oct. 7. Maybe it would have been if all the fronts had erupted at once. But it was not true on October 8 – and it is not true now. It’s a war of choice.”
Next, he said that the war was originally justified, but addressing whether and why it is justified on an ongoing basis and at different points along the way is important.
ANOTHER POINT he clarified was that “It is actually not merely one war. Rather, there are three different wars.”
The Reichman University president explained that the first round of the war ran from October 8, 2023, until the first ceasefire of November 23-30 starting six weeks later. This was a war to strike Hamas and to serve as a response to its invasion of southern Israel, he said.
Ganor defined Oct. 7 as a “terror attack. I still call it terror,” as opposed to its being more similar to a foreign country staging a military invasion. He added that in round one of the war, the response by Israel was designed to harm Hamas and its capabilities.
The second stage of the war ran from November 2023 until January 2025, he said. The central events during this time period were to harm Hezbollah in a large way and to neutralize Iran. There were also the assassinations of Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
The third stage has been ongoing since then.
Still, he insisted that none of this was existential.
Looking more broadly, he said that Israel’s existence has been an issue in play since the day it was established. But the Jewish state’s existential and primary security dilemmas can only be resolved in one of three ways: peace deals; a change in its enemies’ orientation to simply accept Israel existing here; or ignoring the issue, which is a fantasy and the root of ideas like Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza.
After all of that, once again, Ganor does not fit the bill of an ideological leftist, saying that “Two states is also a fantasy,” which shows that he is skeptical about any imminent complete diplomatic solution or complete military victory.
ADDRESSING THE concept of absolute victory head-on, Ganor warned, “We are moving farther away from this. It would have been easier six months ago, and already was harder three months later and is even harder now – and will be even harder in another three months.”
Rather, he somberly declared, “It has been decreed upon us that we can only aspire to partial wins. Nothing we do in Gaza, if it is not one of those three things I mentioned, will eliminate the danger that at some later date there could be another Oct. 7 in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, or any other place.”
Further, he cautioned, “There is a group that says that if we conquer Gaza and send [Israeli] settlers back there, this will stop another Oct. 7. This misconception is no less gravely mistaken than what was before Oct. 7. No invasion happened in the West Bank because we have military control there,” and we can establish the same paradigm in Gaza.
Countering the idea that only war and resettlement can stop future invasions, he explained that “If the IDF had operated on October 6, like we recommended to them, then Oct. 7 also would not have happened.”
Ganor clarified that he and other top security officials and experts held 43 meetings, including with top decision-makers, and sent their report with recommendations to the prime minister and to the heads of all of Israel’s defense branches.
Much of the report was about how unprepared Israel was in the North and about how launching a preemptive strike could have had vast advantages against Hezbollah.
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Brick, who had warned before Oct. 7 that Israel’s infantry was not prepared to properly defend the country – including in the South versus Hamas – wrote one of the sections.
But what is the solution for reducing threats to Israel from Gaza?
Ganor started out again by explaining what the wrong approach is: “There is no significance to the war if we reach a point where there is no longer a goal.”
And what is the goal? “Until late May of this year, it was unclear what [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s ‘day after’ plan was. Then the prime minister gave a speech focused on tactics for defeating Hamas and expelling its leadership, but central to the speech was the new Trump plan,” he said, referring to the US president’s proposal for America to take over administrative control of the Gaza Strip, announced on February 4, 2025 – initially involving a forced relocation of Gazans, then a voluntary one.
Why voluntary transfer of Gazans is inherently flawed
Ganor continued, stating, “Netanyahu cannot continue the war without defining the day after. But any definition which isn’t the Trump plan will lead to the government falling apart.”
Reichman’s president also speculated, asking: “Who brought forth the Trump plan? It seemed to come from Israeli sources.”
Think about playing out the idea of voluntary transfer, he said. “Let’s say it happens and Trump gets one million Gazans to go to Libya, Jordan, and Egypt. If one million go, one million will still be there – and they are worse!
“What happens to the one million Palestinians who left?” he asked. “There are two dangers. There is deterioration of the local situation where they are transferred to, a place that is weak from the start.”
Next, he stated, “For Libya and Jordan, this could be disastrous. For Egypt, this could also be disastrous. Some [Gazan Palestinians] may go to other places that will give them political refuge. We see them all over the world. This could lead to a new wave of global terror soon after or within a few years.”
According to Ganor, “We should keep them in Gaza, where they cannot freely carry out terror attacks across the globe.”
He then asked rhetorically: “What would the day after plan be if not Trump’s plan?”
Improving Gaza’s education is key to reducing threat
Ganor started to allude to the two-state solution, but first he identified problems with that solution, recalling, “I was against the Oslo Accords. I even wrote against it, but it was not because I was against two states. I just didn’t believe in Arafat. He was a terrorist who knew how to fool us, the Palestinians, and the whole world. Nothing good could come from him,” he said.
“When [former prime minister] Arik Sharon was foreign minister, he appointed me as a member of a trilateral committee after the Wye River meetings” between Israel, America, and the Palestinians in 1998. “The committee worked on preventing incitement to terror. I was the public representative on the committee, which was mostly made up of foreign ministry representatives,” Ganor said.
“The committee met once in Ramallah, once in Jerusalem, and once in Washington, DC. We divided up roles for the committee. I worked on the issue of school books’ incitement to terror,” he said.
“I was at a lunch meeting in Washington and was discussing incitement in Palestinian textbooks with the president of the University of Notre Dame in America, who was also a friend of then-US president Bill Clinton,” Ganor recounted, referring to Rev. Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C.
Malloy said to him, “I am giving a formal speech – our committee will appoint educators to read books from both sides. You will search through for terror incitement, and if you find some I will go to Clinton and get a budget to reprint the books without the incitement.”
Ganor responded, “I don’t support Oslo, but if what you said happens and it changes these books so education for this generation does not produce a generation of hate in 20 years, maybe this will actually help with peace – so then Oslo is worth it for me.” The Palestinians also supported it, at least at that time.
“I updated the Israeli head of the delegation, Uri Dan, who practically jumped at me yelling. ‘How dare you? This committee is for monitoring Palestinians; it is not reciprocal on us.’”
Ganor retorted, “The Foreign Ministry asked me to be a public representative on the committee. I am a seventh-generation Israeli. Regarding our education system, in my whole life I never saw incitement to terror in our books. But if there is, then we should find it and toss it. In two minutes, I will say that publicly. If you want, you can just fire me now, before the speech.”
“He didn’t fire me,” Ganor said with a wry smile.
“However, at a later point when the Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians opened formal meetings on the issue, Palestinian Authority official Marwan Kanafani suddenly turned against the idea and yelled at us, ‘Why are you making trouble for me – these are Jordanian [authored] books [that the Palestinians are using] – what can we do?’”
RETURNING TO the present, Ganor declared, “The success of any ‘day after’ plan will not be determined based on how many houses will be destroyed or what additional damage we will do to Hamas beyond what we already did to them.”
The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood will continue, the former intel expert said. “They will build a new leadership, even if we expel the old one – even if we returned Israelis to parts of Gaza,” he warned.
Instead, he cautioned, “We need to change the education system in Gaza. Whoever controls the education system will determine the long-term direction of Gaza and what achievements Israel can obtain” – or not obtain.
Further, he said, “We already achieved so much. Hamas as a military force is destroyed. So what if they put on shows, when there are hostage exchanges and they put out videos of the hostages suffering in order to pretend they still have power? We don’t need to let that fool us.
“They are not a broad threat to Israel militarily anymore,” Ganor said. “They are in the weakest possible situation. If it is possible at all, they will need years to come back,” especially if Israel continues to enforce security issues in Gaza like it has in the West Bank.
“We should be charging toward a deal for Gaza, since we want to get the Saudis, the Gulf states, and other international friendly states to rebuild Gaza so we can influence things and have the new educational system be in their control,” Reichman’s president said.
“If the Saudis and the Gulf states will invest billions and want the PA involved, so who cares? Let them do some [symbolic] oversight. Go ahead.”
Israeli-Arabs teaching Gazans
Ganor also had some original ideas about who could improve Gaza’s education system in terms of teachers. “Bring in Israeli-Arab teachers to teach in Gaza. They [those Gulf states] can pay teachers 10 times more than what they get paid in Israel. If there is an authority or actor that knows how and has an interest in education for the future and long term, it’s Israeli-Arabs. Not all of them, but a large portion of them,” he said.
Broad strategy
Returning to the broader strategic picture, Ganor said that while Israel is much better off militarily now than it was before Oct. 7, “in all other elements, things are much worse: in international legitimacy – relations with our allies, broader relations with the US [Israel as a long-term bipartisan issue] – the Israeli economy, people emigrating from Israel, and the state of the nation’s confidence, stability, and resilience.”
He also warned that “the breaks and gaps within the nation are much worse” than even before the war.
“So I don’t know if this war made the overall balance better or worse,” he said with a forlorn look.
Ganor once again urged an end to the war in order to return the hostages and to change education in Gaza so that Israel can find a point where much of the world will be more ready to hear its narrative.
Further, he urged accepting US and Saudi conditions for normalization with Riyadh, saying, “If the price is lip service to two states, then we should pay this price. Even the Saudis won’t demand that Israel take any concrete final actions such as withdrawals or creating a Palestinian state.”
Rather, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, prime minister and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, just needs to “show his country that he is having an impact toward a positive change for Gaza and that he is showing enough attention to the needs of the Palestinians.”
The two-state solution
Returning to the two-state solution, Ganor said, “I believed in the diplomatic solution of two states, but I changed my mind after Oct. 7. A large part of the public, even those who believe in it, have made it clear to me that it won’t happen in my lifetime. It is the right solution, but only a new generation” after the one that experienced Oct. 7 can make it happen.
“This is bad news, but also good news. It means that today the ideological distance separating sane Religious-Zionists like [former prime minister] Naftali Bennett and the moderate Left is almost nothing regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That means there is some [achievable] constellation to get to 70 to 80 mandates in the Knesset.”
Continuing, Ganor stated, “In the short term, a Palestinian state and a withdrawal from the territories [in the West Bank] is not a reality. We need a trend of deep educational improvement to be ongoing now for years.
“So it is good news for healing the cracks in Israeli society,” he said. “If there will be a leadership that understands how to heal these breaks, in order to unite and not divide, then Israel will be able to progress to a very good place.”
Circling back to university life, Ganor noted that half of Reichman students are reservists. Many of them have served between 100 and 300 days in the IDF during the war.
To cope with this issue, he said that deans of Reichman’s various schools traveled to their army bases – even in Gaza – to bring them educational materials.
There has also been a policy of greatly increasing the number and frequency of courses throughout the year, the university’s president said, to give student-soldiers many more opportunities to jump into courses if they missed earlier and standard course schedules.
A variety of other policies, such as additional course hours and recording for courses, has been extended to reservists.
Reichman also ran seven “emergency command centers” to help students and Israel with a variety of practical and emotional issues brought on by the war.
All of this has been part of Ganor’s vision of Reichman University coming to meet its student body where they are, according to their special needs during this unusual, disturbing, and disrupting time.