Rebuilding Gaza Is Not Enough

The Developmental Blind Spot

This post was originally publisehd at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack where there is an AI translation following in Hebrew and Portuguese

Recent policy proposals on “the day after Hamas” are beginning to recognize something important: reconstruction is not only about infrastructure. It is also about transformation.

One widely discussed framework argues that rebuilding Gaza requires more than roads, housing, and institutions. It insists that education, religion, and media must be addressed—that “material aid alone cannot dismantle a jihadi worldview.”

This is correct. But it does not go far enough.

What is being proposed as political reconstruction is, in effect, an attempt to reorganize the psychic infrastructure of a society.

That distinction matters.

Policy language tends to assume that ideology can be replaced through institutional reform: new textbooks, new leadership, new administrative structures. But ideology, especially in its more extreme forms, does not function merely as a set of beliefs. It operates as a stabilizing system—one that organizes anxiety, humiliation, grievance, and belonging.

It is not simply taught. It is inhabited.

This becomes clearer when we look at the earliest stages of development. The foundations of identity are laid not in adolescence or adulthood, but between zero and age three, within the primary attachment relationship. It is here that the infant’s sense of safety, recognition, and separateness begins—or fails—to take shape.

In social environments organized around shame–honor dynamics, this early attachment can take on additional weight. Where the status of the family is tightly bound to collective reputation, and where gender roles are constrained, the maternal–infant bond may become overburdened with meanings that exceed the child’s developmental needs. The child is not only a child, but also a bearer of continuity and symbolic repair.

Under such conditions, separation and individuation can be compromised. The bond remains too tight, too charged, too necessary with too much cycling anxieties and terrors. What is preserved is not autonomy, but fusion.

Ideology functions as a stabilizing system. It gathers anxiety, humiliation, grievance, and belonging into a form that can be held, shared, and defended. These structures are rooted in early attachment. In conditions of constraint and devaluation, the child may become a container for the mother’s unprocessed anxieties and terrors, carrying an inherited emotional charge. What later appears as ideological rigidity may reflect this earlier fusion, where separation was never fully achieved and identity formed under pressure rather than freedom.

This is not a matter of individual pathology, but of structure.

When identity forms under conditions of chronic anxiety and constraint, it tends to seek stability through rigid systems of meaning. These systems may later appear as ideology, but their roots are earlier and deeper.

This is why efforts at “de-radicalization” so often fail. They approach the problem as if it were cognitive, when in fact it is structural.

To remove these structures without replacing them is to produce instability, not moderation.

But the problem is not only “there.” It is also here.

Conflicts of this kind are relational. As one side is shaped by its internal structures, the other is affected in turn. We are not external observers, but participants in a dynamic that acts on both sides.

We often underestimate the extent to which our own anxieties and early formations remain active. Strategic and tactical thinking can give the illusion of control, while deeper fears—formed much earlier—continue to operate beneath the surface. These anxieties can become the unseen motors of what we call Konseptzia.

Terrorism, in this sense, does not only act outwardly. It also operates through projection. The terrorist becomes the terror which is translocated into us. The terror is externalized and, at times, taken in. But it does not land on a blank surface. It meets an internal world already shaped by our own vulnerabilities.

This does not create symmetry. It does, however, create interaction.

If we fail to recognize this, we risk responding not only to the external threat, but also from within our own unexamined structures.

This is why reconstruction—however well designed—will remain incomplete if it does not engage with the deeper structures through which identity is formed and sustained, beginning in early life and extending through family, culture, and social organization.

It also means that our own frameworks must change. A culture that thinks only in strategic and tactical terms—however sophisticated—remains incomplete. Without integrating the developmental level into how we understand conflict and identity, we risk repeating the same failures under new names.

We are then left with Konseptzia after Konseptzia.