This is like having someone break into your house, murder your children and then having your neighbors call for you to declare a truce and commence negotiations. What is there to negotiate? Hamas is an organization devoted to killing Jews. In its founding documents it calls for the destruction of Israel.
The Jewish website Forward gives us some history:
Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamic fundamentalist party — an offshoot, really, of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In 2006, a year after Israel withdrew its armed forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in what is widely known as the disengagement, Hamas won legislative elections, beating the rival Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, 74 seats to 45. A year later, it launched a bloody military campaign against Fatah, and took complete control of Gaza.How does one negotiate with such people? If Israel fails to eliminate Hamas the same sort of barbarism we saw over the weekend will recur. Hamas is not interested in peace, it's interested in stoking hatred and committing genocide.
After Hamas’ takeover, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling travel and trade in and out of the coastal enclave. Hamas, which the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan designate as a terrorist organization, had by 2006 conducted terror attacks in Israel that killed 506 and wounded thousands. After the blockade, the number of attacks plummeted.
But Hamas has never changed its aspirations to wrest control of all of Israel by killing its Jews— a goal you will see clearly when you read the Hamas charter....
The first version of the charter, adopted in 1988, begins with a preamble: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
The 36 articles that follow are buttressed by quotes from the Quran and lessons of the Prophet Muhammed … as interpreted by the militant Islamists of Hamas.
After establishing the primacy of Islam, the charter pivots to removing Jews from historic Palestine. “Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land,” states Article 12.
The charter’s description of Jews echoes millennia of antisemitic tropes.
“With their money, they took control of the world media,” reads Article 22, “news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.”
The 9000-word document blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World War I and II, and for the Rotary Club and the United Nations, “to enable them to rule the world through them.”
“There is no war going on anywhere,” it reads, “without having their finger in it.”
The charter directs the killing of Jews, drawing on a hadith (prophetic saying of Mohammad): “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”
Hamas has given the Israeli people a choice between three options:
- Continue the status quo and get used to suffering similar attacks in the future.
- Abandon Israel to the barbarians.
- Eliminate the barbarians.
It's true that Jesus Christ called us to be peacemakers, but after forty years of trying to make peace with Hamas through negotiation, and being rewarded with persistent rocket attacks on their homes and children, perhaps it's time to try for peace by doing something else besides talking.