That, Lefty, is the lesson of the 20th Century for Jews. Hamas, and the rest of the Palestinian Arabs for that matter, say they intend to kill the Jews and destroy Israel. Believe them.

When Israel arrests terrorists, even if they’re in the planning phase of a suicide attack, Hamas deems these arrests a violation of the truce.

Kassam rockets are made from a volatile mix of chemicals that has a short shelf life. When the shelf life is near the end, Hamas passes along their unfired kassam rockets to PIJ and other terrorist groups to fire. This is also not considered breaking the truce.

There is also the subject of Hamas absolutely refusing to recognize Israel. It’s right there in the picture, in plain English. Hamas will NEVER recognize Israel. Not ever.

And last, you claim that Israel would be better off waiting for Hamas to arm itself like Hezbullah. Really? Because Hamas will be firing thousands of rockets into Israel, quite probably also from the West Bank. Thousands of civilians and soldiers will be killed or wounded in an all-out war, as will thousands of Palestinians.

And the world opinion will be, as always, against Israel for defending herself.

There is no “semi-peaceful status quo.” Israel is at war. It is an undeclared war, and it is supported by much of the Arab and Muslim world. Syria, Iran, formerly Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon—all these nations have given or are giving money to terrorists who murder Israelis, and funded the armed groups building up against Israel.

You really ought to shed those rose-colored glasses for ones that reflect reality. I would love to be able to agree with you about the situation. But history has proven you wrong time and again. The Palestinians don’t want peace. They want Israel.

The concept of a truce is controversial within Hamas itself. A lot of Hamas supporters evidently consider a truce to be equivalent to Hamas simply giving up while claiming that the new situation is temporary to save face.

Meryl also assumes that Hamas would still be in power in a few years, which is far from certain.

But even if Hamas used a truce only to rearm and later attack Israel, Israel would still be better off. Like Lebanon, the conflict would be reduced to a more straight-forward military conflict in which Israel would inevitably prevail. And in the meantime Israel would have a few years peace and quiet.

And more optimistically, it’s possible that once the Israelis and Palestinians were out of other’s hair the Palestinians would reconcile themselves to the semi-peaceful status quo.

Either the Arabs will live at peace with Jewish neighbors or they must go where they can find other neighbors with whom they are willing to live at peace. Hamas threatens Israel with destruction and Israel’s Jews with genocide. These loud-mouths should be much more wary of doing that than they are, but those whom Allah would destroy He first makes extraordinarily stupid.