"The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who thinks that Jews do not have the right to exist."
The same way we got Sunnis in Iraq to abandon Al Qaeda and end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq in '08:…
"The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who thinks that Jews do not have the right to exist."
The same way we got Sunnis in Iraq to abandon Al Qaeda and end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq in '08: by their own internal decision-making.
The only people who can truly get rid of Hamas are the Palestinians themselves, because they know where Hamas sleeps at night and which families/tribes they belong to. If Palestinian men can fight an insurgency against a better-armed IDF, they can fight an easier insurgency against Hamas. All it takes is *enough*--not all--of Palestinian men to realize that Hamas isn't their friend and indeed is holding their children back from having a better future via their refusal to negotiate with Israel on a future 2-state solution and their refusal to reject the tenants of their platform (that all Jews must die and that Israel isn't allowed to exist). As long as Palestinian men keep licking Hamas' boots instead of killing them, there will be no peace. It's up to the Palestinian men to reject and kill off Hamas. Until they do, Hamas will remain in power and keep them in the violence trap of martyrdom culture and zero tolerance for Jews.
The rest of your point about military over-reactions impeding counter-insurgency goals is a valid one, and I witnessed it first hand on the ground in Iraq. Killing civilians does in fact harden a local populace against the occupier. That conflict only settled down (until 2013 with ISIS coming across the border from the Syrian civil war) because the Sunnis rejected their governing militants in the midst of a Sunni-Shia civil war on top of an insurgency against a foreign occupying military. The men of Afghanistan did not reject the Taliban via violence the way Iraqi Shia and eventually Iraqi Sunnis did with AQI. Until Palestinians are willing to fight their own militant overlords, this conflict never goes away.
"The question is how do you get rid of Hamas? Hamas isn't a set of people, to a larger degree it's an ideology. It's a group of people who are committed to the destruction of Israel, who thinks that Jews do not have the right to exist."
The same way we got Sunnis in Iraq to abandon Al Qaeda and end the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq in '08: by their own internal decision-making.
The only people who can truly get rid of Hamas are the Palestinians themselves, because they know where Hamas sleeps at night and which families/tribes they belong to. If Palestinian men can fight an insurgency against a better-armed IDF, they can fight an easier insurgency against Hamas. All it takes is *enough*--not all--of Palestinian men to realize that Hamas isn't their friend and indeed is holding their children back from having a better future via their refusal to negotiate with Israel on a future 2-state solution and their refusal to reject the tenants of their platform (that all Jews must die and that Israel isn't allowed to exist). As long as Palestinian men keep licking Hamas' boots instead of killing them, there will be no peace. It's up to the Palestinian men to reject and kill off Hamas. Until they do, Hamas will remain in power and keep them in the violence trap of martyrdom culture and zero tolerance for Jews.
The rest of your point about military over-reactions impeding counter-insurgency goals is a valid one, and I witnessed it first hand on the ground in Iraq. Killing civilians does in fact harden a local populace against the occupier. That conflict only settled down (until 2013 with ISIS coming across the border from the Syrian civil war) because the Sunnis rejected their governing militants in the midst of a Sunni-Shia civil war on top of an insurgency against a foreign occupying military. The men of Afghanistan did not reject the Taliban via violence the way Iraqi Shia and eventually Iraqi Sunnis did with AQI. Until Palestinians are willing to fight their own militant overlords, this conflict never goes away.