Except what you’re saying here presupposes that Hamas is sincere in wanting peace. Not even Hamas pretends that’s the case.

There was just the kind of ceasefire you’re talking about in place on 10/6/23, and Hamas broke it in the most brutal and deadly way imaginable.

I actually find it bizarre that Western “morality” is more about maintaining a status quo (however brutal and destructive it may be) than actually solving problems or resolving disputes for all time.

I feel like it stems from the Cold War where it wasn’t feasible to fight the Soviets directly, so we engaged in proxy wars designed to weaken them, but never cross a line where it devolved into total war, as that would be a level of destruction neither party wanted.

NATO and the US is used to that dynamic where instead of total war you fight to a stalemate and the actual issues take decades to work out.

That’s well and good when you’re fighting a few thousand miles away from your homes, but people like the Ukrainians, Israelis, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Afghanis of course have a VERY different perspective on the morality of waging war that way.

When America was attacked directly we didn’t “seek coexistence” with the Nazis or Imperial Japan in WW2. We saw them as a threat to Western civilization and did what we felt we needed to in order to remove the threat. We did the same after 9/11.

Israel has the means to completely destroy Hamas, and isn’t really interested in letting them lick their wounds and gain enough strength to commit another atrocity against their people in 10 or 20 years. Again, that is in fact what Hamas still to this day very explicitly states they wish to do.

Israel is also uninterested in the opinions of people who haven’t grown up with rockets raining down on them to the point where they had to invent “Missile Command” in real life and spend billions a year on it to keep their people safe.

I’m not sure what about any of that is hard to understand either.