I must respond to the Dec. 21 letter to the editor concerning the Israel-Gaza War.

The war will end when Hamas is gone and the hostages are fee and home.

Israel left Gaza completely in 2007, uprooting any Jews who lived there and turning over greenhouses and other developing industries as gifts to the Gazan people. Gazans thereafter destroyed everything they were given and the people elected Hamas to run their territory. Hamas immediately murdered any moderate opposition and seized sole control. The people of Gaza supported and still overwhelmingly support Hamas, as proven by all the latest reliable polls.

Financial aid to Gaza has been showered on the territory for decades. Africans are forgotten, but Gazans get money like it’s growing on trees. They could have made the territory a jewel on the seas, building infrastructure, hotels, universities, etc. Instead, they built rockets, tunnels and waged war.

Hamas states its goal is to annihilate Israel and kill Jews — all Jews, anywhere. Yet the Gazan people idolize these homophobic, homicidal, sexual perverts and have given them aid and comfort. They share their goal. Hamas epitomizes the “river to the sea” mentality that is nothing more than a real genocide of 8 million Jews who live there, the majority of whom trace their ancestry to the Muslim countries that forced them out after having lived there, in some cases since biblical times, not Europe or America. Where are the Jews of Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Syria and Ethiopia?

You cannot negotiate and reach an agreement or compromise with people who will not reciprocate.

Middle Eastern and European Jews have spent 2,000 years being massacred, raped, humiliated and victimized by pogroms, inquisitions, ghettos, expulsions and ultimately the holocaust. Israel and Jews will not let it happen again. Never again.

And by the way, who are you to tell Israelis to get off the land? Americans have been living and working on stolen land for hundreds of years. Why don’t you give back your land to the native Americans from whom your ancestors stole it?

Hal Cohen

Middlebury