You don’t need to make peace with your friends. You’re already at peace with them. You make peace with your enemies, if you so wish, and if you can. If you don't wish to or you can’t, then you do what you must. If your enemies are mortal enemies, then you need to deter them, incapacitate them, relocate them, or kill them.
I’m afraid that most of Israel’s Hamas enemies are mortal enemies, who must be relocated or incapacitated temporarily or permanently for Israel and Israelis to survive.
I truly wish it were otherwise. Sometimes the problem between people in conflict really is — to quote from the film Cool Hand Luke — “a failure to communicate.” But there are other conflicts, like the one between Israel and Hamas, which is not based on a misunderstanding that can be corrected through diligent communication. The kind of irreconcilable conflict that exists between Israel and Hamas is so absolute that it is often difficult for people of good will and a sunny disposition to face up to it or even to believe that it exists. But it does exist. Some people, like Hamas leaders and their committed followers, want other people dead because of who they are or where they live — people like Israeli Jews who live in that land known by some as "Israel" and by others as "Palestine."
The recent slaughter of young Israelis at the music concert in the Negev is clear evidence that what is at issue is who lives where and who rules, and possibly something far more basic: who lives and who dies.
What was so memorable for me about Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, the one time I met with him, was how mild-mannered and soft-spoken he was, a gray-bearded wizened old man confined to a wheelchair — the kind of person one might assume was harmless, until he spoke. And then there was no doubt, and, for him, there was no possibility of reconciliation or peace as long as Jews were committed to living in a sovereign Jewish state in part of Palestine. For Yassin and his followers, such a sovereign state, even consisting of one square inch of territory anywhere in the historical land of Palestine, was and still is “Islamically unacceptable.”
There is an impasse here, a chasm that cannot be bridged, regardless of how much goodwill the leaders of Hamas and the leaders of Israel might someday be willing to display towards one another. Without bringing in the U.N. or some other third party to mediate -- an idea which brings in its own set of problems -- there is really a very small number of options available to the parties in this conflict, and those options have been discussed ad nauseum for more than half a century, since the aftermath of the ‘67 War, and much longer if you date the conflict from the U.N. Partition plan of 1947 or from the Balfour Declaration of 1917.