Hamas may be a terrorist group, but for decades, Israel and the wider world have treated it as a fact of life. John Kerry visited the group as a senator, prior to becoming secretary of state. So, too, did many European officials. The Turkish parliament gave Hamas leader Khaled Meshal a rousing ovation during his 2006 visit to Ankara. Today, Qatar competes with Turkey to shower funds and support on the group whose charter calls for the extermination of Jews.

Hamas’s 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority in Gaza allowed the group to assert absolute control over the Gaza Strip. Today, half of Gaza’s population knows nothing other than Hamas rule. The group begins its indoctrination of children early, teaching them in kindergarten the ideal of murdering Jews.

For the past 15 years, Israel sought to contain Hamas and limit its ability to strike at the Jewish state. Israel built elaborate defenses to shoot down Hamas missiles and rockets and ground-penetrating radar to counter tunnels and monitored the border with drones and blimps. When Hamas capabilities would grow too threatening, Israel would “mow the grass” to degrade terror infrastructure.

Those days are over, but is it possible for Israel to eliminate Hamas, or must Israel settle for simply mowing the grass a little lower? Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s willingness to encourage a ceasefire in talks with his Turkish counterpart suggests key elements within the Biden administration see Hamas as a reality. Prior to leading the charge for unconditional rapprochement with Iran, Biden’s former Iran special envoy Robert Malley openly advocated engagement with Hamas.

Neither the United States nor Israel should be so shortsighted. Hamas need not be permanent. It is possible to uproot and erase the group.

I have written before about how Jordan expelled wholesale the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1970, expelling PLO rank and file to Lebanon. In 1983, history repeated when Lebanese forces in conjunction with multinational peacekeepers expelled PLO leaders to Tunis. The sheer size of the Hamas presence in the Gaza Strip makes the problem exponentially greater to resolve.

Rather than acquiesce to evil, the international community should view Hamas through the lens of its experience with the Khmer Rouge, the group responsible for the deaths of more than 1.5 million Cambodians during its four years running Cambodia (or Kampuchea as the group renamed it). Hamas might root its ideology in a fusion of racism and religion, while the Khmer operated upon the fusion of racism and Marxism, but the two are similar in totalitarian ambitions and their progressive protectors.

In 1979, Vietnam ended the nightmare and overran the Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia’s recovery was not easy. After Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge, Hanoi sponsored a People’s Republic of Kampuchea to fill the vacuum. While the Soviet bloc and India threw their support behind the new regime, the United Nations did not. Only in 1993 did the U.N. sponsor elections for a new government. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, continued its insurgency through the end of the century. Pol Pot’s arrest in 1998 and his death the following year was the final nail in the group’s coffin.

What happened to the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge was tragic, but had Vietnam or Cambodia’s other neighbors decided that the group was a fact of life that must be contained rather than eliminated, the tragedy would have been compounded many times over.

So it is with Gaza. Self-declared human rights advocates might scream bloody murder, but to allow Hamas to survive is simply to compound the tragedy Palestinians suffer under and due to their rule. It is time to end Hamas as resolutely as Vietnam and Cambodian forces ended the Khmer Rouge.