The Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, successfully intensified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the past, Israeli terrorists attempted to do the same.
In 1984, Israeli security forces prevented a Jewish terrorist plot to destroy the Dome of the Rock. They arrested 25 settlers from the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Their objective was to destroy the Muslim shrine on the Temple Mount, a highly sensitive religious site, in the hopes of sparking a global religious war between Jews and Muslims. Prior to that, in the same year, members of this group attached five powerful explosive devices at the bottoms of five Arab buses in East Jerusalem. The bombs were timed to explode when the buses would have been packed with Palestinian worshippers. Members of the Jewish terrorist group were arrested in time to foil their plot.
The Jewish terrorist group was a radical right-wing settler organization formed by prominent members of the Israeli political movement known as Gush Emunim (the block of the faithful), an Israeli messianic movement dedicated to establishing Jewish settlements. It successfully carried out several acts of terrorism against Palestinians. Their general goal was to fuel a religious war, which would have created the pretext to expel Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank and further facilitate settlement expansion.
The Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, on civilians and the subsequent Israeli response intensified the war as a religious conflict between Jews and Muslims.
Hamas is a Palestinian political and Islamist military organization that uses terror against civilians. It was founded in 1987 by a Palestinian Imam Ahmed Yassin and merged with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Their attack on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, was calculated and well planned. It led to the destruction of Gaza, the death of over Fifteen Thousand Palestinians the vast majority of which were not Hamas members and the expulsion of over 1 million Palestinians from their homes. Hamas lured Israel to respond severely. Israel’s response intensified and stoked the conflict while preventing the possibility of a peace agreement in the region.
Whether Hamas intentionally acted the way they did to lure Israel to respond as it did to perpetuate the conflict for generations is immaterial. The fact is that peace within the framework of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is much further away now than before the October attack.
Neither Israel nor Hamas can bring peace or security to their people. They failed in the most central duty of their existence, which is to insure security and peace and have made those elements even more distant.
A common federal government may be the right solution at this time. The Israeli-Palestinian Confederation (IPC) provides a mechanism for peace based on a common constitutional democracy independent of the Israeli or Palestinian governments. It stands for the notion that Israelis and Palestinians must live together and in peace in a democratic, equal, and open society with mutual respect, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. The historic connection of both peoples to the land of Israel and Palestine is an integral part of their identity and must be respected. The IPC does not wish to dismantle the Israeli or Palestinian governments but rather work(s) in conjunction with those governments to encourage, promote and facilitate peace and prosperity. The IPC believes that the legitimate needs of Israelis and Palestinians would be advanced and protected by the constitution published on www.ipconfederation.org
