On the morning of Oct 7, the nation of Israel was attacked by rocket fire coming from the Gaza Strip in southern Israel. The missile attacks acted as a screen as thousands of Hamas militants viciously attacked towns and cities in southern Israel killing more than 1,000 Israelis and kidnapping many others.The attack was the single bloodiest day in the nation’s history and was carried out by a group known as Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that is labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. and Israel, but seen as the legitimate government in the Gaza Strip. While there is no place for this type of violence, and Israel has the right to retaliate as aggressively as they feel necessary, I have found that the question my students have asked the most is why Hamas would commit such acts knowing the repercussions? I have found myself telling this story to each of my classes in the past weeks and thought it worth sharing.The Gaza Strip, in southwestern Israel borders the Mediterranean Sea and the Egypt’s Sani Peninsula. It was originally part of the Ottoman Empire from 1285-1917. After WWI and the defeat of the Ottomans, the land was given over to Great Britain as part of the Palestine Mandate.The British agreed to allow European Jews escaping persecution to settle in Palestine after the war. In the beginning, there were no issues between the Jews and Palestinians, but as more Jews arrived and bought up more land displacing the Arabs, Palestinians began to resist. This caused the British to cut off immigration.However, after WWII and the Holocaust, Britain and the United Nations once again opened the doors to Palestine for Jewish settlement. At first the U.N. tried to divide Palestine into two regions, but in 1948 the Jews declared themselves the Nation of Israel and their military drove the majority of the Palestinians into refugee camps in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and the Egyptiancontrolled Gaza Strip.In 1967 when Egypt, Syria, and Jordan amassed armies on their borders in preparation to attack, Israel struck first with precise accuracy taking out the armies of the aggressive nations. Israel then moved into and acquired more land including the Gaza Strip. Israel controlled the Gaza Strip and its two million inhabitants until 1993, during which the first Intifada occurred, and Palestinians rose in protest of the Israeli control. In 1993 U.S. President Bill ...
