Despite college protests being a major focus of national headlines, many students are still unaware of what exactly is going on in the Israel/Gaza conflict.
Many protests broke out at colleges across the nation this past spring semester, with protestors calling for schools to divest from companies that they claim fund Israel and their war in Palestine.
Many had encampments created on campuses where Palestinian supporters refused to leave and police were called to break up these groups on both USC and UCLA campuses.
In the case of the UCLA protest, violence even broke out between pro-Palestine protestors and pro-Israeli counter-protestors.
“I think the immediate Israeli-Hamas debate got pushed to the side with the protests and the reactions to the protests and the violence that ensued with campuses across the country,” LBCC Co-Department Head of history, political science, and ethnic studies Paul Savoie said. “I think it became a separate very domestic issue.”
The deadliest attack in Israel’s history has sparked a major war between Israel and Palestinian militant political group Hamas.
Hamas carried out the attack on Oct. 7, 2023 when it ambushed an Israeli open music festival among other locations in Israel leaving over 1,100 Israelis dead and around 250 hostages taken by Hamas.
Israel has responded with an assault that has not ceased for nearly a year in the Gaza Strip, the smaller of the two Palestinian territories that, along with the West Bank, make up the region of Palestine.
As of Oct. 6, the current death toll of the war stands with at least 41,870 Palestinians dead and 1,139 Israelis per news organization Al Jazeera.
Hamas is a militant political group that governs Gaza and has violently rejected Israel’s existence and claimed it is merely occupying the country of Palestine since its inception.
Hamas took power of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after a violent altercation with rival political party Fatah, who took control of the West Bank.
The conflict started during World War I when Great Britain promised both Palestinian Arabs in the area and Jewish nationalists across Europe the right to a portion of land that was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, who had sided against Great Britain in the war.
“The conflict originally stems back many years and it comes from the fact of fighting over land in terms of what was promised versus what was not necessarily given,” LBCC political science professor Jerome Hunt said.
“There has been a lack of willingness from both sides to find a common ground and also there hasn’t been a strong international presence to ensure a compromise be reached,” Hunt said.
A member of the Palestinian Liberation movement speaks to a crowd of protesters in Downtown Los Angeles on Saturday. The organization works with college students across the nation to hold demonstrations. (Cain Carbajal)
The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1299 to 1922 and although it was a primarily Muslim nation, it also contained many Christians and Jews in the empire who lived relatively peacefully.
“It’s not really rooted in religion. It’s about competing claims of territory, they were both promised something and betrayed. I do think religion is manipulated and utilized to galvanize different movements for sure but this isn’t just about religion,” world history professor Mary Marki said.
Most recently in the conflict, Israel has mobilized forces and attacks in Lebanon to fight Hezbollah, another rival militant group in the area. Over the weekend of Sept. 28-29, they killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah have been deemed terrorist organizations and have been allied and funded by regional ally Iran.
On Tuesday, Iran retaliated to the attacks on their allied groups by sending a wave of ballistic missiles at Israel, many of which were intercepted by Israel’s defense systems.
Israel has lifted restrictions on citizens gathering in major cities, signaling that another wave of missiles are not expected.
“If history tells us anything, the situation in the Middle East is always a powder keg and it always risks dragging other countries into the conflict,” Savoie said.
Though their war is on violent militant groups in the region, Israel continues to receive criticism for their haphazard bombings and attacks leaving many civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas or Hezbollah dead.
This, paired with their blockades restricting basic needs such as food, water and electricity from getting to the people in Gaza, has turned many people against Israel and toward supporting an immediate ceasefire.
At Long Beach City College, a small group of protestors have shown up to multiple Board of Trustees meetings and made public displays of their displeasure of the school’s investment in BlackRock, an investment company with investments in defense contractors that sell weapons to Israel such as RTX and L3Harris Technologies.