The Israeli/Palestinian conflict did not begin on October 7, 2023. It has been ongoing for over a hundred years. It started with the birth of Zionism. Zionism was born in re- sponse to an especially severe attack on Russian Jews in 1881. The Zionist solution envisioned the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine that would require the expulsion of the indigenous population. The Zionists were secular European Jews and knew that their goal could only be realized through violence. The Zionist state they envisioned was patterned after the European powers of their day. The Zionist movement has always been backed by a major world power (and the Western world, in general)?first by Great Britain and then by the United States which were both seeking their own strategic goals without any real concern for the Jewish people.