Lev, your pair of posts says everything that needs saying on the subject.

Wobbles.

Your background is a little flawed. The Balfour Declaration which was drawn up in 1917 set out how the Ottoman Empire was to be divided after the war. Parts of Palestine were set aside for the Jews to form a homeland.

In 1922, the LEAGUE OF NATIONS granted Great Britain a mandate over Palestine for the express purpose of "placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home"

By the beginning of the Second World War there were nearly a million Jews living in and around Palestine.

The newly-created UNITED NATIONS approved Resolution 181 on 29/11/1947, allocating just over half the land for a Jewish state and most of the rest for an Arab country. The Jewish community accepted the UN Partition Plan, but the Arab League and Arab Higher Committee rejected it.

The State of Israel was proclaimed on 14/5/1948, one day before the expiry of the British Mandate of Palestine. Not long after, five Arab countries – Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – attacked Israel, launching the 1st Arab-Israeli War.

After the ceasefire Jordan annexed the West Bank including parts of Jerusalem and Egypt took the Gaza strip. Neither of these Arab countries attempted to create a Palestinian state. Indeed they actively worked against such an outcome.

Significant upheaval accompanied the war with many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing Israel. Similar numbers of Jews were also forced out of Arab countries in the Middle East and settled in Israel.

In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria massed troops close to Israeli borders, expelled UN peacekeepers and blocked Israel's access to the Red Sea. Thus began the Six-Day War, during which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. The 1949 Green Line became the administrative boundary between Israel and the occupied territories.

On October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, the Egyptian and Syrian armies again launched a surprise attack against Israel. The war ended on October 26 with Israel successfully repelling Egyptian and Syrian forces but suffering great losses.

Con’t

This article of 8 October below is interesting and pertinent. World conflict is not a contest obviously but sympathisers with the 'cause' tend to not to display any perspective.

If the Palestinians and their 'supporters' had permanently laid down (or never picked up) their various agendas along with their guns and instead acted just a little like the strong, gentle, peaceful, patient Buddhists of Burma, for example, the world would truly have respect both for their predicament and for them.

Arab-Israeli Fatalities Rank 49th
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4990

And those who cast the first stone should consider their ways.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071007/ap_on_re_mi_ea/palestinians_christian_killed

Ro

Pipes article is fundamentally flawed when he classes Israel as a Liberal Democracy. It simply isn't, it's a religious state, that hangs onto the homilies in a book whose origin is subject to some debate and theorising.

And really I find attempting to diminish the effects of an aggressive 40 year occupation and political killings by measuring the number of deaths is a frightening way of attempting to justifing supporting Israel.

It also logically leads to the question should we support Israel because it has only killed a few Palestinians?

So was it Hamas or the historically meddling destabilising Israeli's who killed Rami Khader Ayyad

"Pipes article is fundamentally flawed when he classes Israel as a Liberal Democracy. It simply isn't, it's a religious state, that hangs onto the homilies in a book whose origin is subject to some debate and theorising."

Israel is a secular parliamentary democracy - it is simply mendacious to suggest otherwise. Religion obviously plays a large role in shaping Israeli national identity and culture. But this is no different to the role Christianity plays in Western countries (well, maybe not so much ultra-secular Australia). For example, Ireland has long been considered a Catholic country, but nobody is asserting a Papal theocracy exists stealthily on the Emerald Isle.

You may be interested to know that Israel's population is around 20% Arab and 16.5% Muslim. This so-called 'demographic time bomb' is understandably causing some trepidation in the Jewish state.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2002/11/27/edcook_ed3__0.php

Paull, your statement earlier - "Any support of Iranian nuclear weapons won't help the Palestine Arabs," could sound like a threat not only to Iran, but also to the well-discussed Balance of Power theories in University Schools of Humanities?, which I was engaged in during the Cold War