I hope that will correct some of the misapprehensions you have.

And what mettaculture said.

No palestine was not mandated by the league of nations to keep the peace.

The league of nations establised themandate of palestine after the 1st World war and granted it to britain for the EXPRESS PURPOSE OF IMPLEMENTING THE BALFOUR DECLARATION.

Britain and France in their carve up of former ottoman territory had other concerns, such as creating a whole list of made-up nations that had never existed before.

The Ottoman Empire has produced in its steady erosion by the Western powers, Russia and Persia’s geop-political games, since the 19thC over 40 successor states, with the vast majority appearing after WW!, with significant boundary revision after WW11 and the Balkans wars of the 1990s.

A few of these nations, Egypt, Greece and the Southern Slavic nations can lay claim to an ancient ethno-territorial existence, but this prescence does not correspond to present geopolitical boundaries.

Jews also have a ethno-territorial claims in the Middle East in countries contiguous to Modern day Israel and in the territory itself for over 2 thousand years.

seen in this light israel is no more a made up and illegitimate nation, than Iraq or Jordan carved out by the British from trans-Jordan, Syria of lebanon.

Modern Turkey and Greece are equally made up nations formed out of the largest forced population exchange ethnic cleansing and genocide in history.

Peninsula Greece was the home to a minority of ethnic Greeks until it absorbed the remnants of the millions murdered orforced out of Ottoman territories from the Black sea and Anatolia to Damascus and Alexandria.

The idea that Israel is the sole product of the children of Holocaust survivors stealing a land because of an ancient book is the biggest anti-semitic trope of all.

In fact if you add the numbers of israeli Arabs to the number of israelis of Mizrahi, Arabic speaking , origins (who would be called Arab Jews, if we use the term Arab Christians) you find that 70 +% of the people of Israel are of Arabis origin.

Indonesia did not even exist as a territory until after 1945 and its borrowed national language derived from trade Malay, is still spoken as afirst language by a minority.

Israel is as just as much of a state as any in the World today and the starting point should be today, otherwise looking at historical atlasses we could abolish, or double, the number of states in the world today at whim

Eh? Not quite sure what you are disputing here. Not, I hope, that it was the Arab states that attacked Israel in 1948 – or indeed that the resultant size of Israel was purely the outcome of a successful repulsion of those attacks.

Israel is not like other modern states in that it was set up in large part on someone else’s land within living memory

No, I’m afraid this is totally wrong.

The “someone else’s land” was a part of the British Empire, in which some Jews and Arabs lived.

The Arabs, and Arab states, repeatedly refused to accept partition plans that followed, more or less, the main population concentrations of the two separate parties.

They then invaded the internationally-recognised Israel when it declared statehood, having defined its borders according to the UN partition.

What we have is a refusal on the part of Arabs to countenance any Jewish state at all in the Middle East. Of course, if they had accepted such a proposition, no doubt the Israeli state that would have resulted would have been tiny in comparison with the present-day Israel.

It is only their intransigence that is to blame.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Sand-Frank-Gardner/dp/055381771X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232012639&sr=1-1

Gardner was a banker, but he had also learnt Arabic and travelled around Egypt, Sudan and Jordan in the 1980s. His memoirs were good because they avoided the ‘great I-am’ tone of other BBC reporters’ memoirs (John Simpson – take a bow, you win the pomposity award again).

I was also struck by the section on the Iraq war; critical, but dispassionate. It avoided the ‘this is the most terrible crime ever in the history of the world!’ tone that most Anglophone journalists adopt.

Thanks for telling me about Frank Gardner’s memoirs. I will try to read them. I am not sneering at him when I say that, on the face of it he does not appear to be what you term a “smart guy”. Leaving a job as a banker voluntarily to go to a war zone full of Islamists is just not smart. You may call him courageous. I would call him foolish and reckless.

“Don’t go there” is an axiom that has become common parlance. It is self-evident. Neither Terry Waite, Alan Johnston, the late Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie nor Norman Kember paid it any heed. If there is one characteristic none of these volunteers possess or possessed, it is the instinct for self-preservation. English law says volenti non fit injuria.

I also seem to remember Frank Gardner had a native interpreter who was killed in the mine explosion in which Frank Gardner lost his legs. Possibly he had little financial alternative but to accept the BBC’s danger money. I wonder what his family thinks of Frank Gardner or whether Frank Gardner’s memoirs address the question of who got him into the situation that caused the mine incident. The responsibility for the mine clearly lies with those Islamists who planted it. But who allowed Frank Gardner to visit a war zone with minefields in it if not himself.

“Blood and Sand”, I think. He was in banking in the Gulf States until he was in his mid-30s.

“I must learn about it and try to hold it down rather than change jobs like him. Clearly he has now made two catastrophic decisions in his life.” This reads like a sneer at a courageous and very smart guy who has had the guts to reclaim his life after being put in a wheelchair. It really doesn’t become you.

No I don’t get the point at all. All those other cases are either hundreds of years ago or remain controversial today, like Tibet.

As for the “why does Israel get more media attention” debate -In addition to all the valuable points made above – I remember a very different atmosphere in the British media during the Yom Kippur war. Yes, the whole media was less intense, more stiff upper lip then, but then Israel was the tiny brave state ruthlessly attacked by several arab armies at once. As Israel has become stronger and more sucessful (and less likely to disappear in some people’s minds) it seems that the West has felt a need to find a different underdog to root for.
I think that the media long ago stopped reporting news and started to believe that it is its responsibility to create it and that in itself is problematic. I would not underestimate the combined influences of the media and the remarkable propaganda work done by Palestinian ex-pats (really – hats off to them -they’re much better at it than the Israelis are) in influencing ordinary public opinion.
I also am constantly surprised by the sheer lack of factual historical knowledge on the part of most Brits I meet regarding the Middle East, which I am sure influences opinions too: if people don’t know the history they will more easily accept the version they are given by the media or pressure groups with a vested interest.