CarolC,

Too bad you didn't have time to reply properly. Instead you did so hysterically. Apartheid? Please.

What the heck does "Jordan is Jordan" mean? Jordan came out of trans-Jordan, which was the eastern part of the British Mandate (barring the Golan Heights, which went to French Syria). There was no such historical country, just a river. Trans-Jordan meant the part of British Palestine that was located on the other side of the Jordan River. It makes up 77 percent of Palestine. The British set this state up as a puppet regime so they would have access to Arab oil (sound familiar?) and equipped and trained a deadly army of Arabs, which they stationed on the borders of the Jewish areas just months before the mandate was to end. In other words, they set the Jews up.

It was the League of Nations, after the British had admitted they'd fucked the whole thing up, who came up with a plan to create another Palestinian state, whittling away at the Jewish borders. This was in the area currently known as "the West Bank." After the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank, which once again had originally been given to the Jews by the British, then to the Palestinian Arabs by the league of nations.

You well know that Israel "took" the land in question back after having been attacked by several nations in a coordinated assault. Far from being a land belonging by rights to Palestinian Arabs, it was in the part of the land Britain earmarked for the Jewish state. And it was not being used for a state for the Palestinian refugees anyway, so Jordan was no more an observer of the League of Nations' wishes than Israel was.

It is true, of course, that some Palestinian Arabs have been living for generations in what is now Israel. (Indeed, some are citizens with full rights--Apartheid indeed!) When countries with State religions are established, displacements of this kind often occur. India's borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh at exactly the same time spring to mind. But Pakistan did not immediately become a power-hungry auto

cracy bent on keeping some Muslims out, which is the route Jordan took. I'm the first to admit that colonialism sucked for the colonized, and that Jews and Arabs all got Screwed by the colonial powers, but how can you blame the Jews (later the Israelis) for this?   And how can you blame them for taking land won in a war where they were the ones attacked? As I said, neither the US nor any European nation would have given back the land, and if the Arabs had won they certainly would not have given back Israel.