Thanks for that helpful reference, Carol, I've bookmarked it for further reading.

And troll, good to see you see your recent posts, maybe we're inching towards that meeting of minds.

One of the biggest problems of the internet is that anyone can put up any kind of rubbish on a site, and the trash appears to have the same validity as the serious material. The site which Carol refers to has extra legitimacy by virtue of being the product of a group of Jews (whose viewpoint, I suspect, doesn't get much of an airing in the mainstream US printed press), but even their efforts to enlighten the debate can be denigrated by people alleging that they are really either "self-hating Jews" (hard one to refute) or a bunch of Palestinians putting up disinformation.

I swallowed the Israeli "Exodus" movie version of the history of the region for years, but only now am I beginning to see the period leading up to and immediately following 1948 as having possibly entailed some measure of so-called "ethnic cleansing". Can anyone recommend a published history from a source which might aspire to objectivity? Books aren't necessarily entirely credible either, but at least the author usually has to convince a publisher to produce them, so there's some degree of quality control which is lacking from the internet. Also I can take a book on holidays and read it on the beach!

It was the realisation of the need to explore the history before coming to any understanding of the Northern Ireland problem which triggered a consuming interest in history which has been with me for over thirty years, and now I'm ready to branch into a greater understanding of the Middle East. Seeing the damage which naive, partisan accounts of history can cause, and its importance in many of the world's trouble spots, it seems to me that there is a case for prohibiting the teaching of history to anyone under the age of 16 and making it obligatory for everyone over that age... just a rumination, not a serious suggestion.