First, let me congratulate you, seeing that you have your own special version of Encyclopedia Britannica.. Next, let's get some facts in the way of your specious remark about my post being 'suspect'. The Balfour agreement of 1917 was just a letter - from Britain's Foreign Sectary to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. It was followed by a public statement issued by the British government, announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. I called it an artificial basis for a country - as ''national home is not an internationally defined term. Even today, you have the UN on the one side arguing that the Israeli settlers land grabs are illegal. The updated Balfour Declaration of 1948 meant that the Palestinians faced the prospect of being outnumbered by unlimited immigration, and of losing control of Palestine to the Zionist drive for sole sovereignty over a country that was then almost completely Arab in population and culture. refs: (wilki) and The Consequences of the Balfour Declaration, by Avi Shlaim (2005). At this stage, your next responses is likely to be a bare bones boring reply. Realizing that I cannot add anything of any interest to this thread, I'm abandoning it now. as Richard Nixon once said, 'you wont have me to kick around anymore'.