and their public relations firms dream up. Meanwhile, despite much howling and crying foul, the Israelis have not met this information deficit with perceptible positive action.

Israel — the Jewish State

Israel, one of the world's smallest states, roughly the size of New Jersey, has, since its inception, been under constant attack, physically, academically and in the media -- most destructively from its own citizens. They claim the right of "free speech" and often even seem to enjoy watching the fatal results, as if needing to confirm a need for malignant power.

The establishment of the Jewish State was Theodore Herzl's answer of turning the messianic dream of millennia into a political reality. After World War I, the victors dismembered the Ottoman Empire and created a number of new Arab statesas well as Mandates, one of which was Britain's Mandate for Palestine. Palestine at that time was a geographic term only, invented by the ancient Romans in a still earlier attempt, by renaming Judea, to strip the land of its Jewish roots.

Britain's Mandate to create "a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine" was confirmed, in 1922, by all 52 member states of the League of Nations. Its heir, the United Nations, in 1947, by two-thirds majority, confirmed the establishment of a much-reduced Jewish State, as the bulk of the territory originally mandated to the Jews had been handed over to the independent kingdom of Transjordan.

It is worth noting that the Jewish State was effectively created through the efforts of the countries of the world in San