Iran

It's all on to Iran again. When will the world learn that attempts to humiliate a great nation only result in defiance? Iran has existed for two and a half milennia, and every Iranian knows that Cyrus was running a great multi-ethnic society when the British were still dancing about in woad and long before America had even been thought of. Yet we will not treat them as equals.

Of course, it does not help that Ahmadinejad is a jumped-up little demagogue, but he is no Hitler, just the front man for the ayatollahs, who themselves are constrained by a religion that preaches human brotherhood and compassion for the poor and downtrodden. And Iran still has the largest surviving Jewish community in the Middle East.

Iran is doing nothing illegal under international law. 20% enriched uranium is a valid fuel for a nuclear reactor, and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation pact. Even if Iran did develop a nuclear bomb, the West turned a blind eye when India and then Pakistan did the same, so what is different.

It is of course Israel that is different - Israel, which has had nuclear warheads for forty years or more and which has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation pact. Israeli propaganda claims that Ahmadinejad is a new Hitler who wants to destroy Israel. But what has he said? That Israel should be 'wiped off the map'. But East and West Germany were wiped off the map without a shot, as was Czechoslovakia, as was the Central African Federation, as was Austria-Hungary, as were many past political constructs.

At present five million Palestinians are totally controlled by the representatives of six million Jewish Israelis. If the two were meged in a single political entity, Israel and the West Bank and Gaza would be wiped off the map, and a new democratic state would be born. In the long term that is the only possible solution, for no Israeli government is going to have the power to remove hundreds of thousands of Israeli colonists from the West bank, without which a Palestinian state is impossible.

Ahmadinejad has also said that Israelis who are not wiolling to live in peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbours should go back to Europe or America; but how is this different from the spirit of UN General Assembly resolution no. 194 of 11th December 1948 (ignored by Israel), which resolved that 'refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return...' Why should Israelis who do not wish to live at peace with their neighbours be permitted to stay?