Balanced BBC (updated)

Here's a nice piece of background analysis on the BBC site, under the name of Paul Reynolds. It goes from the Sharon plan and Bush's backing for it to this:

In 1917, the then superpower Great Britain, through the Declaration named after the Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, promised a "national home for the Jewish people in Palestine".

The Balfour Declaration, bitterly recalled to any British visitor to any Palestinian refugee camp, set the scene for large scale Jewish immigration and settlement while supposedly safeguarding the "civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities".

This dual aim proved impossible to sustain and in 1939, Britain reshaped the terms again with a White Paper which severely restricted Jewish immigration for five years and then gave Palestinians a veto on any more, thereby aiming to prevent the emergence of a State of Israel.

This plan, too, eventually collapsed and Britain withdrew.

Then the Israelis started creating further facts on the ground.

And that's it, nothing more; from there it's back to Sharon.

Don't let yourself be too long detained by the fact that this item happens to be posted on Yom HaShoah but fails to mention that several million Jews were murdered in Europe in the years just preceding... er, 1948, and many of the survivors sought refuge in that said 'national home'; because you need to go on and note that it fails also to mention 1948, and the creation of the State of Israel by a vote of the United Nations, and the implacable hostility to its creation by the surrounding Arab countries which immediately waged a war of intended destruction against it. But no, it's Balfour and Israel's creation of facts on the ground, and that's your lot. (Hat tip: EG and SdeW.)

Update at 5.50 PM: See also this BBC item on a Wiesenthal Center report about extremist websites:

The... report shows how important the net has become to these extremists, including racists, "terrorist" groups and homophobic organisations, and details the way that the groups use websites to spread their messages.

And see Bill Sjostrom's question.