It seems to me I heard somewhere that Kevin Gowen wrote in article
<bfkabl$fpk34$1@ID-105084.news.uni-berlin.de>:

>John Yamamoto-Wilson wrote:
>> Mike Fester wrote:

>>> Hey, I knew an Irish-Japanese family; named 0'Gawa.

>> Really? There's a delightful family named O'Hara in our neighbourhood,
>> though I'm sorry to say they wouldn't know a ceilidh from a
>> shillelagh. And in a cemetary in my wife's furusato lie the bones of
>> Terence O'Reilly, the famed Irish plumber, known affectionately
>> throughout Japan as O'TeArai. 

>>>> And, since we're talking, the state of Israel dates from....

>>> From the time  the people with the guns got the land and called it
>>> such :-) 

>> I just *knew* that once we got past the local differences of
>> perspective we'd find we were in complete agreement over this!

>United Nations = people with guns? Ok.

Well, when you consider that the Zionist movement began in the late
1800s (Theodore Herzl convened the first World Zionist Conference in
1897), that certain assurances had been made in the Balfour Declaration
in 1917 that included promising Jews a Palestinian homeland, and that
there was considerable guilt in Europe and the US immediately post WW II
over the lack of effective action on behalf of the Jews suffering under
Hitler before and during the war, the 1948 UN decision was pretty much a
no brainer, at least partly made in hopes of keeping guns out of the
equation.
-- 
Don
donkirk@covad.net