■ The Orbiting Eye provides the facts you need to understand the Jerusalem crisis.

Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel in the eyes of anyone but Israel and the US government. It is certainly not the capital of Israel because an ignorant, bumptious, boorish American president says it is. In reality it is a stolen, occupied city, a Palestinian city, the western half seized by main force in 1948 and the eastern half seized by main force in 1967.

By the 1880s the Jewish population of Palestine was probably about 15,000, much of it non-Zionist, out of a total population of half a million. Early in the 20^th century the Zionists approached, in turn, the Ottoman sultan, the German Kaiser (below) and the Russian government seeking support for their colonisation of Palestine. All said no. The Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid (right), passed on the message that Palestine was the possession of the Ottoman state and people and was not his to give away.

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