Highlights

GDP is a misleading metric of a population’s welfare because it skirts the all-important issue of who benefits and ignores the costs to future generations arising from reckless natural resource use.

On 2 November, after the US and France had approved the plan, the Balfour Declaration was issued, stating that 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, provided this did not 'prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine' - in other words, the Palestinian Arabs who were the overwhelming majority of inhabitants. The failure to even name them was a revealing mistake. The words were carefully negotiated - 'a home' not a state, in Palestine not of Palestine.

Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and withdrew from the war, adding insult to injury by publishing the secret Sykes-Picot-Sazonov carve-up which they had found in the tsarist archives.

Saddam Hussein was hanged

The Anglo-American coalition launches war against Iraq

President Hafez Al-Assad dies

Iraq invades Kuwait

The ‘Declaration of Principles on Palestine Self-Rule’ aka Osla Accords was signed. PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist, and Israelis simply recognised the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people

First Intifada (meaning ‘shaking-off’ or ‘trembling’) by the Palestinians

Start of Iran-Iraq War

One of the destabilising effects of the Iranian Revolution stemmed from Khomeini’s determination to export it.

Ayatollah Khomeini comes back to Iran from exile

Shah flees Iran

Sadat was assassinated by Muslim extremists

Camp David Accords was signed

Today's readers, used to interpreting events in the Middle East largely in religious terms, may recall that, before Iran's Islamic Revolution (1979) and the collapse of the USSR (1990), the secular left-right (communist-capitalist) divide was as significant as any Shia-Sunni-Alawite-Christian distinction, perhaps even more so.

Egypt & Syria launch the fourth Arab-Israeli war, popularly known as the Yom Kippur war

Yasser Arafat was elected the PLO chairman

Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was established

MoD Hafez Assad carried out a military coup in 1970 following the military defeat & loss of territory after the six day war and made himself president in 1971.

Nasser dies of a heart attack & is succeeded by Anwar Sadat as the president who then tries to offer peace with Israel which was rejected by both the US & Israel.

Nasser accepts ceasefire after the start of The Six-Day War with his reputation in tatters.

Six-Day War: Israel launched an offensive against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq invade Israel.