FOREIGN Secretary Robin Cook has again been showing a remarkable capacity for going abroad and upsetting everyone he meets.

In a welcome respite from last year's romantic complications, he went to India with The Queen and her husband where he insisted on bringing up the thorny problem of Kashmir. This upset his hosts no end, as could have been foreseen.

If I was invited by the Japanese on a free trip to Tokyo, I would hardly include the subject of the Burma Railroad on my list of topics to be discussed with my hosts.

Instead of learning from his mistake and avoiding touchy subjects, on a recent visit to Israel he decided to visit Har Homa, the most controversial piece of real estate in that hotly-disputed country.

The subsequent reaction of both Israelis and Palestinians who got very hot under the collar showed what a foolish decision it was.

I thought Foreign Secretaries were

supposed to concentrate on diplomacy, not stir up hornets' nests every time they got off the plane.

Does the Foreign Secretary not realise that the barking mad fanatics on both sides of the Middle East divide are not confined to suicide bombers and

swivel-eyed heavily-armed religious

settlers from New York.

Having lived in Israel and studied its

history, I could have told Mr Cook that any outsider who tries to intervene in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute is likely to end up smothered with brickbats from more than one direction.

Neither the Arabs nor the Israelis have forgotten Britain's less than honourable role in the political history of the area.

The British Government, for entirely selfish reasons, promised the land at different times to both the Jews and the Arabs, while subsequently acting in a way as to deny it to both sets of people, before finally skulking out of the country in the dead of night, leaving a full-scale war and a five-generation legacy of bitterness behind.

Is the Foreign Office really surprised that Robin Cook's arrogant and patronising decision to tramp around the most disputed proposed Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, in the same way he would meet protesters at a proposed superstore site in MIlton Keynes, backfired terribly?

Robin Cook's advisors should know much of the confused history of the conflict in the Middle East, like how Jewish settlers bought land from absentee arab landlords, subsequently replacing the former tenants, thereby making diametrically opposite claims such as: 'The Jews stole our land,' and 'We bought the land from the Arabs,' both true and untrue at the same time.

They may be aware that peace negotiations have been stymied by the Israeli intention to build 6,500 Jewish homes on a hillside captured during the Six-Day war in 1967 - which incidentally the Israelis started, but only because the Arabs said they were going to start a war against them - unlike the one in 1956 which the Israelis started - encouraged by the British and French who wanted to use the conflict as an excuse to steal back their canal from the Egyptians who, understandably, argued that it was their canal because it was in their country.

These were slightly different to the war of 1948 which the Arabs began in order to 'Drive the Jews into the Sea' and the war of 1973, which the Arabs also started because it was Yom Kippur and they thought the Israelis would all be on

holiday - which, incidentally, they nearly all were.

Throw into this mixture a long history of terrorist mass murders, plane and boat hi-jacks, mass killings by deranged (as if there were any other kind) 'Greater Israel' religious settlers, assassinations, suicide bombings by mad fanatics, casual individual killings, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, (which was laughingly titled 'Operation Peace For Galilee' by the them Prime Minister Menachem Begin), heavy-handed security operations in the Occupied Territories and thousands upon thousands of refugees.

Into this boiling cauldron of militant Zionism, Arab nationalism, collective insanity, bitterness, grief, fanaticism, despair and desperation, steps Robin Cook in his great clod-hopping size fours saying: "Look here you lot, I'm from New Labour and I'm going to tell you what's best." If it wasn't so embarrassing, it would be laughable.

The man should resign, his actions over the last few weeks have been appalling.

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