Re: "a continuous Jewish presence for the past 3000 plus years"
"The Roman, Ottomans and the British never held elections." Look again, Matt, I never said elections. "Election" being a formal and organized process of electing somebody to something. I said "electorate", those people qualified to vote and elect somebody IF and WHEN there's election. The Arabs living in the Mandate after 1922 were so qualified. However, the self-interested British only allowed the people to vote in plebiscites for monarchs the Brits had nominated.
"At the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British set the parameters for Iraqi political life that were to continue until the 1958 revolution; they chose Faisal as Iraq's first King; they established an indigenous Iraqi army; and they proposed a new treaty. To confirm Faisal as Iraq's first monarch, a one-question plebiscite was carefully arranged that had a return of 96 percent in his favor. The British saw in Faisal a leader who possessed sufficient nationalist and Islamic credentials to have broad appeal, but who also was vulnerable enough to remain dependent on their support."
And as for you previous contention that oil was unknown to the region until 1933, look at this:
"Before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British- controlled Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) had held concessionary rights to the Mosul wilayah. Under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement--an agreement in 1916 between Britain and France that delineated future control of the Middle East--the area would have fallen under French influence. In 1919, however, the French relinquished their claims to Mosul under the terms of the Long- Berenger Agreement. The 1919 agreement granted the French a 25 percent share in the TPC as compensation."
"Beginning in 1923, British and Iraqi negotiators held acrimonious discussions over the new oil concession. The major obstacle was Iraq's insistence on a 20 percent equity participation in the company; this figure had been included in the original TPC concession to the Turks and had been agreed upon at San Remo for the Iraqis. In the end, despite strong nationalist sentiments against the concession agreement, the Iraqi negotiators acquiesced to it. The League of Nations was soon to vote on the disposition of Mosul, and the Iraqis feared that, without British support, Iraq would lose the area to Turkey. In March 1925, an agreement was concluded that contained none of the Iraqi demands. The TPC, now renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), was granted a concession for a period of seventy-five years."
You remember "Heisenberg's Certainty Principle?" If one of your neighbors has oil underneath his country, you can be almost certain there's oil under yours.
"you could look at the long list of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners"
Why would I do that? All I have to do is turn on cable tv and somewhere on the 250 channels there is a Jewish talking head reciting them. Like the Jewish prayer for the dead until the body is buried, someone in some language is receiting the names of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners. In perpetuity or the sun becomes a red giant. Which ever comes first.