Carry On Up The Jordan

It is becoming quite comical how dedicated the fag end of the Bush Administration is to forcing Israel to adopt a far harder line on Lebanon and Syria than she, being inhabited by people who actually have to live in the Levant, has the slightest remaining desire to do.

The Israelis long ago gave up on theirs being a positively Jewish State, having cottoned on that the American Jews, in particular, would noisily do anything for Israel except live there. Instead, Israel has become purely negative in her self-definition as an obsessively non-Arab state, using a historically ludicrous definition of Arabs as excluding native speakers of Arabic if they happen to be Jewish.

On that basis, she flies in pretty much anybody, from Russian Nazis to Peruvian Indians (seriously), in order to maintain a non-Arab majority, thus defined, within her pre-1967 borders. Yet even there, the single most common name for newborn boys is now Muhammad.

So those Israelis who are still very Jewish indeed have clearly decided, "Sod this. There have always been Jews in the Levant, and very nicely they have done too, as part of a society also including Christians, Muslims and Druze, with Arabic as its lingua franca and with its de facto capital at Damascus. Compared to the alternative, that'll do nicely, thank you." And good luck to them.

But no one seems to have bothered telling anyone in the New York bagel bars or the Scofield Reference Bible Belt. It is becoming very, very funny to watch.