Sixty Years Of Neither One Thing Nor The Other

If a recognisably Levantine state which happened to have a Jewish majority had been set up in Palestine in 1948, would anyone even have noticed?

But instead, they insisted on setting up a faux-European one, but without the necessary cultural basis: the Christian synthesis of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire, safeguarded by having a Christian majority population, and at least greatly helped by having a European language. Without that basis, there could even be (and there are) legally binding Sharia courts for those born into certain ethnic minorities.

So Israel doesn't look Middle Eastern to the Middle East, and doesn't look Western to the West.

The rest, as they say, is history.