Israeli Arabs

If seventy-seven per cent of Israeli Arabs really wouldn't want to live anywhere else, then why did one of them run amok with a bulldozer outside the BBC's Jerusalem offices today? And why did the BBC's own reporting change him from "an Israeli Arab" to "a Palestinian" between 12 noon and 1pm our time?

Actually, I think that the Arabs probably preferred Israel back when it was concerned with being a Jewish State, and before it became just the obsessively non-Arab that it is today flying in all and sundry in order to preserve a non-Arab majority. Russians who won’t eat kosher food, and who insist on taking their IDF oaths on the New Testament alone. Russian Nazis. East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries but who make no claim to Jewish descent. Peruvian Indians "converted to Judaism" and put on the plane as a single act. All sorts.

But the single most common name for newborn boys inside the pre-1967 borders is still now Muhammad. No wonder that the Israeli Arabs are mostly pretty contented. The long game is playing off. It's just a pity about the odd hot-head outside the BBC's offices. And the BBC won't admit that he was an Israeli Arab, anyway.