Bulwarks

An interesting programme on Radio Four this morning, about upper-class girls who were sent to spend time at institutions in the Nazi Germany that their fathers saw as the bulwark against the Soviet Union.

However else one might describe today's sympathisers with a regime headed by Netanyahu and including Avigdor Lieberman, no one could accuse them of being upper-class, and indeed much of their rage derives from their realisation that, no matter what, no one will ever regard them as such. These things simply do not work like that.

But they do see that regime as some sort of bulwark against Islamist expansionism, just as many both of their own type and of the real thing saw the extremely anti-British regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia as somehow on our side really. (Others of them were on the other side.)

In reality, such a bulwark was the old Levantine civilisation of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Druze, with Arabic as its lingua franca and with its de facto capital at Damascus. But a dreadful wound was inflicted on it in 1948, from which it has still begun to recover hardly, if at all.