…US Ambassadress to the UN Nikki Haley spoke before the Israeli American Something Council, started by yordim, those who descend from the Holy Land into the Exile who want to help Israel nonetheless, like other successful American Jews, if no longer Israelis.

And she gave a wonderful speech. I believe I read in a mini-bio of her, her past includes run-ins with bigotry in the US because her family came from India and therefore she is not Caucasian, so she experienced insult and it sounds as if she identifies with the Jews for that.

Orde Charles Wingate was like that, the English intelligence officer posted to Mandatory Palestine in 1936 to help squelch the first intifada known in the history books as the Arab Revolt — certainly not the Palestinian Revolt, not when in 1936 all Palestinians were Zionist Jews. Wingate grew up in an offbeat Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren and was the butt of jokes among boys at school belonging to the mainstream Church of England. Wingate was the butt of jokes in his boyhood and he too identified with the persecuted Jews.

In any case, Nikki Halle nonetheless had never been to Israel, which is kind of strange, but maybe not. For thousands of years, Jews too moaned of their longing to go to the same land they had never been to…