Matthew Yglesias Discovers Christians In Israel!

Matthew Yglesias, who, like everyone else, has been offering his opinion on Israel from time to time--has never been to Israel before.

Of course, being to a place does not necessarily make you an expert on it--remember Roger Cohen pontificating on how good things actually were for Jews in Iran because he had actually been there and talked with them?

Still, you have to wonder just what Yglesias knows about the area. Here is what he wrote upon arriving in Jerusalem.

I’ve arrived at my hotel in Jerusalem, exhausted as one tends to be after a ten-hour flight featuring many screaming babies. It’s of course difficult to achieve really deep insights on a brief trip, but one thing travel does help you do is recognize things that should have been obvious but are nonetheless easy to overlook. For example, I found myself shocked in the passport control line at Ben Gurion Airport by the enormous quantity of Christians on the line. In my mind, Israel is a place that Jews and people interested in politics visit—but there I was face to face with an enormous group of elderly Italians with crucifixes around their neck.

It makes perfect sense, of course, when you think about it for a minute. But in general I hadn’t.

We can only hope that Yglesias takes a minute or two when he writes about Israel in the future.

(Hat tip to Jeffrey Goldberg, who helpfully informs Yglesias that Unbelievably, Israel Also Has Hummus.)

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