How I Found Myself With The Islamic Fascists

Britain's complacent satisfaction with its multi-culturalism and tolerance ignores the facts that Pakistanis and other ethnic minorities mostly live in their own segregated spaces on the margins of British life. "Native" Britons like me -- the white ones -- generally assume that is out of choice: "They stick to their own kind". Many of us rarely come into contact with a Pakistani unless he is serving us what we call "Indian food" or selling us a packet of cigarettes in a corner shop.

So, even though we may have been neighbours of a sort in High Wycombe, my life and theirs probably had few points of contact.

But paradoxically, that changed, I think, five years ago when I left Britain. I moved to Nazareth in Israel, an Arab -- Muslim and Christian -- community on the very margins of the self-declared Jewish state. In the ghetto of Nazareth, I rarely meet Israeli Jews unless I venture out for work or I find myself sitting next to them in a local restaurant as they order hummus from an Arab waiter, just as I once asked for a madras curry in High Wycombe. When Israeli Jews briefly visit the ghetto, I suddenly realise how much, by living here, I have become an Arab by default.