Here's Looking At You, Kid

Casablanca, Morocco
This is not your father's (OK, this is not your grandfather's) Casablanca. The bougainvillea, wisteria, roses, orange trees, eucalyptus, and date palms that adorn Marrakech-so plentiful are Marrakchi palm trees, in fact, and so revered, that some have been left to grow up through great fissures in the middle of paved streets-and add to its dreamy oasis-like quality, are not apparent in Casa, as Moroccans call it. This is everything a city should be: filthy, crowded, bustling, bristling with vitality. And of course it's a Middle-Eastern city, so, as in Tel Aviv (and Cairo, but that's another, worse, story)-which it very much resembles, with its industrial energy, its pollution-stained limestone high(ish)-rises, roll-down shutters closed against the afternoon sun, throngs making their way home after work-traffic rules are very, very flexible. Riding in Casa's rush-hour traffic gives even a lead-foot like me the occasional heart palpitation.

Not that I'm not having them anyway: news of escalating efforts by the Obami to force the Israeli hand on natural growth in established settlements is horrifying and profoundly depressing. Do they want to take the Netanyahu government down? And if they succeed, do they think the Israelis will replace Bibi with someone more to their liking? Natural growth is a consensus issue in Israel, defended by members of every party.

If the Obami don't know that, they should. But of course they do. Hillary Clinton is a good little homework-doer; George Mitchell has been told it; Rahm Emanuel knows it in his bones: no Israeli leader-not even Ehud Olmert, who offered the Palestinians the Moon and the stars (though not the Sun, as Mahmoud Abbas has dissemblingly suggested)-is going to tell a resident of Ma'aleh Adumim or Ariel that he can't add an extension onto his house to accommodate another child or build a new house next door for his newly married daughter and son-in-law. Jettison your one true democratic ally in a region swimming in dictatorships at your peril, Mr. President. The Arab states may love you more for it, but that love won't last.

As for Moroccans, every non-Jew I meet avows a deep friendship for Israel and attachment to Jews, whose history in this country stretches back to the Roman Empire, while every Jew claims to descend from an ancient Jewish-Berber intermarriage. If all of that is even only half-true, here's a full truth: there is here none of the feeling of enmity-in-potential a Jew can often experience in an Arab country.

And if you ever need a dentist in Casablanca, I can recommend one.