Tel Aviv: We had just pillaged our way through a sumptuous meal in a fashionable restaurant and were dawdling over the last dregs of a wonderfully dry Mediterranean red when the casual after-dinner banter meandered its way into a zone best avoided on such occasions. Even otherwise little or no purpose is served debating the vacuous ideological posturing by the Left-liberal intelligentsia, especially on state-funded campuses.

But the temptation to be provocative proved to be irresistible, and I asked our host, an Israeli with a healthy disdain for those who nurse half-baked notions of liberalism or are given to preening from their left-of-centre perch, “Do you have a JNU too?” It took a few seconds for him to realise what I was referring to. He burst out laughing and said, “Oh yes, we have Tel Aviv University.”