It used to be known that the culture of the Foreign Office was bound up in a romantic, obsessive attachment to the Arab world. As the former Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, explained in September, Our “Arabist” diplomats “devote their careers to the Middle East. But unlike other country and region specialists – Sinologists, Russologists, and Africa experts – Arabists were accused of having an infatuation with their interlocutors, of seeing Arab and British interests as intrinsically li