As all her readers know, Julie Burchill despises hypocritical celebrities, bleeding heart liberals and one of her ex-husbands.

But if there's one thing the controversial British columnist loves, it's Israel. "I always thought I wanted to be Jewish," says Burchill, fluttering her eyelashes in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv yesterday. "But that would be too difficult - you have to be too nice and sensitive. What I really want to be is Israeli. I think I've got the temperament for it: scrappy, defiant and I don't care if people hate me."

Burchill, one of Britain's highest profile - and highest paid columnists - is coming to the end of her first trip to Israel. Currently employed by The Times, and here for a week as a guest of the Tourism Ministry, Burchill's passion for the place cannot be exaggerated. "I don't want to sound like I've had an epiphany or a spiritual awakening because if someone said that bullshit to me, I'd tell them where to stuff it, but it's just a feeling since I've been here of complete happiness. I know that [Israelis] are not saints, but I've just been feeling happy in a way that I've not done anywhere else." She pauses for the first time: "Is there any way you can write that without making it sound completely creepy?"

Burchill's fervent flag-waving for Jews and Israel is not new. Having long complained of anti-Israel bias in the media, the British Jewish community nearly jumped for joy a year ago when Burchill turned her famously acidic pen to the matter in one of her final weekly columns for The Guardian. "If there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the State of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under," she wrote...