High on a hill stands a lonely goatherd

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If you’re going to put on a puppet show, you’d better make sure you’re a good puppeteer: even though the audience can see the strings, it still has to be a breath-taking show. Even Geppetto knew this. He made a puppet that’s got no strings to hold him down, and that was a blessing, for, with strings, Pinocchio would never have grown up to be a real little boy. It was the mistakes he made that gave him the wisdom to grow up, by realising that appearances, with or without strings, are deceptive.

The standard answer in an on-stage Miss World interview to what the contestant’s greatest wish is, is always “world peace”. However well-meant the aspiration is and whether any of the girls achieve that high ambition, I can only say that it’s a laudable one.

As far as the United States, or the European Union, or China, or the Russian Federation, or the Republic of South Africa are concerned, it is hard to be cynical, as one might have been with Miss World, and to cast scorn on such high ambitions as peace. Many are they, nonetheless, who more readily ascribe to these countries, and others, an ambition of attaining wealth. To be wealthy is not necessarily to lack a yearning for peace. At worst, it simply means that, real though it is, other matters take precedence.

When Mr Biden threw his unqualified endorsement behind Israel’s right to defend itself, there was no mention of proportionality. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t implicit, for proportionality of a response is a trite tenet of the criminal law, and Joe Biden used to be a public defender, so he knows the criminal law. For instance, you may not take a golf club to someone’s windscreen as a reaction to their poor roadcraft skills.

Later, Mr Biden started to tell Mr Netanyahu that he was killing too many Palestinian Gazans in exercise of Israel’s right of defence. I wonder: if Mr Netanyahu had been at home with a carton of popcorn, binge-watching Downton Abbey on telly with his extended family assembled around him, and a hoard of hooligans had broken into his home and killed everyone there but him, and Mr Netanyahu had thereupon armed himself to the teeth and gone to the assailants’ neck of the woods and started to shoot all and sundry there, be they in shops, houses or on the street, at what point would the police have intervened to tell him that’s quite enough now? If he says he needs to get them all, otherwise they might come back, how will he know when he has them all? How many people in how many quarters of the town must he eradicate before he feels he can continue his Downton Abbey in safety?

I believe there’s an argument for saying that killing one Palestinian Gazan is disproportionate as an exercise of the right of defence. Mr Biden is now of the wholehearted view that killing 22,000 Palestinian Gazans is certainly a disproportionate number of Palestinian Gazans to kill in exercise of Israel’s right of defence, and that has me wondering: what number of dead Palestinian Gazan babies, boys, girls, women and men did he then deem in his own mind to constitute the number, the threshold, beyond which exercise of the right of defence was exceeded, was disproportionate?

If, instead of this being a genocide, as it is in the view of South Africa, it were more in the order of a playground tiff, I imagine the following exchanges, as a burly teacher holds the mutual assailants apart at outstretched arm’s length, left and right:

He started it, by taking hostages and murdering and raping our peaceful citizens.

- What did you do to provoke him to do that?

Nothing.

- Nothing?

Nothing.

- He murdered, raped and took ransom 1,200 people for no provocation whatsoever?

We were busy.

- Doing?

Supporting settlers in the north.

- Legal settlers?

No comment.

- Do you think you let your side down?

No comment.

- Is 22,000 Palestinian deaths enough defence for Israel?

They kept shooting at us.

- After you went in all guns blazing?

Yes.

- Are you surprised?

No comment. Yes—one: we found tunnels.

- You didn’t know they were there before?

They justify what we did.

- Finding tunnels justifies killing 22,000 people?

We need to eradicate them.

- What do you think they’re thinking right now?

They can think what they want. We have America behind us.

- Yes. Don’t you.

I oppose the Israeli action in Palestine. And, what’s more it’s spreading. Even though the strings that Mr Netanyahu holds, and those that hold him, in a way, are all visible, these are errant puppets, more along the lines of Pinocchio. The difference is that, in the end, Pinocchio learned the error of his ways. Will these puppets learn the error of theirs?

Pinocchio’s great desire was to grow up. He so wanted to be a real little boy so that he could then be a man, and, as he knew only too well, that would then allow him to die. The natural life cycle was Pinocchio’s great dream, in his greatest interests.

I hear much about where interests lie. The interests of Russia in Africa, and of Ukraine in Europe, of America in South America, but these interests, what are they in truth? Allegiance? Loyalty? Camaraderie? Bonhomie? Entente? Trade? … Money? If the Middle East had no oil wells, America could likely not give any more of a hoot about Israel than the Roman Empire could. And now Israel wants to take its battle to its neighbours and it is manifesting breath-taking brinkmanship in so doing.

Twenty-two thousand Palestinians in exchange for 1,200 Israelis. Jews, they are: it says so in their identity documents. There is no such thing as an Israeli: ironic, isn’t it? The IDs issued by the state of Israel nowhere declare the holder to be Israeli, but rather to be a Jew or a Muslim. So, to heap irony upon irony, I am unable to criticise Israel without simultaneously, and as a natural consequence, being antisemitic, and I baulk at that over-simplistic, technical, specious sophistry. Israel may want to bind its citizens into the nation by dint of their religious confession; but it cannot thereby bind me into eradicating all distinction between what Jews do as an act of faith and what the state of Israel does as a putative act of national defence.

Upon its creation as a nation state, Israel rejoiced in joining the community of modern nations. Now, it is time for it to be acting as one, to be assuming its responsibilities as one, and to stop wielding its religion before the eyes of its peoples, of its neighbours and of the world community. It is creating a situation out of road rage disproportion, and it is making a bed that it will some day soon need to lie in. Enough.