IT never matters what takes place in the Israeli elections, as the Palestinians will always come in for more of the same rough treatment. I do find it rather interesting, however, that Benny Ganz – the leader of the Blue and White alliance that was running neck and neck with Likud in the 2019 polls – not only believed that the Golan Heights should remain in Jewish hands but even applied the same arrogant logic in relation to his own back garden. Indeed, this long-serving general and Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, a veteran of at least two murderous campaigns on the Gaza strip, once came under fire when he illegally extended the perimeter of his garden to incorporate a plot of public land. I suppose there is but one short step between stealing a neighbouring footpath and annexing the Golan Heights, but this led me to consider how other political tendencies would manifest themselves in a similar context.

The colonialist gardener would no doubt wish to settle on his neighbour’s front lawn, justifying his presence by claiming to have introduced superior forms of permaculture, whilst the imperialist would seek to install a puppet-gardener in each greenhouse and ensure that the best vegetables end up in his own hands. A fascist gardener might set up a few machine-gun turrets along his perimeter fence, which is all well and good if you’re concerned about a flock of Marxian sparrows getting their beaks into your seedlings, but line upon line of soldierly gnomes, ruthlessly-policed bird netting and rigid rows of sharpened bamboo might seem a little oppressive after a while. Particularly if you make an attempt to convert his bourgeois patio into crazy paving.

The leftist gardener, meanwhile, after convincing everyone that only he has a genuine right to green fingers on account of having once spent a wet Saturday afternoon demonstrating outside the offices of the Ministry of Agriculture, would possibly have the worst-kept garden of all. Not only would it be an overgrown compost heap upon which stalks of wilting white asparagus find themselves out-muscled by crops of first-season aubergines, but our deluded forker’s commitment to ‘no borders’ would invariably mean that every Tom, Dick and Hassam would be streaming from a succession of newly-arrived wheelbarrows, trampling their way through gentrified shed-loads of oblivious hipsters and clamouring to get their hands on the juiciest tomatoes. It just goes to show that a man reaps what he sows.