I have often said - he intoned ponderously as the massed vuvuzelas made his ear drums reverberate and he felt the onset of tinnitus - I have often intoned ponderously that one must exercise caution about people with double-barrelled names.

There has been (and is) Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, as well as the famous Morag Tremolo-Derriere, a bosom buddy of the infamous Karen Bliksem.

Now we have Sasha Polakow-Suransky whom I have an abiding desire to call Polakow-Poepchik. (But that's just me - an irritating not-so-young whippersnapper - so pay no attention.)

And Polakow-Suransky wasn't even born thus. He seems to have taken each of his parent's surnames and conjoined them. How politically correct.

And that's not the only odd thing about Polakow-Suransky. In the acknowledgements (always read the acknowledgments first, they're usually instructive), he thanks some relations for making him feel at home "in a stressful city" - to wit, Johannesburg.

Stressful? Johannesburg? I dunno about that, my brother. Gaza city, okay, that's stressful. Kabul, okay; that's also. Tembisa, maybe; Phnom-Penh, perhaps. But surely not our Joeys?

It's too breathless a sentiment, if you see what I mean; a tad too theatrical.

Now, I don't mind if folk want to be breathless and theatrical about Johannesburg. And I don't mind if they want to be PC. But I do watch them carefully if they are writing books because it does suggest they could be breathless, theatrical and PC about the subject at hand - which in this case is about the not-so-secret relationship between the "old" Seffrica and Israel.

In his book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (published in South Africa by Jacana), Polakow-Suransky reveals and chronicles the infamous relationship - the nub of the matter being, as former Guardian correspondent Chris McGreal has written, that:

"Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The ‘top secret' minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them ‘in three sizes'. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that ‘the very existence of this agreement' was to remain secret."

The book is the fruit of six years' doctoral research at Oxford University and, as Benjamin Pogrund, former deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail now living in Israel, puts it, the book "reflects impressive perseverance in getting access to secret documents and interviewing more than 100 key players."

In fact, my dicking around at the beginning of this article is jejune. This is very fine political history and if Polakow-Suransky might favour a slightly precious moniker and be nervous in good old Joeys, it doesn't matter.

He's a first class scholar and an impressive historian because he does a thorough job and most of all because he understands about context.

Imagine if this book has been written by some bonehead with an axe to grind? He/she could have gone ape about the evil axis, Israel and Seffrica, and how Israel almost gave the evil okes on the African tip nuclear weapons with which to obliterate their black citizens, and how therefore Israel and all who sail in her should be consigned to the furthest circles of hell.

Polakow-Suransky, on the contrary, does not do this. He gives us context. We could come to understand why some - some - leaders in Israel, especially the sanctimonious Shimon Peres, now the country's president ("that poodle," as Arik Sharon once contemptuously remarked), thought it necessary to make a pact with the devils in South Africa, the men who ran one of the most appalling Western regimes that the modern world has known.

And yet, having said that, and being happy to say that this is a book that you should certainly go out and buy and read carefully - and besides being basically in agreement with Anton Harber that this book is a "tale of spies, hunting trips and two-faced politicians, and a head-on challenge to anyone concerned with the place of morality in international politics" - besides all these, there is something about this book that does not sit comfortably with me.

I have some questions to ask and some points to make.

First. I read somewhere - I wish I could remember where - a piece about Alan Dershowitz, the somewhat hysterical champion of all things Jewish, by a Jewish American writer, I wish I could remember who it was. What he said was that Dershowitz always brought out in him the overwhelming desire to go over to Dershowitz and, rubbing Dershowitz's tummy, to say: "Ketzkele, it's okay; the holocaust is over now; we can move on."

Similarly, the apartheid regime is a dead dog. For how long are we going to stand at the side of the road and kick its decomposing corpse? Isn't it enough already?

The point I am rather clumsily trying to make here is that, given that this book is not purely a historical study - that it has a trenchant point to make about morality - why base one's moral arguments against Israel's behaviour on something that happened in the past? Surely we define who we are, and what our morality consists of, by dealing with what is happening in the present - rather than by moralising after the fact?

Second, it's difficult - no matter how fair one is, and Polakow-Suransky is an eminently fair person - to be able to remember what was at stake for those people: on the one hand, the John Vorsters, PW Bothas, etc, and, on the other hand, Peres and his ilk.

I would not deny for a second that they were all a bunch of pricks (and that many of them were in any case deeply corrupt) - but not to understand, not to feel, that they really feared that their respective peoples could be obliterated (and therefore acting accordingly, making pacts with the devil) is to miss the point about them.

Third, any books about Israel, morality and realpolitik have to navigate the hoary, thorny (and, in my view, tedious) issue of Israel being "a light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6) - the idea that somehow it is incumbent on Israelis to behave better than others; that somehow they are better than others. Polakow-Suransky's book is all about realpolitik - in fact, it is a magnificent study in realpolitik - yet in the end he does judge the Israelis by a more stringent set of values.

I, on the other hand, rather liked a comment made recently on the op-ed pages of The New York Times by ultra-witty author Michael Chabon: "The past two decades in particular have illustrated to Jews and to the world a painful premise, but one that was implicit in the Zionist idea from the beginning: If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right ‘to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,' then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, ‘like all other nations,' are every bit as capable of barbarism and stupidity."

Finally, Polakow-Suransky's Epilogue, where he does his moralising, is a bit sleight-of-hand. He states categorically that his book "does not seek to draw a comparison between contemporary Israel and the old South Africa but, rather, to document the development and demise of an extensive and lucrative military alliance".

He then proceeds to do precisely what he said he would not do - to draw a comparison between contemporary Israel and the old South Africa (the dreaded "apartheid" comparison).

And the horrible and sad thing is that his comparisons are exceptionally difficult to refute or ignore. As I suggested a few paragraphs back, ol' Parsnip-Worthington should have been more upfront about his intention of kicking one so smartly and effectively in the cojones.

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