On 8 October 1973 or thereabouts, my friend Roy and I were hitchhiking in the northern Galilee ... Nah, it wasn't Roy. I was hitching with a friend called Sulla who is now, if I am not mistaken, a granny in New York City.

Those who remember or know anything about the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, will recall that one of the problems facing the Israelis on the Golan Heights was simply getting troops up the narrow and few "roads" to the front. And we were picked up by a man who had been using his private car and spending hours ferrying reservists to the front.

Being sort of leftie, hippie students at the Hebrew U, who rather fancied the "Arab cause" (no one spoke too much about "Palestinians" in those days), we said rather insensitively, almost contemptuously, to the man - a middle-aged fellow with a son on the Syrian front - that we had heard that things weren't going too well for the Israeli army.

This was an under-statement: if it had not been for soldiers such as Yanush Ben-Gal, Avigdor Kahalani, Rafael Eitan and others, the Syrians would have trampled northern Israel.

"No," the man expostulated, "our boys are doing very well under the circumstances and the Syrians are still not the greatest soldiers in the world. Still," he said thoughtfully - and for some reason I have never forgotten this - "the Syrians are nevertheless not shooting potatoes. What they fire from their tanks kills and burns people."

We shall return to that comment in a few minutes; for the moment, we segue (a word beloved by many of my readers, especially the knuckleheads) to the Goldstone/Goldstein affair. We all know the basic facts, yes?

If I have it right, it runs something like this.

Somebody reports in The Jewish Report (rather badly: the story is full of holes) that Judge Richard Goldstone, former constitutional court judge etc., has been "banned" from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah - by whom it was not clear, though chief rabbi Warren Goldstein seems to have been implicated.

This is the biggest "hole" of all because no one can be banned, not even by the chief rabbi, from going to a bar mitzvah or entering a synagogue. The last person they pulled that stunt with was Baruch Spinoza - and that was in the 1600s.

Then Zackie Achmat - a gold medal holder in the Order of the Pain in the Tuchis, who loves nothing more than to stick it to the local Jewish community when it comes to "Palestinian issues" - got hold of the story and the proverbial hit the fan.

So much so that it is still not clear who precisely did what to whom. But it would appear that the fellows in the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) - which is not, please note, the same as the Jewish Board of Deputies or the rabbinate or the Israel Defence Force or King David High School - these fellows had apparently threatened to hold an anti-Goldstone demonstration at the particular synagogue where Goldstone's grandson was due to have his coming-of-age ceremony.

Why did they want to hold a demo? Because they were upset that Goldstone had agreed to lead a United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict. In the eloquent view of the SAZF (see here), Goldstone's report has done incalculable harm to Israel and to Jews.

"Your request that countries prosecute Israeli soldiers under Universal Jurisdiction Principles will prevent thousands of Jews from visiting their parents and grandparents in certain countries and force their absence from family celebrations. [This,] Judge Goldstone ... is not International justice. It is simply a travesty of justice, a reintroduction of discriminatory laws and practices against the Jewish People."

Maybe; but this was still not a good enough reason to frighten a 13-year-old boy and to make Goldstone feel unwelcome. Anyway, following an embarrassing brouhaha, some kind of peace was made, the two parties met on 4 April, and the statement/s I refer to above were issued.

And the bottom line is that the SAZF, represented by Avrom Krengel, its chairman, is mightily annoyed by Goldstone's report on the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

Why? First, the members of United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which established Goldstone's mission, are a bunch of biased bozos. Second, so stacked were the cards against Israel that the council struggled to find someone with "the necessary profile" to lead the mission.

Third, Goldstone's report said the mission received full cooperation from Gazan authorities but it becomes clear from the report itself that it probably didn't because everyone was scared of reprisals from Hamas. Fourth, there was no equitable contextualisation: "Nowhere in your 573 page report do you feel it is of value ... to mention that Hamas' founding charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel".

Finally, there is the prospect - as a result of Goldstone's report, according to Krengel - that Israeli soldiers, generals and politicians could face the prospect of war crime trials at The Hague, a fate formerly reserved for people involved in real genocide...

It's eloquent and moving stuff - have a re-read of Krengel's statement.

Yet what blows me away about the reaction to Goldstone by the SAZF (and also by other Jewish organisations and bodies to anti-Israeli "events" - but let's stick to one, this one, for the moment) is the complete - and frightening - absence of any realization and/or admission that there might be any fault - any fault whatsoever - on the part of Israel.

What do people think that the Israeli army was firing at the people of Gaza? Potatoes? It is common bloody cause that about one thousand civilians - flesh and blood human beings - were killed in Gaza. Who - or what - do you think killed them? And among them were children, women and old people.

I am not suggesting that Israeli or Jews should therefore all commit hara kiri or convert en masse to Catholicism and say a thousand hail Marys. But I am suggesting that we all grow up and look at the real world around us - and acknowledge that we are not - when invading Gaza in 2008/9 - the noble heroes of ‘48, ‘67 and ‘73.

Times - and the world - have changed. Israel has the fire power now. In any case, what happened in 1948 is not exactly as black and white and heroic as we might like to think it was.

Historian Isaac Deutscher's description is perhaps still the best. The Jews were like a man forced to jump off the first floor of a burning building (Europe) - and landing on an innocent man (the Palestinians) in the street below, breaking his legs in the process.

Again, this does not mean that we need to beat our breasts in woe every evening just after sunrise. But it does mean that we might just show a little bit of sympathy and understanding for the Palestinians - instead of the holier-than-thou litany about how badly the world has treated us and instead of dragging a young man and his grandfather into these travails on the day of the youngster's bar-mitzvah.

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