One damp and foggy evening in London, some seven years ago, Pinchas Lavon explained to a certain young man why it was better for him to give up practical politics and devote himself to education or art or ideology. Politics, Pinchas said, is a business that ‘nobody comes out of unscathed’.

The younger man, for his part, put one or two questions to Pinchas to elucidate whether this was not an excessively general conclusion to draw from what was, after all, an individual case.

‘Are you saying that because politics is a dirty business, because anyone who gets involved with it ends up sooner or later getting his hands dirty?’ the young man asked, among other things.

‘On the contrary’, Pinchas replied with his quizzical, impish smile; ‘politics is a very clean business. Too clean. Sterile, in fact. Eventually you stop seeing people, you stop tackling human misery, and you deal only in “factors”, “data” and “problems”. Real objects are replaced by silhouettes. The word “factor” is a key symptom: when a politician stops saying “man”, “comrade”, and starts talking about positive and negative factors, that is a sign that he has reached the sterile phase.’

This is, more or less, what Pinchas Lavon said one cold, rainy night in London, and he went on to explain that a politician who dealt with factors instead of talking about people would soon start seeing ‘phenomena’ instead of shapes and colours, from which it was only a short step to using expressions like ‘human material’, ‘human debris’, and so on, until eventually his whole world is divided into two: the world of means and the world of ends.