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Earlier this week South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, produced a YouTube video critical of the Pope. The Wall Street Journal, probably the world’s most important newspaper, published an article of admiration for the Rabbi’s stance and arguments. South Africa’s local Jewish community rag, the South African Jewish Report, published a snivelling critique. The juxtaposition was the perfect case study of how to, and how not to, conduct politics and exposed why much of South Africa’s government thinks that much of the leadership of the Jewish community are idiots.

It is a pretty open secret among serious people that the South African government regards much of the leadership of South Africa’s Jewish community as fools. That applies both to key prominent Jews in the business community and to organisations such as the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.

Politics has only ever been, and will only ever be, about one thing – forcing a balance of power. It is a fable made popular since the fall of the Berlin Wall by limp-wristed Westerners that this is not so and that politics might be better conducted through finding mutual common ground and understanding.

The African National Congress (ANC) and that part of the South African government it still controls knows better.

The party’s central strategic thesis is that you advance aggressively against your adversary when they show weakness and accommodation but that you must stop that advance at once should you run into serious opposition. The reason is quite straight-forward in that, if you seek to advance over a line that your adversary is prepared to defend at any cost, then you may suffer a setback, the public may see that and lose faith in you, and the public may further be swayed by the stand taken by your opponent. This is the kind of basic Leninist doctrine that anyone properly schooled in basic political strategy would intuitively understand.

If you want to see the theory in practice look at Russia or China and how they conduct their external affairs – perfect case studies. No-one messes with them because the lines they are prepared to defend are clear, as is what they are prepared to do to defend those. They are not running around trying to make friends with X, Y, or Z and get them to like them. They instead bring forward hard power, when necessary, which garners something much more important: respect.

Forcing such a balance of power bound by mutual respect need not be a hostile act – particularly if done in a sophisticated manner. It is simply a matter of demonstrating that there are basic lines of principle that cannot be crossed and will always be defended and that crossing them will bring forth consequences. Where adversarial political actors understand this in each other, quite positive relationships are formed. Conflict and crises only emerge where the one doubts the strength of the other and advances against them – particularly where that doubt was based on a miscalculation. As Donald Rumsfeld famously, and brilliantly, remarked, “If we have learned one thing it is that weakness is provocative.”

Come back to the Pope and the Rabbi. The short version of the story is that the Pope said the Americans are dangerous warmongers and should cease their actions around Iran and instead try and find negotiated common ground with the Iranian leadership. The Rabbi took to YouTube and said that the Pope needed to understand that there was no moral equivalence between the actions of the Iranians and the Americans – and that the inevitable consequence of his call for talks was that Iran would get a nuclear weapon with which to threaten the world.

This is how The Wall Street Journal reported on that exchange.

First the headline: “A Rabbi Takes on Pope Leo – A Rejoinder to the Pontiff’s Simplistic Condemnation of the War against Iran”. That’s strong. It went on to describe the Rabbi’s remarks as “a remarkable speech” and “poignant”.

Compare that to the local Jewish community rag.

First the headline: “Chief Rabbi Faces Blowback from Pope Critique”. Immediately weak, even grovelling. The text was little better, quoting critics of the rabbi left and right and stating how upset Christians were (the tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of views the rabbi gets on his YouTube channel tell another story). If that were not pathetic enough, the community rag then quoted the Jewish Board of Deputies having a full go at their rabbi and accusing him of engaging in “unsubstantiated” rhetoric that “lacked factual grounding” and caused “hurt”.

Those comments reveal precisely the kind of “simplistic condemnation” that The Wall Street Journal warned about. Consider, for example, a report by The Common Sense earlier this week on poll data showing that the Pope’s comments on the war are actually not supported by Christians in the United States and that those comments are in fact more than twice as popular among atheists than among Christians!

The message in those data has been starkly on display at prominent interfaith prayer days in South Africa, attended chiefly by black Christians, where the rabbi has received thunderous applause from the near 100 000 gathered faithful for his firm defences of both Israel and, more broadly, Judeo-Christian values.

That sort of response makes sense given that South Africa is an essentially Christian conservative society. Consider further that many of Africa’s black Christians face a murderous onslaught from Islamist terror groups across much of the continent (the white Christians live in relative safety afforded by their living standards) – something the Catholic Church has been loath to condemn and on which The Common Sense has reported before.

These are all factors of the kind of sophisticated understanding that the leadership of neither the Jewish Report nor the Board of Deputies possesses.

It is little wonder, then, that in the very same week South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa saw fit to use his high office to sign a petition demanding the release from prison in Israel of a chap by the name of Marwan Barghouti, who had planned and executed a series of terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Mr Ramaphosa and his government were completely correct in their calculation that the South African Jewish community would engage in no action of any consequence to confront such an outrage. Instead, much of the community leadership would be fretting in their offices about what homage they might further pay to please Mr Ramaphosa enough that he might demand the release of fewer terrorists.

The contempt this kind of limp-wristedness induces for South Africa’s Jews is an existential threat to their futures and to that of Israel, without which the Jews will disperse to be swallowed into a broad Western diaspora into which they will eventually dissolve.

The Chief Rabbi has said that he regards his responsibility to the safety of his flock as something for which he is prepared to pay any price. And indeed, by serious accounts, he lives in great danger. But he stresses, too, that he has no broader political dispute with the ANC or South Africa’s government and that, unlike some prominent leaders of the Jewish community, he does not think it proper for South Africa’s Jews to interfere in the internal politics or leadership contests of the ANC (many prominent Jews have played an active role in that sort of thing). Instead, he has a simple request: don’t mess with our people in South Africa and don’t mess with Israel’s ability to exist – those are the lines he is prepared to defend and if the South African government stays within them, he sees his role, and that of his community, to help that government, regardless of who leads it, in any endeavour.