A digression before talking about crocodiles. If you have seen Nolan’s latest, you know about xenia. Among the ancient Greeks, hospitality towards strangers was a sacred code of Zeus. Regardless of their origin, status, or wealth, a stranger was entitled to their share of food and drink, to their corner of sleep. In the Bronze Age, humanitarian rules against barbarism had already been invented. Three millennia later, we are on a different wavelength.
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With an amnesia unbefitting prime ministers, Giorgia Meloni and Mette Frederiksen forgot the crises of Lampedusa and Greenland to do politics by the fireside with the desperate. Someone should gift them an Odyssey and tell them the story of Faten Ben Amar, the player of Maghreb Atlético Tetuán who might have been an Alexia Putellas if she hadn’t drowned on the way to Spain a day before receiving permission to enter legally.
Parallel to the 21st-century Greek tragedy, the absurdity has arrived with the reinstatement of borders for Spaniards and Italians. Again, upon landing at airports in the other country, they have to hold their ID between their teeth before sinking them into the pizza or paella they have saved all year for. Europe urgently needs a lifebuoy.
One of the paradoxes of our society is that while there is regression in the defense of humanitarian rights, there is progress in animal protection. And so we come to the reptiles.
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An Israeli court has halted this week the government’s plan to build moats around prisons where, as you can imagine, Palestinian prisoners abound. The medieval engineering of the moat was to be reinforced with the presence of Nile crocodiles. The matter, devised by the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, was moving fast. At Ketziot prison, excavation of the surrounding land began while the Ministry of Environmental Protection hurriedly changed the classification of Nile crocodiles to allow their use for security purposes. This legally justified their conversion into authorized predators to intervene in any escape attempt. For this mission, the reptiles would not need training courses. They would do things as they know how, with the same efficiency with which they feast on wildebeests in the Masai Mara during the Great Migration. And no matter how much a Palestinian has been trained by Hamas, nothing can stand up to the four meters and 200 kilos of a rather hungry average crocodile.
It was the group Let the Animals Live that achieved the temporary veto after denouncing the reptiles’ lack of protection in court. Although it does not seem that the Israeli minister will give up on his idea, it is something. “Political resistance often begins with an interim,” said writer John Berger. So, while some humans are treated as subhumans, we welcome this interim that looks out for the rights of crocodiles.
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