Last year when I was in Israel, I fell in love with Israeli cats. My wife is a cat fancier, and wasn’t traveling with me, so I thought I would take pictures of every stray cat that crossed my path. I took a lot of pictures. There are a lot of stray cats in Israel and the West Bank. They were in every city we visited, particularly in the alleyways of shuks and old makets; on the beach in Jaffa, crossing busy thoroughfares in Tel Aviv, hanging out near butcher shops in Akko and Bethlehem. When we visited the Temple Mount, there were a group of cats, sublimely and insouciantly indifferent to the hubbub and tension around them, sunning themselves in front of the Dome of the Rock. In Hebron, the IDF didn’t seem to care that cats were passing from the Palestinian to Israeli-controlled parts of the city. They were always underfoot, and generally tolerated.

Cats largely domesticated themselves in the Middle East some 6,000 years ago, probably in Egypt—unlike dogs, or horses, or chicken, cats chose to hang out near humans, humans found them useful, primarily to keep down the rodent population near granaries, and a marriage of convenience was created. If Jews were familiar with cats in Egypt, they don’t seem to have made much of an impression—there are no cats in the Tanakh, or in the New Testament, for that matter. But wherever people are, cats soon follow.

For the most part, cats and humans don’t interfere with each other’s business. But too many feral cats cause problems, both for themselves, and for other species they might prey on. (Cats have unfortunately been engines of extinction of many native species in Australia and elsewhere.)

The reason I mention all of this because Israeli cats have been in the news recently. There was a perfectly reasonable proposal to spay and neuter feral cats to keep down the Israeli cat population. But evidently, there were halachic objections to this proposal, I gather because it violates the injunction to “be fruitful and multiply.” (I didn’t think that the birds and the bees and the cats needed God’s approval before putting this into practice.) Anyway, Uri Ariel, the very right-wing Israeli Agriculture Minister suggested, to peals of ridicule, that Israel deport its feral cat population. Where? To Jordan or Syria? Fill a boat with tens of thousands of meowing cats and see what country was willing to admit the feline refugees, a cat Nakba?

Anyway, this is a parable of contemporary Israeli society. Sensible solutions to social problems flounder in the face of implacable and unreasonable religious opposition. And the first thought of many Israelis and many of the ministers in the current government is to deport it, and make it someone else’s problem. But Israel, and no one else, will have to deal with its cats/ Israelis and Palestinians need to learn to be as kind to each other as they are to their cats. And Israel’s inability to deal with its cats is symptomatic of its inability to deal with far bigger problems.