In 1929, René Magritte painted a picture that has since become iconic in both art and philosophy. The Treachery of Images depicts a finely detailed tobacco pipe with a caption beneath: Ceci n’est pas une pipe – ‘This is not a pipe’. Magritte’s point is subtle and enduring. It is indeed not a pipe, but an image of one. You cannot fill it with tobacco, light it, or smoke it. It is a representation, not the object itself.

Israel manoeuvres within it, cautiously. Hamas exploits it, selectively. Saudi Arabia nods along, calculating

Magritte was exploring the gap between signifier and reality, between the name and the thing named. His visual paradox is echoed in Alfred Korzybski’s famous aphorisms: ‘The word is not the thing…The map is not the territory.’ Language, maps, and images are abst

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