ABY: And of course we are not better than the others. I want to be judged in a relative way and when I am wrong, I am wrong and when I am right, I am right. And I have to say the question of coming to Israel, to Palestine, at the beginning of the 20th century, is a problem for me. I can say one thing in our defence: by coming to Palestine in the 1920s, we saved another 300,000 Jews from the gas chambers.

HJ: You have said, had more people gone to Israel earlier, had more people seized the opportunity of Zionism, European history might have been different.

ABY: What I hear all the time from my Arab friends is, "You didn't have moral legitimacy to come here." This is the most basic thing that even my dearest Israeli-Arab friends say to me: "We can accept you as a fact but never will we give you moral legitimacy." I was writing this essay about what is the moral right and I said that I cannot recognise the religious right, I cannot recognise the historical right, I cannot recognise anything but the right of the person who does not have a home and is condemned to death and who comes to take a room in my apartment, to save his life. This was our right - the right of the distressed, the right of the hungry men who had to steal.

HJ: And it wasn't any person's apartment either, it was an apartment that we had visited before, many of our family were still in that apartment.

ABY: Of course we had emotional and historical ties to Palestine but this did not give us the right to take part of it, only the fact that we were a homeless people did. If there had been in those times a kind of a United Nations, a kind of just organisation, it would have said: the Jews will take a part of Palestine, the Palestinians will be compensated by a part of Jordan, Jordan will take a part of Iraq, Iraq will take a part of Pakistan, and then we'll take back Turkey and then England and every country. When there is a person who is on drugs, let's say, in the street, what do we do for him? Every one of us pays £1 to make a home for him so that he will not be homeless. So does all the world, because the problem of the Jews was the problem of the world, not only of the Palestinians. The Palestinians say, "It is not our problem." But you are part of the world - the Palestinians - so this is the problem of the world and everyone has to contribute something in order to help this difficult, difficult people with this problem.