HJ: I think that's a propaganda mistake. We'd have done much better in the propaganda war had a few more Israelis been killed.

ABY: Exactly. This is the criterion: "Why do they have so many casualties and you have less?" What's happening? You have to balance the casualties. What do you mean by the balance of casualties? We are a people of six million. There are 200 million Arabs around us. So perhaps we will balance the casualties, when we are 200 million. Fight with Hizbollah, balance the casualties, fight with Gaza, balance the casualties. What is this idea of balancing the casualties instead of digging shelters for their people in Gaza? Instead, they were digging tunnels in order to fight better by taking their fighters from one place to another.

HJ: There is no comprehension of this. When the demonstrators walked through the streets, almost every day, certainly every weekend, during the weeks of Gaza and for a couple of weeks afterwards, there was one banner that they carried: "No to the slaughter and massacre." "Slaughter" and "massacre" only work rhetorically as long as there's an imbalance of numbers. You certainly can't say "slaughter" and "massacre" if they've also been slaughtering and massacring you. So the numbers are very, very important. They suggest an imbalance of power and a heartlessness. This makes a rhetoric of heartlessness - "the Jews are heartless, they kill indiscriminately" - as though there is something discriminate about those wonderful rockets that Hamas is sending over, picking out their targets with a fine precision. They don't even know where they're going or which direction they're flying in.

ABY: Yes, they were paralysing one million people who had to be in shelters because of these rockets. This idea of balance - how many British were killed in the Second World War? I don't know how you don't have the numbers, we remember all the numbers of our casualties from the beginning of Zionism. But I think there were about 400,000 and 10 million Germans. Now where is the question of balance in that?

HJ: Ah well, we can say we had right on our side.