ABY: They don't have a blockade, they have an open territorial passage to Egypt. We are not responsible for Egypt closing the border checkpoints. Why do they have to smuggle all their things through tunnels? Because Egypt closed the borders. Now why has Egypt - a country of 70 million Muslims, Arabs, who are brothers, who were fighting for the Palestinians for such a long time - why have they closed the passes? All the material could come from Egypt, this was a territorial open border. So if you understand why even the Egyptians, their brothers, their friends, the most important Arab country, have closed the borders to Hamas, you can understand what type of organisation it is.

So are we responsible for the checkpoints? If they say, "We want to destroy Israel, we are launching rockets," do we then have to open borders? Morally, why do we have to do it?

HJ: With other Israeli writers, who think not dissimilarly from you, like Amos Oz and David Grossman, you have your differences, but I think essentially we see you as the three great literary sages of Israel. It's so terribly important, I think, for everybody to read you, because you make something possible for Jews: you make it possible for Jews to hold a complex of feelings, a complex that it's almost impossible to feel here. It is wonderful to hear someone who is such a refined moral critic of Israel, a refined ethical critic of Israeli actions, who at the same time can say, "But the Gaza action is another thing," taking one issue at a time. It's so hard for Jews who themselves feel that to say it here, because the minute you accede to any criticism of Israel, you accede to the whole bundle, because the whole bundle is that Israel is vicious in everything that it does, and no one will distinguish them.

Of course, what's so wonderful is for an English Jew to hear these distinctions being made by an intelligent Israeli Jew. You Israeli Jews don't have to prove each time your Jewish bona fides - that's sorted. So when you criticise Israel - it's grotesque the thing they call "criticism" here, as though they're posting the most subtle and reluctant demurrals, but let's just use the word - you are able to criticise it with a great deal of freedom, secure in your Israeli nationality, secure therefore in your Israeli Jewishness. Over here, we have to keep proving it all the time, we don't feel that we have the right and every time that we criticise Israel we have to say, "But at the same time we are for Israel," and that's what the critics then latch on to: "Ah, you're for Israel are you? What about this? What about that?" And the critics, as they call themselves, as though they're engaged in some refined Arnoldian practice, have this selective anthology of quotations - Ben Gurion said this, this one said that, in 1948 this happened - everyone has his own little package of quotes, proving that we've actually been swine from the very beginning.