A.B. Yehoshua: In the Warsaw Ghetto there were no rockets. When the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, spoke about Yassir Arafat as a Nazi, I was totally against it. I don't think that Arafat, the terrorists, Hamas and the jihadists are Nazis. This is a national fight for territory. If the Jews went to Australia, for example, to build a state, there would be no jihad, no Hamas, no land would be occupied. So you can never use those terms. So all the comparisons with the Holocaust from Israel's side, or from the anti-Israeli side, are totally false and unjust. People were saying in the intifada that we had been behaving like the Nazis, but I say that during the four years of the intifada there was a very sophisticated army, with sophisticated arms, with tanks, with aeroplanes etc, fighting against Palestinian militias with explosives. During the four years approximately 1,000 Jewish civilians were killed, compared to 4,000 Palestinians. The Nazis would kill 4,000 civilians in one hour.

HJ: I agree. But of course those who want to speak in those terms accuse the Jews of employing the Holocaust for pity. I don't know a single Jew who does that, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that somewhere or other there will be some Jews who would say, "We can do what we want" - though they would never put it like that - "because this was done to us." The only thing that I think that you can say that the Jews learned from the Holocaust - which was not a lesson, the Holocaust was not there to teach us lessons - the only thing that you could see the evidence of Jews having learned in Israel is that we are a people very much on our own. That anything can happen and that we have to look after ourselves, and when we say, "Never again", we mean many, many things, but one of the things we mean is, don't go defenceless into the world.

ABY: Yes, it is immoral to go defenceless, this is the reason why we thought that the Diaspora was immoral, sitting among nations without really having the possibility to defend ourselves. It was immoral to be without arms. And this is why the entire world supported Zionism, because they said that if the Jews are going to take responsibility for their reality, this is a moral act. So we had the support of the world and especially of the left wing, and even in a subtle way the right wing. The anti-Semites were saying, "OK, let's get rid of the Jews," but the Left were always pro-Zionist, because, as I say, this is taking responsibility for your reality, for your entire life, and this we respect as an act of morality.

HJ: Until we took responsibility, as they saw it, too far, and won. While we were brave little Israel battling against the world, I remember it vividly, what it was like to be a Jew in the Diaspora before the '67 war, we were young enough and strong enough to fight. Everybody wanted to fight in what seemed a just cause - Jew and Christian alike - but the minute Israel won, the whole complex changed, partly because of the occupation. I understand that.