ABY: The question is if we have right or we don't have right? Leave the question of casualties: do you have the right to defend yourself when Hamas is firing rockets from Gaza, after you have pulled out?

HJ: Abraham, I wish you and other Israeli writers would write more often for the English. We don't hear your voice unless we are novel readers who know your books and are therefore attentive to what else you say. What we are told is that anyone in Israel who stands up against the cruelty of Israeli policy is persecuted. People who don't know anything about it, who think Israel is an intolerant monolithic entity, assume there's a secret police waiting to pounce on anyone who speaks out. So the real heroes, we are told, are the historical revisionists, the ones who argue that the 1948 war was in fact a cruel dispossession of the Palestinian people and nothing else. The only Israeli Jews we hear inveigh against Israel are those who have virtually washed their hands of it. We don't hear enough of those voices of Jews who live there, who are sympathetic to the country because they cannot be otherwise, for whom that land is their land but who take severe issue with many things. We don't hear the criticisms of Israel from those who love Israel.

ABY: In a moral judgment, I always say, I can judge what is happening. For example, the first war between America and Iraq in 1991 was justified. They had taken Kuwait, so they had to fight, they had to liberate Kuwait. The second Iraq war wasn't right. I was totally against the first war between Lebanon and Israel. It was profoundly unjust, and then the second Lebanese war I was for. You have to examine everything in moral, objective terms, Kantian terms.