ABY: Exactly, and this is the reason why it's so good to be an Israeli: I'm free, I can say whatever I think. For 42 years, since the Six Day War, I, and others too, of course, have been arguing for the legitimacy of a Palestinian state. We failed in the beginning, for the first 20 years after the 1967 war, but now the majority of Israelis believe in it. I was the first to sign the petition to recognise the PLO. And I was one of the first to hail the Geneva Accord as it was signed between the PLO and the Israelis. And I was saying with Amos [Oz] and with others, we are going to have to speak with Hamas, if they want to speak with us we must speak with them. I have said all these things. But when they shoot at us, what do you think that I should do? What do you want me to do?

HJ: "Be nice to them," they say here. "Be nice to them, speak to them."

ABY: But they are not nice. I said to Gideon Levy [a prominent left-wing Israeli journalist], with whom I had an exchange of letters, "You are protecting the Palestinian cause all the time, explaining how we are criminals of war. Now the Palestinians who love you will come to you and say to you, ‘We want the checkpoints open, or we will shoot.' You'll say ‘No, don't shoot, don't shoot!' You advise the Palestinians not to shoot, but when they shoot, you defend them." This is absurd.

HJ: But of course what they say here is that those rockets that they were sending in were tin cans, they were nothing, they didn't kill, they were toy rockets, they didn't kill enough Israelis.

ABY: This is absurd. There are rockets, and they are falling on houses. The problem is that they are falling on kindergartens. These are the same rockets as Hizbollah's that have killed 60 or 70 civilians. If they are useless, then don't fire them. Just say, "We love the Israelis, give us food, give us a say, open the borders." This is what is so absurd - the combination of viciousness and stupidity. Rockets were targeted only at civilians. Rockets were falling on kindergartens or schools but our "problem" was that our children were in shelters and we didn't have enough deaths to justify the "morality" of balanced casualties.