ABY: I don't know. If you're asking me about the survival of Israel, then of course Israel can survive militarily. Iran is a different kind of question. This has to be handled by the whole European community and is also a problem for the Arabs themselves who live near Iran, so they have to deal with it. I don't believe that Iran will fire nuclear missiles, because they can be destroyed too.

HJ: I feel that it is a shame for Standpoint readers, who might not have read your novels, to know you just politically in this way. Because to read your novels, to read something about what it's like to be in Israel at the moment, and you're very delicate in that way - to me, your latest novel, Friendly Fire, is a Tolstoyan novel, in that it knows that the truth of anything lives in the moment-by-moment details of a life. You do an almost impossible thing in that novel - you do many wonderful things - but you do something about a lift engineer at the heart of the novel. The novel has two hearts actually, or two halves of one heart. One half of the heart is about a lift engineer. And you talk in immense detail about lifts, and what lifts are like, and what they're like when they malfunction, and as you read you think, "I don't think I want to know any more about lifts." But you go on, and then you discover that what you're actually reading is the story of a practical man living in Israel with all sorts of the issues we've been talking about impinging, and then not impinging. And it makes such a difference to read them - you're a novelist, so you will feel what I feel - that in the end, there is a truth that can only come to you from art, that can't come to you from all the political discussions in the world. And for me to read those is to have a better sense, an optimistic as well as a melancholic sense, of what it is like to be an Israeli, what it is like to have an Israeli conscience, what it is like to be Jewish in that world. Anybody who hates Israel should read these novels, more than listening to everything you have to say politically, wonderful as it is. In the novels, one gets that sense of the sheer emotional complexity of it. What it is to love Arabs, what it is to be frightened of Arabs, what it is to feel day by day that you are involved in this conflict, but also that you live a life which is very unlike the life that we who are not involved in this conflict live day by day. That's one of the great things that an artist can do.

ABY: This is what I want the complexity for: so people don't make a quick judgment. When something is Israel's fault, say it very clearly. You have the full right to criticise Israel. You have to be free. The thing is that the Jews and the non-Jews can do it: feel yourself free.