But I have to add something else. I think that beyond all this there is, perhaps among the British especially, a resentment against Zionism in general. "The Jews went to Palestine, they took part of Palestine, they didn't have the right to do it, we have helped them by giving them the Balfour Declaration, they didn't have to do it, the Jews didn't have a right to go." And this is an argument, of course, because of historical rights: "I don't believe in historical rights, you cannot keep historical rights to a land you abandoned 2,000 years ago and you cannot come back to it." And for the Palestinians this is the reason why, I think, this conflict has stayed on the agenda of the whole world for about 120 years.

HJ: Well, the other reason it's preoccupying the world is that the world knows that while on the one hand it says, "We cannot bear Zionism, we cannot bear what's happened to the Palestinians, you cannot wander into another country just like that," that same world knows that its actions made the creation of Israel inevitable. I am astonished sometimes at how the people of countries that said to Jews, "Get out," can in the next breath say, "But don't go there. Get out, but don't go here. We don't want to know anything of you, but we retain the right to have views about where you settle." So they carry a burden of weariness and guilt of which they wish now to be rid. There's a wonderful statement by the philosopher John Gray in his book Straw Dogs about how impossible people find it to forgive those who have suffered "irreparable wrongs." The Holocaust is a case in point. "When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?" he asks. Meaning never.

Many in Europe have developed a strategy for not having to forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. They know they cannot deny it altogether, or tell the Jews they had it coming, but they can say, "You have proven yourself to be unworthy of it, by not turning out to be that exceptional people you were meant to be. Having suffered the Holocaust, you were meant to act as no other
human beings had ever acted on the face of the earth, ever. You were meant to give everything back, you were meant to be" - I think it might be from you that I heard this phrase - "you were meant to be magnanimous in conquest, you were meant to do what no conqueror has ever done, and return every scrap of what you'd won in war." And the moment Israel was not as no victorious country has ever been before, the rest of the world was able to say, "Ah, you are the same, you are no better than anybody else and, in fact, because this was done to you, you're actually worse than anybody else because you of all people should have learnt this lesson." So, yet again, the Jews are made an exceptional people. They are an exceptional people in that they should have nowhere to live and they are an exceptional people in that they should have learnt lessons that no human being has ever learnt.