Did you have to, in your school days, memorise Cicero's speeches? Cicero's great speech against Catilina-"Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?", how long will you abuse our patience? When I hear this,  when I hear about Gaza, when I hear about the Jenin "massacre", I get crazy, I get mad. You see, what is an appropriate retaliation when 20 per cent of your population is subjected to air raids, and when your children can't go to school?

And on the other side, Jenin turned out to be the most brilliant PR opportunity — 45 people killed, and the Palestinians made out that 4,000 had been massacred. And then it is always reported like this ever since, young journalists look up the file and it says "Jenin: massacre." The same is true of Sabra and Chatila — terrible stories, but who did the killing? I'm afraid, Lebanese Christians. But the propaganda is always that the Jews did it. Sharon pulls out of Gaza and 8,000 settlers leave their homes, and the result is more rockets: this is the situation.

AR: Of course, but the fact is that the Israelis, for all that they should be brilliant propagandists, never seem to be. You get some people, Tom Gross being a good example, who put out the truth on a regular basis. And sometimes they have good ambassadors, like they do in London at the moment  —he's excellent. But by and large the Israelis don't do themselves any favours on the propaganda front. You mentioned '67, the Six-Day War, earlier, and the key moment when the Left effectively forsook Israel.

GW: I think 90 per cent, 85 per cent, of the Left has abandoned Israel, and I would say that 20 per cent of the Right is still anti-Semitic, anti-Israel. But broadly speaking, what I would call the centre Right, the Thatcherite Right, the Kohl Right, were our best friends. 

I have very strong views on how the boycott in the universities would be best met: not through letters to the editor and so on. I am in the process of setting up six Chairs of Modern Israel Studies — this is a new thing called "Area Studies", in other words, it's not about studying the Bible and ancient history, but by starting in 1947. And I've now got two already fixed: a very ambitious chair for £3.6 million in Oxford, and a ten-year Chair at King's College London.

AR: There's also one being set up by the journalist Jeff Randall in Nottingham. He is raising £1.5 million for a full professorship, and he's not Jewish or anything.

GW: I'm now trying to set up chairs in Sussex and other universities, and they have a particular reason in each case. One in Manchester, which will be called the Weizmann Chair, and one in Bradford, where half of the student population is Muslim. The other will be at either Leeds or Glasgow. And it's almost more difficult to get the professors than the money.

AR: But how will they interact, how will the boycott affect them? Because they're bound to be, especially in Bradford, tremendously controversial.