JS: Whether it's Shimon Peres or Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert, sometimes the most hawkish — I mean, not sometimes, but always — politicians, when they become Prime Minister and when there is a genuine possibility of peace on the table, have all become statesmen, all educated the Israeli public towards the need for sacrifices for the sake of peace. No one expected Ariel Sharon to be the Ariel Sharon of the Gaza withdrawal. No one expected Olmert to be the kite flyer of various very audacious peace proposals.

So we are focusing on one-half of this equation, which is by far the less difficult half and almost no attention is paid to the other side. That is very problematic to me. To my mind, this distorts so much of Western thinking about the particular drama that is being enacted in the Middle East.

DJ: You talk in the book about the delegitimisation of Israel, but this is about more than just Israel — the way in which the language of human rights has been hijacked and turned into a weapon to be used against Israel. Can you say how this has happened and why this is such a tragic development given the extraordinary role that the Jewish people have played throughout history in the emergence of human rights, the very ideas of freedom and toleration, and now these very concepts are being turned against you? 

JS: A major American Christian theologian has written a book on how human rights came directly from the Bible. That is a point which I've made in several of my books. The book which Thomas Hobbes, Milton and especially John Locke are in dialogue with is the Hebrew Bible. It is quoted 657 times alone in Leviathan. This was a very religious Hebraic concept of human rights — extremely Hebraic in fact. The least Hebraic was the one Jewish guy, Baruch Spinoza, who was a little bit of a mixed-up kid, the descendant of marranos, who were Christian in public and Jews in private, and it kind of made him the first Jewish intellectual, of whom there were many, who just wanted to see a world without Judaism and Christianity, because religion was the source of our problems. Mind you, we used to have a better class of atheist in those days. 

So the concept of human rights emerges out of this biblical culture in the 17th century — this huge encounter in the wake of the Reformation, and especially Calvinism, which had such implications for Scotland, England, and especially for the Pilgrim Fathers. 

Out of the concept of obligation came the idea that people have rights. Out of the concept of human dignity — that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God — came this feeling that each one of us has a non-negotiable dignity, which is really the basis of human rights. What always struck me as wacky and counter-implausible is that great line of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Just think how self-evident that would be to Plato and Aristotle: they would have thought he was mad. All men are created equal? What about the gold, the silver and the bronze? What about Aristotle and those who are born to rule and those who are born to be ruled? You couldn't have a concept of human rights without the Bible. But we have now reached a stage where rights have been severed from their living connection with responsibilities. The whole human rights discourse which was rooted in a religious world view has now become a kind of rival to, and opponent of, every religious world view. 

As I wrote in the book, it is not easy to get people to hate. It goes against their moral sense, which as Adam Smith told us, comes with being human. Therefore you have always to legitimate hatred by seeking legitimisation in the most prestigious authority within the culture at any given moment. In the Middle Ages, that was religion, so you had religious anti-Judaism. In 19th century post-Enlightenment Europe, religion no longer functioned as a source of authority. The glittering, pristine authority lay with science. Hence, the adoption of two pseudo sciences, social Darwinism and the so-called scientific study of race, [leading to] racial anti-Semitism. In the post-Second World War world, after Hiroshima, science no longer had pristine authority. In the post-Holocaust world, that ultimate authority goes to human rights. Therefore, anti-Semitism had to be justified in the language of human rights or it couldn't be justified at all. The ease with which that entire post-Holocaust structure was infiltrated or captured is extraordinary, because no civilisation has ever tried so systematically to create this immune system of "Never Again". It was defeated in one, simple step. If you believe in human rights, if you believe in everything the Holocaust taught us, then the worst things in the world are racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide and crimes against humanity — the five cardinal sins of which Israel was accused at the 2001 Durban Conference.