DJ: One of the most telling points you make is that Jews have lost many things all through their history, but the one thing they have never lost is an argument. Jews are good at argument. But you feel that Jews are losing the argument at the moment on the international stage, both at the micro and the macro level. 

JS: I believe that Israel is losing the argument because, in some senses, it never really tried to make it. We are in a situation, not only in the Middle East or in the Jewish world, but in Western civilisation generally, of that great W.B. Yeats couplet [in "The Second Coming"], "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." 

There are potential spokespeople for Israel who have enormous articulacy and street-cred, like Amos Oz for instance, who are able to speak in a language with which the average Guardian reader and BBC viewer can sympathise. Somehow, there was never a co-ordinated attempt to make that argument. It is almost as if it is written into the psyche of the state of Israel, this feeling that we came into existence because of the Holocaust, because the world was against us, because when we cried for help, no one listened, no one responded — that there is almost no purpose in arguing the case because every time we do, we lose. Hence Israel has depended and relied on, more than anything else in recent years, the US. So I spent the years from late 2000 to about 2004 visiting Israel to try and persuade people that it really must make the argument. In the end, I failed. 

DJ: Are you worried that Barack Obama — to whom you pay generous tribute in the book, for whom so many Jews voted, and with whom Jews in the wider world identify and look to for leadership — is less viscerally sympathetic to Israel? And that, particularly for example in his Cairo speech, he has to some extent bought into this different narrative about Israel: that Israel really is a product of the Holocaust? Because in your book you very clearly set out the reasons why Israel's roots lie right back in Biblical times.

JS: I tell this story about my late great-grandfather who went to settle in Israel in 1871 and I could have told the story about my great-great-grandfather who settled there in 1852, but didn't take his family with him. Our connection goes back a very long way. 

But I don't actually analyse the politics of the US in those somewhat narrative or psychotherapeutic terms. It just seemed to me all along that, like whoever said, "Nations don't have principles, they have interests," the negative impact on America of Iraq in particular — on its standing in the world, on the self-image of America on Americans — did suggest that America would move into its old default option that it falls back into when it gets its fingers burnt in international politics. This default option is isolationism and actually isolationism is never an option in a global culture. But some move back from principle to interests struck me as inevitable, whoever became the next President of the United States.