On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.

We have to carry through to the next day and hope that we will be okay tomorrow as we are today and in the meantime, enjoy life.

I would love to leave my children and grandchildren a nicer world than the one I am going to leave them. But bearing in mind that I was born in the world of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, the legacy I leave them might not be as terrible as the legacy my parents and grandparents left to me.

I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.

A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.

It's possible a Palestinian state will be installed over the heads of the Palestinians. It could be part of an agreement between the Israeli government and moderate Arab states, but not one between Israel and the Palestinians.