That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.

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

In some of the Israeli media, but not all, they read about very nasty things done by Israeli settlers and soldiers to Palestinian Arabs. This is a pain in the neck for many Israelis. They say: Leave us alone, what can we do about it? Or they say: Look at Syria, look at Iraq, the West Bank is paradise by comparison. I was one of the first to say, shortly after the Six-Day War, that occupation is corrupting. It corrupts the occupier and, in a different way, it corrupts the occupied.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right. And, therefore it's not black and white. Sometimes, recently it is indeed a clash between wrong and wrong. It is not as simple as fascism was.

Recently with IS and Islamist fanaticism, it has become easy for the Israeli government to simply push the Palestinian struggle for self-determination into the same ranks as these fundamentalist movements.

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves. This is not the case here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right.