Israel has obviously not liberated the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. We have occupied them, but we have not liberated them.

When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business. I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart.

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.

Universally, not only in Israel, people want to feel good about themselves. We all want to feel good to some extent.

Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.

The dreams and the visions of the Israeli founding fathers, these were very very ambitious dreams. They were world reformers. They wanted to create a new and improved kind of humanity, or at least, a new and improved Jewish society, a new and improved Jewish individual human being here. The whole Zionist project was based on a whole spectrum of different and even conflicting dreams and visions.

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