Johann Hari

Israel and Palestine

Drunken Politics: One of the things about your writing is that it’s hard to categorise. In the sense that you talk about war crimes that Israel committed and the suffering on the Palestinian side. So American pundits will kind of assume that you're Hamas, but then you've also done pieces on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie who has been targeted by Islamic extremists. So I wanted to know, number 1: We don't really hear about Palestinian suffering in the States, so I wanted to know what you thought of this kind of restricted journalism and maybe compare writing over here in the UK to what you see as dangerous trends in US media including restricted journalism and niche journalism.

Johann Hari: American newspapers are unbelievably bad. It’s when you go to America that you realise they're so dull, they’re so incredibly ideologically narrow. So you get this really incredibly right wing view, in the spectrum of global opinion, represented as centrist and that's all you hear. There are many reasons for the death of the American newspaper industry, but one of them is just that they produce an absolutely lousy product, that does not help [anyone] figure out what is going on in the world, the Palestinian issue is a good example.

Everyone knows in America, rightly, the Israel narrative, which is insofar as it goes, true. It is absolutely true that the experience of Diaspora life for Jewish people was horrific; they were subject to genocide, ethnic cleansing and the most appalling atrocities of the twentieth century. And it is true that as a result many of them went to what is now Israel. What you don't hear is that there was already a bunch of people living there. Nothing would make me happier than if the Israeli founding myth that it was ‘a land without people for people without land’ was true. You go to Tel Aviv which wasn't built on stolen land, which was built on genuine empty land and you see what a Jewish state could have been and it's one of the most beautiful cities in the world: amazing, thriving, democratic cosmopolitan, beautiful.

Unfortunately the rest of Israel isn't like that, there were people living there and the Palestinians had done nothing to justify or support the abuses against Jews. They were completely innocent, in the same way that the Kurds are denied a state now, and if they turned up and said, “Okay, New Jersey is ours tomorrow”, I don't think that the people in New Jersey would say, "Fair enough we're off to California, you have New Jersey". No, they love their houses, they love the places they’re from; they would stay and they would defend it.

And in the same way, that's what the Palestinians have done, and actually if you look at the Palestinian story, one of the things that is striking is how unviolent they were for so long. Their land is taken, 800,000 of them were ethnically cleansed, driven out of their land and not allowed to return and this is not seriously disputed by serious historians who are not propagandists any more. And the Palestinians were driven into these enclaves, Gaza and the West bank, some remained in what is now Israel with second class citizen status and then in 1967 there is another war and even Gaza and the West bank are taken and then Israel starts sending settlers to steal that land.and settle on it.

I can't remember the figures but between 1948 and 1967, something like 400 Israelis were killed, that’s appalling, I don't believe in killing, killing civilians is always wrong and it's always murder. But bearing in mind you've had ethnic cleansing, and 800,000 people, absolutely huge massacres and for almost twenty years you've had virtually no retaliation from the Palestinians at all. You then, when the settlements start being built and the tiny remnants of land that they've been left with are stolen, you then do begin to get some fight back.

People say, and this is one of the most incredible ignorant clichés you get in the American media is they say "Why don't they Palestinians try passive resistance, why don't they try a Gandhi?”. Well these people need to be told that there was something called the First Intifada. In the First Intifada, the Palestinians overwhelmingly peacefully, in 1987, simply refused to cooperate with the occupation. They ripped up their identity cards and they sat down. Yitzhak Rabin, now revered as a man of peace blah blah blah, gave the order and his words [to the Israeli Defense Force] were: "Break their bones". They went in and beat the shit out of them, so that's the reality. After the failure of the First Intifada, a fairly peaceful resistance, there then began to be more violence. Some of that violence took horrible and unjustifiable forms like suicide bombing of civilians. The violence has always been much more on the Israeli side, but that doesn't justify a single attack on an Israeli civilian but it's an element of the story that’s not told to Americans.

So look for example at what’s happening in Gaza now. It's 2006, the people of Gaza in a free and open election choose Hamas. I hate Hamas. Hamas are antithetical to everything I believe, but it was an open election, it was fair, it was not a rejection of a two state solution, as 70% of Palestinians want a two state solution. It was a rejection of the corruption of Fatah.

Drunken Politics: Can I just interject very quickly, we've heard other people state that Hamas actually stole the election because they were, this is one example, throwing members of Fatah off rooftops.

Johann Hari: No, the chronology of that isn't right. Right, what happened is, Hamas won fairly, no one disputes this, independent monitors, UN monitors, everything.

Drunken Politics: Didn’t Jimmy Carter say it was a fair election?

Johann Hari: That’s right, Hamas won, what then happened was that the American government then said that you can't allow Hamas to become the government. So they prevailed upon President Abbas, the idea [being] that you have two tiers of power here, you have the presidency, which is meant to be symbolic, and the legislative power of the Prime Minister, the real power broker. A bit like in Britain, the Queen and the Prime Minister. So they appealed to Abbas, equivalent to the Queen, to not allow Hamas to take power. They then started to flood Gaza with arms [calling for them to] forcibly stop them from taking power. In that context, where suddenly the democratically elected government is getting attacked, it's true they begun to fight back. There begun to be effectively, a civil war, a breakdown of power. When Hamas eventually does take power as the Palestinian people wanted, the European Union, the US and Israel together, imposed a blockade of Gaza.

I spent a lot of time in Gaza and the first thing you have to understand about a blockade, is that Gaza is absolutely tiny, a little bit bigger than the island of Manhattan, about 1.5 million people living on it and they can never leave. Most of the people there, if you speak to people our age who are, I guess, in our thirties, have never left this tiny patch of land. So you’ve got 1.5 million people, standing on top of a tall building and you can see the borders of their world. You can see the Mediterranean Sea to one side, and the Israeli barbed wire to the other. They were blockaded meaning that it was surrounded and very little was allowed in and out, so they massively restricted the food, Ariel Sharon’s advisor Dov Weisglass described it as putting the Palestinians on a diet, and medical supplies weren’t allowed in.

When I was last in Gaza, the hospitals were collapsing, the blood transfusion units were down to the very last, don’t know what it’s called, the centrifuge in the middle of it, so if that breaks, there’s no blood transfusions in Gaza, meaning huge numbers of people die. There have been things like the sewage system collapsing because they’re not letting pipes in, they're running out of medicine. They’re in the middle of that and bearing in minds, this is a response to a democratic election. Then in response to the blockade, rockets are fired. Then they [Israel] say, “what can we do we're being rocketed”. Well hang on; go back to the chronology of what happened. Then in response to the rockets, they began as what everyone now knows, to bomb Gaza. We know that about 1400, 40% of them children, people have died. And now it looks like in a couple of days, and I guess your listeners will know by the time they hear this, it looks like the Israelis are going to elect Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who's committed to toppling Hamas and reoccupying Gaza.

So all that narrative, most people as I say would know they Israeli narrative, and that’s important, and there’s truth in that narrative, but there’s just as much truth in the Palestinian narrative and that isn’t. That is shocking. You mention that I support Salman Rushdie, and I support Ayaan Hirsi Ali's right to speech. I absolutely hate Islamic fundamentalists, I detest them, they believe in killing all gay people, imprisoning women in their houses. I’ve taken a lot of risk to work undercover to expose these people. But it’s precisely, one of the reasons why I am so critical of what’s happened in Israel, is because it's causing Islamic fundamentalism to rise. Since the Bombing in Gaza, support for Hamas has sky rocketed, one of the biggest recruiting sergeants for Islamic fundamentalists for this part of East London and all over the world are pictures of what’s happening in Gaza and the West bank. Gaza has been turned into a Petri dish of Islamic fundamentalism. There’s no contradiction between being critical of human rights abuses by Israel and being critical of Islamic fundamentalism – the connecting thread being you're in favour of human rights for everyone.

Drunken Politics: Right, that's a very logical point so why do you think that at least in the American media's narrative [it is perceived that by] criticising Israel you support terrorism, yet [ignoring] everything you just said…

Johann Hari: The problem with terrorism is that it's a propaganda term. Terrorism is violence we don't want. It’s apparently not terrorism to blow up a family in Gaza, or a school in Gaza that you know, having been given the GPS coordinates, is a school with the UN approved coordinates. It is [however] terrorism to blow up a family in Tel Aviv, either they both are or neither are. I prefer to talk about murder, and when it's murder and when it's not. Both those instances are clearly murder, and I refuse to use the term, so why is there a situation? One, there is a group that describe themselves falsely as a pro-Israel lobby, in fact they are doing unimaginable harm to Israel. There is no contradiction between the pro-Palestinain and pro-Israel, I have friends on both sides who I want to be safe and the same thing will make them both safer.

The idea that bombing the hell out of Gaza and stealing more of the West bank is going to make Israelis safe is insane. And when you have a friend who's self-harming, and you going to their house and they’re slashing their arms up with razors, you don't say “Oh you've run out of razors, I'll go and buy you some more”. You say, “Wait you've got to stop doing this, we've got to find a way for you to stop doing this”. The same thing is happening in Israel, Israel is harming itself. Even if you don’t care about the Palestinians in the slightest, even if all you cared about is Israeli security, the course their on is a catastrophic for them. There is a group that describes as pro-Israeli, people like the Anti-Defamation League, Camera and Honest Reporting who just viciously smear people who try to tell the truth about this. You look about Jimmy Carter, you know Carter brokered the first and only peace deal Israel ever had with one of its Arab neighbors; he couldn't do much more for Israel’s security than Jimmy Carter has done. Yet even he could be smeared as, you know, anti-Semitic and the terrible thing about this is that it makes it actually really hard to deal with genuine anti-Semitis,, which is real and most people then think it's just a propaganda smear.

Drunken Politics: People then said, with Carter it was just really over his book where he just told the history of what happened from both sides.

Drunken Poltics 2: And he's not a part of that?

Drunken Politics: And that’s actually one of the reasons why people actually said that Obama didn't have him speak at the democratic national convention. I have just another quick follow-up question with the media and I’m curious about your take on it.

Blogs, Newspapers and Pundits

Drunken Politics:So moving away from newspapers, and just [focussing on] American punditry, a lot of people see the rise of popularity of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow. Maddow I like a lot more and I think she’s intelligent [and works[ as a good counter to the Bill O’Reilleys and the Sean Hannitys. I don’t think it’s like this over here, do you see that as dangerous, that instead of countering the extreme right propaganda noise machine, we’re creating just a left wing equivalent instead of countering them with more objective journalism?

Johann Hari: That’s not my problem with Olberman and Maddow. Like you, I like both of them and they’re nice people and they do some really good work. I think that the problem is more that something Noam Chomsky talks about [how the] left is [being] represented. This idea that Maddow represents the far left, if you listen to what she said about Gaza it’s shocking. I was really disappointed with her, she took a really shocking and ahistorical view. Her views were unhelpful to understand what was happening, and Rachel Maddow is on domestic issues pretty liberal but on foreign issues, she’s pretty hawkish.

Drunken Politics:We could figure out whether it was her or the network was hawkish.

Johann Hari: What I think the danger is though… if you’re going to have a shrill imbecilic right wing people, it’d be great if we all spoke in this lovely elevated way. Look, if you’re going to have shrill imbecilic right-wingers, you’re may as well have shrill imbecilic left-wingers, which I’m not saying Maddow or Olbermann are shrill imbeciles or indeed left-wingers. I don’t’ think that’s the problem, the problem is what gets delineated as ‘the left’. Did you see in Forbes magazine, did the most incredible thing recently: the top 25 most powerful liberals?

Drunken Politics: Maureen Dowd?!

Johann Hari Christopher Hitchens? Who’s a friend of mine, but no one’s idea of a left-winger and Fareed Zakaria? He’s the most market fundamentalist loon. It really is ridiculous. It’s very interesting because, where you delimit dissent, I think Noam Chomsky is right about this, is that you don’t just ban people form saying things, but what happens is, people think that even if this really liberal person thinks that, then it must be true. If you never hear anyone giving the Palestinian story, and you’re a nice well-intentioned liberal person and you think “Well if even Rachel Maddow, who everyone thinks is this crazy left winger, says that Israel is in the right and they had to do this” then surely that’s just the truth.

Drunken Politics 2: I feel that the part of the problem is the real liberals have been marginalised to the Internet where there are fantastic blogs like Glenn Greenwald. The mainstream media actually has a vested interested in dismissing them as marginalised, radical and unserious. I wonder if you could focus on this, I know you’ve blogged for Huffington Post, what you see as a counterculture to the mainstream media on the Internet where the liberals are hiding.

Drunken Politics: They’ve been banished

Johann Hari: There are some really bad blogs, and there are some good blogs. Just like there are some really bad newspaper journalist there are some really good newspaper journalists. The idea of people, for example, I write for the New York Times sometimes, the idea of news journalists at the New York Times sneering at bloggers, who were the ones who told us definitively that there were weapons of mass destruction. There’s no humility there, so I think there is a problem, I think there are some really good blogs, I mean I’m slightly worried about the death of newspapers with all the provisos I’ve given. Newspapers do an important newsgathering role, even with all the distortions we’ve talked about. The bloggers, generally can’t do [that], generally bloggers are commenting on news often in brilliant ways, but generally their breaking stories by reading what the mainstream media says and realising their wrong. It costs a lot of money to send a correspondent to Iraq or wherever, and to employ people. I’m slightly worried about newspapers, [obviously] the best way for newspapers to sell themselves is to make themselves much better products, which is clear they’re not going to do. Even newspapers in their current feeble state in the US, if they die, are going to leave a hole in the newsgathering stage, which is worrying. But I do think you’re right about people sneering at blogs, who are the real people who live in glasshouses throwing stones around.

Iraq

Drunken Politics: I've been reading this one quote from a citizen who said and this is a sad statement, but it said "at least under Saddam, we knew what could get us killed, we knew if he had political ambitions, but now going to the grocery store I have a bigger chance of....”

Johann Hari: I'm slightly wary of that argument because there was massive murder of civilians under Saddam, we know that it wasn't on the scale that we've seen in the last two years but there were periods which were just as intense. For example Halabja, a Kurdish town. In fact there were survivors who live near here, who were just gassed – whole civilian populations. So there's a tiny amount of truth in that, in that there were certain predictable things that got you killed. But equally lots of people were randomly murdered under Saddam.

Drunken Politics: And even things like the gassing could be traced back to western ambitions in the region and [it was America] who actually supplied Saddam with the weapons. The famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.

Johann Hari: Oh sure, that was the good old American tactics.

Drunken Politics: It's rare we've talked to something who's had split views on the war. What would you have seen as a good strategy to go in and take out and stop Saddam but without the post invasion problems?

Johann Hari: The problem is not the strategy, it’s the motivation. If the Nelson Mandela peace army could have invaded Iraq, there were all sorts of things you could have done which would have meant that transition to democracy in Iraq that meant life was saved. The Nelson Mandela Peace Army ain't available, so the reality is that the Bush administration did it. In a way to say what would have been the right strategy would be to ask the wrong question. Strategy is about motives. If your strategy is about transition to real democracy in Iraq, and Iraqis living good lives that’s very different to a strategy based on how do we control the oil supply and maximize our control over the country.

Pirates

Drunken Politics: Could you talk briefly about what the article is about. In general, the two types of stories that are underrepresented in our media tend to be about indigenous people and particularly black indigenous people, and why they do those crazy things in Somalia.

Johann Hari: We must try to do this without any ‘arrs me hearties’, or pirate jokes or gags. [Laughter] There are basically two stories about Somalia and pirates. There's the lie and there's the truth. There’s the story which your told which is that the pirates in Somalia have been hijacking ships for the last couple years are evil greedy people motivated just by a desire for money and are thugs and murders. They're like bankrobbers. Then there’s the truth. What happened in Somalia is that in 1991, the Somalian government collapsed and the country imploded. Two processes began in different parts of Somalia; bearing in mind it has a 3000 km coastline. A European shipping fleet, mostly Spanish, Italian and some British came along and basically started industrially fishing Somalian fish, which is one of the main sources of food in a starving country. Suddenly these tiny little fishermen with nets were being out fished by these industrial trawlers and the fish started just disappearing, so there was a massive increase in hunger in Somalia.

In another part of Somalia, industrial waste from Europe begun to being dumped just off the cost, because it's expensive to get rid of waste in Europe [whilst] it costs nothing to take it in a boat and dump it outside Somalia. The most incredible thing that was dumped was literally nuclear waste. So after the tsunami, barrels of all sorts of random shit started to wash up on the coast of Somalia, including nuclear waste that we now know [as a result] radiation sickness killed around 300 people but no ones bothering to count or check. That’s [what] the UN special envoys estimate to me was, 300 died, could be far more, no one’s looking, cleaning or doing anything.

Imagine if this happened in Florida, imagine if the government of Florida didn't have any resources and suddenly Italians came, stole all the fish and everyone was going bust in Florida, and they started dumping nuclear waste. People of Florida would be calling for the nuking of Italy. The Somalians with very limited resources sent what they called the ‘National Volunteer Coast Guard’ to try and stop these people, and the people we call pirates call themselves the coast guard. This is not that implausible when you bear in mind the context. It’s absolutely true that the some pirates have committed unacceptable acts, I don't believe it's ever right to take a hostage, [but] they haven't killed anyone, harmed anyone, but they have taken hostages. That’s not right, they do it to get money but they then in some cases give it back to [their] communities, which have been desecrated in several instances. So it's a good example of how something is presented as mindless insanity when actually it's actually completely different.

[There’s an interesting anecdote about] the original pirates in the golden age of pirates. Alexander the Great had a pirate brought to him and he said "What do you mean trying to seize things and plunder?" and the pirate said "What you mean sir, except I do it with ships and you do it with countries". You can well imagine one of these Somalian pirates saying that to Bush if they’d been summoned to him.

If you look at the pirates of the golden age in the 17th century, actually what happened there [was that] these people who were called pirates were people who were [initially] employed as sailors to work in the transatlantic trade, they were unimaginably abused, they were whipped, they were thrown overboard if [they got] sick and often not paid, simply refused payment at the end of the journey. They were people who were sick of all this and actually said, “screw this we're going to take over this ship and we're going to run it”. And incredibly, pirates were among the first people in the whole western world who begun democratic elections, they would elect their captain weekly and hold deliberative meetings, it seems surreal! They took in slaves, they allowed slaves a vote and not treated any differently. One thing I found out subsequently is that there’s good evidence that a significantly amount of them were gay, and if you were worked on the merchant ships and found shagging a man, you were thrown overboard or whipped. The pirates liked it[?] I think of them as the ‘pillage people’. Pirates were actually, within their context, a very different story.

Anti-Defamation League

Drunken Politics: With the US press blindly taking Israel’s side, there’s motives there, it's our weapons it has and there’s groups like Anti-Defamation League…

Johann Hari: Do you have something like the UK's Trade Descriptions act, where you're not allowed to falsely advertise yourself? I think someone should take the Anti-Defamation League to the court [for] the idea that they are against defamation. They exist to defame people; someone should really sue them for false advertising.

Drunken Politics: They were actually one of the only people who came out against George Mitchell, I’m paraphrasing, the head [of ADL] said that he thinks he would be too even handed.

Johann Hari: They also deny the Armenian genocide because Turkey is the strategic ally of Israel and when congress passed resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, which there undoubtedly was. Adolf Hitler when he was launching the holocaust said, " Ahh who remembers the Armenians?" as proof of why he can do this. The Anti-Defamation league said that you shouldn’t support this motion and deny it. For those people to ever claim to speak for [anyone], they're monsters. Sorry but can't resist that rant.

Media and Motives

Drunken Politics: So we have motives there, but the pirate story, do you think it is another foreign policy move [that] I don't know about, or does it just strictly come down to [the fact that] it’s more entertaining for the media to make Captain Hook puns than to report on class warfare.

Johann Hari: I don't think it's that simple. It's that newspapers are own by very rich men and very rich men have interests, and people who disrupt those interests are seen as outside that. You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, who explains it far better than I can. It's not like a conscious demand, but it's just that the interest of advertisers and billionaire owners will inevitable shape the journalism you write. It would seem very odd in the culture of a place owned by billionaires and paid for by rich advertisers to defend people who are disrupting global trade, for example – it would seem highly odd. Corporate media create a 'common sense' logic where taking the side of the people who are not in favour of those things seems just very odd.

So I think that [although there’s] a lot of individual journalists [who] are very nice people, it seems though almost impossible to see [these subconscious interests]. I think it's like those magic eye pictures where you have to let your eyes go slightly out of focus before you see it. They can't do that; it's so counter intuitive to them. I think Israel story is slightly different due to a highly successful smear and defamation campaign, [and also] partly because it's [in the] interests of the American state, well, to what they think is the United States’ interest to have a strategic ally in the font of the world’s oil. Israel itself doesn’t have oil, but is in the middle of the richest oil base area in the world. [It is due to] a combination of those factors.

Bottled Water and Coke

Drunken Politics: Something that I think liberals are pretty guilty of is that they sort of sit around and bitch about the government and bitch about corporations while smoking their Phillip Moore cigarettes and have our Budweiser beer. And you wrote a great piece around new years, on bottles water and coke. I wanted you talk about that because of a lot of email from overwhelmed listeners who don't know where to start.

Johann Hari: I think the best place for people to start [is to bear in mind that] you are always more powerful when you stand with other people; [however] on your own you have very little power. So join Friends of the Earth, join Amnesty International, join groups that are campaigning. I’m not generally in favour of consumer boycotts, because we're all guilty of something or other, it's better to lobby for the law to be changed so the companies can't do something, rather than that for us individually to try. But there are some companies which are so heinous, who’ve committed vile acts that it's reasonable to say “I won't be a part of that”. I was, until the 31st December last year, a Coke addict. I drank diet Coke the whole time, and I was vaguely aware of terrible things that the Coke cooperation was doing but I deliberately put off researching it. But then a comedian and journalist I know called Mark Thomas wrote a fantastic book called Belching Out The Devil where he just basically followed a lot of the things Coke was doing; I didn't know for example the very last speech Martin Luther King every gave was for people to boycott Coke.

But there were loads of things he looked at, and there are so many examples of monstrous things Coke have done, that we could fill an encyclopedia, but the two that really stuck me was in Columbia, where I think it's called [Carepa] in Columbia where there [were] local trade unionists. The local Coke bottling plant is a Coke subsidiary, we have to stress for legal reasons, and it’s the bottling plant where Coke is bottled. They had a fairly strong trade union, good rights for the local workers and then they fired everyone and tried to employ non-unionized workers, and people organized and basically paramilitaries in Columbia started systematically murdering the trade unionists. The trade unionists say, they saw the paramilitary sitting with the Coke managers, the Coke subsidiary managers. It's shocking that the coke subsidiary people are now in hiding, Coke is paying much lower wages and no rights. So in India, there’s even more shocking stuff where they went into poor areas, took all the water, tapped into the local aquifer so local villages had no water and offered them in return Coke!? To wash in. It's incredible! Mark Thomas is brilliant on this, and absolutely you campaign that corporations have to be held legally accountable, but at the same time you can say enough, “I don't want to drink the blood of Columbian trade unionists” is the high falutin’ way of putting it.

The other thing is bottled water, bottled water is a different issue but firstly the environmental cost of bottled water when you have water running from your taps is just crazy. We are literally flying and shipping water form Fiji to London, when we have perfectly good water in London taps. And what’s incredible is that in Fiji, a third of the people have no access to clean drinking water, but we're taking their water. Companies say but we invest 0.1 percent back into Fiji, but when the Fiji government actually tried to tax them, the bottling companies threatened to leave and the elected government had to give in. So we're going to these poor parts of the world, taking from underneath the rain forest, their water, giving virtually nothing back and has a horrific effect on global warming, can't recall the figures but I’m sure it's if every bottle of bottled water we drink, a quarter of it is filled with oil. So you can just say, I admit I’ve cracked a few times on that one, but you can say “I'm out”. I keep forgetting to carry of water with me like a camel...

Drunken Politics: After a big thing we tried to do, reusing one bottle for weeks but then we saw a study which said it was bad for you.

Johann Hari: What you got to do is use a glass bottle. Actually plastic bottles are really bad for you and can get you ill.

Fareed Zakaria

Drunken Politics: What is the name of your article on Fared Zakaria?

Johann Hari: I really detest Fareed Zakaria, if you click on archive and book reviews it's in there [on www.johannhari.com]. I’ll give you one example of Fareed Zakaria.

Drunken Politics: Didn't you call him tiny fascist?

Johann Hari: Soft voiced authoritarian, there’s just one bit in there where he's profoundly anti-democratic, fawning about how it's better to do business in China than in India, yeah because the Chinese government doesn't have to listen to its people whilst he Indian government does. An example [was] of a businessman he spoke to who went to China, and was shown a huge area and [was told] “you can built factories here”, and there were loads of little towns in it, with people living there. And the guy goes, “what about the people who live there?” [and the authorities said] “Don't worry they’ll be gone”. The guy comes back two months later, they're gone and Fareed Zakaria, says ‘unfortunately Indian government is not so efficient’. It’s true. The Indian government being a democracy doesn’t just force people [out of their homes] on the whim of western corporations. The way he uses that as an example of Indian inefficiency is so revealing – and this is a guy known as a liberal?

To be fair to him he resists some of the more obviously psychotic far right, [for example] he rebuts the people who says Europe is being taken over by Muslims, but he rebuts the far far far right in order to defend the far far right. Well done Fareed, he's repugnant.

Super HIV and Campaigning

Drunken Politics: Were talking to a friend of mine in Manchester who’s gay, and he was saying that the use of crystal meth has exploded in the last 10 years and subsequently there’s a lot more unprotected sex and you wrote a very interesting, very worrying article abut the rise of Super AIDS. Could you briefly talk about that?

Johann Hari: HIV infection rates among gay men are rising for the first time, since the initial aids epidemic, really quite high in the US and in Britain and you have to ask why. There are a number of reasons firstly; some people call protease inhibitors, protease disinhibitors, because they give people the impression that getting HIV is like getting diabetes, instead of getting cancer. Well it's not actually. Protease inhibitors don't work for a lot of people, and life on protease inhibitors is horrible, and incredible expensive, costing [around] a million pounds per person to keep them alive [over a lifetime]. There’s a range of other reasons [which is that] a generation of young gay men like me haven't seen their friends die, they don't know what that’s like. [There are also] a whole range of other reasons. This issue of super AIDS is difficult to talk about, particular difficult because people in the gay community say “don't talk about this publicly”, don't [as it were] ‘air your dirty linen in public’. Well we've got to talk about this, and frankly we're going to be forced to talk about this if you don't change your behavior soon.

In I think 2002, a guy showed up in a clinic in NY showing something that didn't seem to be possible. He’d been tested a few months before and shown to be HIV negative, but he'd turned up and he wasn't just HIV positive, he had AIDS, full signs of AIDS. That is impossible, well thought to be not possible. At the same time, there was an outbreak of 4 or 5 of similar cases, HIV negative initially and now developing AID, and protease inhibitors weren't working with them. A lot of the scientists said, we've waiting for this to happen because if you have a large numbers of HIV positive men having unprotected sex with each other, the virus is making different mutations of it's getting stronger and stronger. So the danger is that if you have a culture of bare backing, you can end up creating effectively a Petri dish for a stronger form of the virus. Now fortunately, this form of super AIDS appears to not have been transmissible, it's still quite mysterious, we don't know why it only went to 5 people, we don't if even know if those 5 people had sexual contact with each other but it does seems likely. We do know the more bare backing there is; the more likely it is that you will have an outbreak of a drug resistant form of AIDS that operates more quickly. This is absolutely terrifying and important for people to understand; even if you’re HIV positive, having sex with another HIV positive person, you're taking a terrible risk not only with your own health but with other people's health.

It’s tricky to start an education campaign about this because the gay community was so stigmatised because of AIDS and they feel like they’ve just branded themselves anew by shedding that old past, but that’s so dangerous because it’s not as though it’s suddenly isn’t a problem anymore. In trying to rebrand the lifestyle of being HIV positive, [for example] they’ll show a guy rock-climbing and [caption it] he’s HIV positive and it’s good that they’re trying to destigmatise people who are sick, but at the same time, HIV is such a terrible illness that the gay community almost needs to own it again in order to protect themselves.

We’ve got two problems, the first is that AIDS is. The stigmatisation of gay people in the 80s was horrific, obviously I think that was monstrous. At the same time, actually part of the problem is that we’ve de-gayed it to much, the fact is if you’re not an IV drug user, a recent African immigrant, gay or have unprotected sex with prostitutes, you’re very unlikely to become HIV positive in Britain or the USA, it’s not impossible but it’s a much bigger risk for gay men than anyone else. It doesn’t help gay people to pretend that’s not the case and to spend all the prevention money on [advertising about] young straight couples going to Ibiza. It seems to be helping people, it seems like a nice thing to do, but actually you’re not warning [the right] people who need to be warned.

I absolutely defend HIV positive people in their right not be discriminated in employment or housing or anything like that. But I was really surprised when I started writing articles about bare backing that I got people who describe themselves as HIV rights campaigners saying “how dare you say we’re sick, that we’re causing problems if we have unprotected sex with each other”. Well I’m sorry, you are sick. You have got a disease. I desperately wish that wasn’t the case, I desperately wish we could find a cure tomorrow, but you are carrying a terrible diseases, I’m not attacking you in the same way I’m not attacking cancer victims when I say they’re ill. They called me HIV phobic, well yeah, I am HIV phobic, I’m frightened of the HIV virus, it would be insane not to be frighten of it.

You’ve had campaigns in San Francisco and in Britain where government information campaigns [are being attacked]. For example in San Francisco they had a poster which said “stay healthy stay negative”, they had to scrap it all because these HIV rights activists said “How dare you say we’re not healthy”. Well you’re not! Partly, we don’t want to be nasty to anyone, but you have just got to say to everyone that this is a terrible problem and is getting worse and HIV infections among gay men are mesmerising. You mention Crystal Meth, which is a key factor; it makes you incredible disinhibited and horny, which is the worst possible combination for unprotected sex. Apart from the problems crystal meth has without HIV, it causes HIV problems, and risks becoming incredibly popular in Britain. The gay community finds this difficult because formative experiences for most gay people is of “we want to get people off out backs, we’re very libertarian as a community, we don’t want anyone interfering with us”, very rightly. But that means we’re also in a difficult position to deal with this threat, because we’ve got to start judging people and warning them, which is something we find quite hard, a formative experience for us is shaking off that sense of judgement and actually we’ve got to say “it’s really stupid and dangerous to engage in this”. A lot of young gay men get into this because they’ve got very low self-esteem, because of homophobia and they’ve got to be helped. Approaching them with a finger wagging tone is unhelpful but it does no one favours to treat this as not a serious problem with potential for a horrific problem. Martin Luther King had a great line which said “We begin to die the moment we’re silent about the things that matter’, and that’s not a metaphor for gay people in his instance, we can’t be silence or we may begin to die again.

Homophobia and Hip Hop

Drunken Politics: On homophobia, you wrote another piece talking about the hip-hop community and a lot of the homophobia in the lyrics and in the culture, and how a lot of people in that community are actually in the closet. I remember after Prop 8 passed republicans were so happy when that 7/10 statistic came out [which stated] that African Americans voted for it, they seems so excited to pit the gay community against the black? Anytime they can pit communities against each other, they seem very happy. Could you talk a bit about the article and the hip hop culture and how you think we can actually stop these minorities fighting?

Johann Hari: I’ll deal with the last question first. You appeal to people’s empathy, the way the gay rights movement won in the UK, and we’ve more or less won, we’ve got gay marriage, and it’s illegal to discriminate in almost every sphere. It’s [won] by appealing to people’s empathy, not just aggressively condemning them. Most African Americans, like everyone else, are basically empathetic people who don’t want to be nasty to anyone, and particular because they’ve got a historical experience of being horrifically abused. I think it’s not helpful to go in with a kind of “damn you, you’re a bunch of bigots” [mentality]. I think what we have to do is approach black American’s decency. Obama is very good with this, he’s not perfect, but he’s very good at it. He supports unions not marriage. We will prevail. If you look at the Prop 8 polling, among every [cultural/racial] minority and look at the under 30s and the majority are in favour of gay marriage. That doesn’t mean we should be too relaxed, but they’re on the wrong side of history, It’s worth bearing in mind the year Obama was born, interracial marriage was illegal in 13 states.

In terms of homophobia there’s a very interesting question with hip-hop in particular, and hip-hop has a disgusting culture of calling for the death of gay people in the lyrics. I actually think there’s a kind of soft racism that stops people criticising that, but it is actually racist to not criticise some because they’re black when they say something terrible. If you believe in treating people equally, you should react to a black person who says something in favour of killing gay people in the way you’d react to Jerry Fallwell saying it.

Hip hop is one the worst offenders who have encouraged this really vile culture. There is a really interesting new book by a man called Terrence Dean who’s a very senior figure in the record industry saying that a really significant number of these very homophobic hip hop artists are in fact gay secretly on the down low. In a way that shouldn’t surprise us, I always think this when I became aware of homophobia “ why would you be bothered”. I don’t sit there feeling angry at straight people have sex. I’m happy for my heterosexual friends when they have sex. One of the reasons why was found by the University of Nebraska, where [in an experiment], they wired some people’s penises to monitor the blood flow. So they get a sample of I think a hundred men who identified as anti-gay and showed them lots of porn including straight porn and gay porn, and basically an extraordinarily high number of them got turned on by the gay porn. It makes it kind of sense in that in that what they’re doing is repressing their own instincts I’m not saying everyone who’s homophobic is secretly gay, although hip hop artists have a lot in common with republican politicians.

It’s not that they’re all secretly gay, but pretty much everyone in their teenage years had some sort of fleeting attraction to the same sex and if you were just not anti-gay that wouldn’t be a problem. I certainly had heterosexual impulse as a teenager, although I’d have sex with a tree if I could. That’s natural, and you forget about it and it’s all a part of adolescent development. But if you think it’s terrible and shameful and remained with you and became externalised hatred, like [as though] the people who’ve tempted you must be punished. I think it helps you to understand how these homophobic climates develop, a climate [that, on the other hand] is relaxed about gay people just accepts the obvious reality that in every human society, 2-4% are going to be attracted to the same sex. That’s life, animals do it, birds do it, bees do it. That’s life; don’t get worked up about it, don’t get hateful. It’s certainly the people who repress it who feel terrible about it that then built up this great well of hatred. I just feel sorry for them, obviously if they beat up a gay person I’d feel more sorry for the gay person, but I pity them.

Drunken Politics: Do you think that would ever happen that would mean these guys would start coming out?

Actually Kanye West totally to his credit, his cousin came out and he said “ I’d like to apologise for all the homophobic things I’ve said in the past, and I realise they were stupid and I love my cousins who’s come out and he’s a great guy”. If you went back 50 years, it would just seem unimaginable gay people were[n’t] put in prison in Britain, that you’d have gay people in the government, gay marriage, it would seem unimaginable. The world changes. I’m sure that this will seem just as bizarre to us as the ban on interracial marriage when Obama was born, it would seem weird.

Influences and Happiness

Drunken Politics: What are a couple examples of books and albums that really inspired you artistically or politically or that you jusr think for someone interested in politics and journalism are must reads.

Johann Hari: I have the worst taste in music in the world; I have friends who weep when they look at my iPod. I will not say music, because you’ll be disgusted.

Actually one book that had a huge effect on me is by someone we’ve mentioned, in his earlier incarnation, Christopher Hitchens. When I was 14 I read an amazing book he wrote, called the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice. It was an expose about this woman who everyone thought was wonderful, who was a disgusting liar, fraudulent and a crook, she’s a real monster who deliberately left people in terrible pain, lied, [was a] hypocrite, a woman who campaigned for divorce to be criminalised and when one of her friends princess Diana got divorced, said it was a good thing. When people were dying her hostels in Calcutta, she gave them only aspirin, said “suffering is beautiful, Christ suffered on the cross’. When she got ill, she checked in to the best clinic in Switzerland she could get. She was repugnant, took money from thieves and crooks. She was a disgusting person I remember reading and thinking, wow, he’s taken something I just took as certain and completely turned it on his head and he’s right. I looked it up and it was all true.

Drunken Politics: Did you think that influenced you and your articles you write? Taking ‘monsters’ like pirates, and looking at them through an empathetic eye.

Johann Hari: I think it was a definite instinct, but Christopher Hitchens showed me that doing that could be your job. I thought – How amazing is that! That had a big effect on me. Noam Chomsky, when I was reconsidering my position Iraq, reading his work really help me reorient myself and figure out what was going on. Richard Dawkins’ writings on religion or superstition as we would call it had a big effect of me. There’s an amazing book that’s just been published in the states by a Australian writer called Clive James who lives in Britain called Cultural Amnesia. It’s a history of all the writers he thinks we should remember in the 21st century; he speaks a million languages, the most polymathic and incredibly funny, beautiful writer. I absolutely love him.

Drunken Politics: Last question: what makes you happy?

Johann Hari: My nephews and my niece make me happy. They make me laugh. My nephew has got the thing we were talking about, [the contrarian’s spirit]. I went to a school debate he did and for some reason they were debating whale hunting, I don’t know why these 9 year olds were debating whale hunting but hey. He came up to me beforehand [and said], “I don’t think whale hunting is right, but everyone else was against it. That pissed me off”. There was a little girl was against it and was whining “ the whales, the whales”. And Josh my nephew stood up and said: “What is the point of whales? all they do is swim up and down in sea that we could have for us so I say lets kill all the whales now, once and for all”. I thought, “ aww, a little columnist is born”.

My grandmother makes me happy; she is a joyous person. She’s nearly ninety and for some reason, although she’s the most gentle person, she loves watching horrifically violent horror films. She loves the Saw movies, whilst I was watching [it] through my fingers [she said] “look son! he’s about to rip her rib cage out!”. I took her a couple months ago ‘Gladiator’ on DVD, and at the end she said: “Didn’t they make such good films in ancient Rome?”

There will be no rewrite of ‘Candle in the Wind’ for Jade Goody’s funeral, but in her own glottal, gobby way, she jabbed a knitting needle into the subconscious of Britain just as surely as Diana Spencer – and revealed something dark and darkening about us.

Why was a big-hearted, big-mouthed young woman who came fourth on a reality show back in 2002 seized on with such glee and turned into one of the most famous people in the country? Because we needed her, to salve our own soiled consciences.

In her short life, Jade showed how as Britain has spiralled into one of the most unequal and immobile societies on earth, we have begun to openly jeer and sneer at the people trapped at the bottom. We gleefully seized on her as “proof” that the people rotting on abandoned estates were not there because of the grim accident of birth, but because they were stupid and ugly and bigoted. And all we proved – with unwitting irony – was our own stupidity and ugliness and bigotry.

Here was a twenty year old girl with a noisy laugh, a quick wit, and almost no knowledge at all. She thought “East Angular” was a separate country, and wondered what currency they use in Liverpool. So the press jeered that she was “a moron”, “the High Priestess of the Slagocracy”, and “poof of Britain’s underclass”, while protestors began to appear outside the Big Brother house with signs saying “Kill the Pig.”

That summer, a string of images of white working class women presenting them as bestial imbeciles dominated our screens. Vicky Pollard – a single mum so thick she swaps her baby for a Westlife CD, played by a multi-millionaire private schoolboy – was becoming a national icon. A chaotic single mum established ‘Wife Swap’ as one of our favourite shows. Words of straightforward snobbish abuse – “chav” and “pikey” – were becoming acceptable again.

Go to any extremely unequal society – say, South Africa, or South America – and you will find a furiously suppressed sense of guilt. It’s hard not to ask, at the back of your mind: why am I here in this mansion, while they are in the slums? This guilt is resolved one way: by convincing yourself that the poor are sub-human, and don’t have feelings like you and me. Oh, the people in the barrios and townships? They’re animals! They stink! They’re stupid! Jade and Vicky and the labelling of the poor as “chavs” filled that role for us. They know nothing! They are repulsive!
Nobody wanted to stop and ask: why doesn’t Jade know much? Here’s why. Her mother was a seriously disabled drug addict, so Jade didn’t go to school much because she stayed at home to look after her. From the age of five she was in charge of doing the cooking and ironing and cleaning. Jade explained: “As early as I could remember I’d spent my whole life trying to protect my mum – frantically hiding the stolen chequebooks she used to have lying around the house when the police barged in on one of their raids; desperately denying to the teachers at school that she’d hit me for fear of being sent to social services.”

Her father treated her even worse. He stashed a gun under her cot, and her first memory was of him shooting heroin in her bedroom, his eyes rolling back and his body juddering. Eventually, after periods in and out of prison, he was found dead from an overdose in the toilet of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “He died without a single vein left in his body,” Jade explained. “In the end he’d injected every single part of it and all his veins had collapsed – even the ones in his penis.”

Despite this, Jade always worked, in shops, for minimum wage, and stayed away from drugs (apart from weed). She applied for Big Brother because her mum was sinking into crack addiction, and she couldn’t think of any other way to avoid witnessing it. To the end, she was terrified of matches, and couldn’t bear to have tin-foil in her house, because they reminded her of crack.

And so she appeared in British public life – and we jeered and howled and held her up as a poster-girl for “the underclass.” Jade soon proved her latent smartness by turning her fourth-place on Big Brother into a fortune, launching her own brand of perfume, a beauty salon, and a series of sensitive, rather beautiful autobiographies, all appealing to young women who had never seen people just like them on television before. The perception of her slowly changed. As people learned about her life story – and saw her chaotic, broken mother being interviewed – many realised that their gleeful poring over her mispronunciations had been vile. The sense of superiority was, for a moment, scrambled.

Then came Celebrity Big Brother – and oh, how we rejoiced. Jade was placed in the house with Shilpa Shetty, a sweet, unworldly Bollywood star who had been raised with servants and never had to do anything practical for herself. She activated all of Jade’s feelings of being sneered at and patronized all her life. Jade said: “Ultimately we were fighting because we were from different classes… I didn’t want anyone to think they’re better than me, just because they have more money or have had a more educated upbringing. And, to me, she was a posh, up-herself princess.”

One day, Shilpa tried to flush an entire cooked chicken down the toilet. Jade – enraged and perplexed – started to scream at her. “Who the fuck are you? You aren’t some Princess in Neverland!” she yelled. She said Shilpa clearly had no idea how ordinary Indians lived, and howled: “You need a day in the slums!”
This was seized on as racist, equivalent to telling her to go back where she came from. But it wasn’t. Other housemates did indeed say despicable racist things about Shilpa: the beauty queen Danielle Lloyd said “I think she should fuck off home… She can’t even speak English properly.” But Jade didn’t: her own father was mixed-race, for one.

But here was a way we could rehabilitate our Jaded view of the white working class – and feel self-righteous about it too. If we can’t feel superior to the poor because they are stupid, then we can feel superior to them because they are racist. One newspaper ran the typical headline “Class vs Trash” over a picture of Shilpa and Jade, while a columnist huffed that Jade's problem was "hating her social superiors". Once more, we could hate the poor and feel good about it too.

And even when she was dying, we continued to jeer. Nobody said John Diamond was “exploiting” his cancer by writing about it in The Times – but Jade’s decision to talk about it on TV so she could leave a pot of cash for her kids was apparently evidence of her “vulgarity.” One newspaper huffs that now we will be subjected to “a chav state funeral.”

Even as she rots, we still want to see Jade Goody as a “chav” imbecile, subconsciously reassuring us that our own higher place in the class pyramid is earned by our intellect and sensitivity and anti-racism, rather than by the fluke of birth.

Believe that if you want – but you should know it’s not Jade you are condemning, but yourself.

The two best print newspapers in the United States – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Christian Science Monitor – have just died. The New York Times is nearly bankrupt, and the Los Angeles Times is already there. In beds all around them in the Emergency Room, the world’s newspapers are being fed ink on a drip, as ashen relatives stand and stare. How many of them will survive this depression? And what would a world with drastically fewer people gathering and sifting the news look like?

Newspapers are in a bizarre position. More people are reading the stories we write than ever before: via the web, we have a higher readership than in the most inky-fingered Golden Age. But we are withering. Why?

Since the mid-nineteenth century, newspaper readers haven’t had to pick up the full tab for putting the paper together and delivering it to your breakfast table. First they were subsidized by governments or political parties. Then they were paid for primarily by advertisers who want to sell you stuff. The price on the cover is only a small fraction of the money it takes to pay for gathering the news.

This model is ailing now because, as Professor Paul Starr of Princeton explains: “Until recently, the Internet seemed primarily to be additive, vastly enlarging the opportunities for self-expression and public debate, while newspapers and other old media continued serving their old functions, such as financing the bulk of original reporting for the general public.” You increasingly read it online, but the bill was picked up by print readers and print advertising.

But this could only ever last for a transitional decade. As more and more readers begin to click rather than flick, it is almost over. The problem is that an online reader is worth ten percent of a print reader to advertisers. So for every reader you lose on the page, you need to gain ten on the screen. The sums don’t add up – so the newspapers are sickening and shedding staff.

Does it matter? There are plenty of reasons to scorn newspapers – especially in Britain, where the print media is unusually rabid and right-wing, and in the US, where it is unusually pompous and proud and protective of the interests of the powerful while bragging about its “balance.” Yes, advertising-funded newspapers are a fractured lens on the world, unconsciously under-reporting anything that threatens the interests of their paymasters. The recently re-issued book ‘Manufacturing Consent’ by Noam Chomsky shows brilliantly: it’s why almost all newspapers failed on Iraq, on the disastrous effects of deregulation, and now on the climate crisis. But today, we are facing the possibility of replacing this fractured lens with no lens at all.

When I last wrote about the need to save newspapers, one reader snapped: “Why don’t you launch a campaign to save CB radios too?” But the difference is that CB radios don’t play a crucial role in a democracy. It has been put best by Joe Matthews, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who says: “With fewer watchdogs, you get less barking: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom. How can we know what we’ll never know?”

A recent study in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organisation found that one of the biggest single factors in reducing corruption in a country is “the free circulation of daily newspapers per person.” Go to any country, and you’ll find that the lower the newspaper circulation, the higher the corruption. If nobody’s watching, anything goes.

As inky news-gatherers vanish, there is a vacuum that on-line journalists are not able to fill. With less advertising cash and no upfront payments from the readers at all, they have far less money to send out foreign correspondents, assign people to tricky investigations, or do the long slog that journalism so often requires. Look at the best political site, The Huffington Post, for which – in the interests of full disclosure – I should point out I write. As they are the first to admit, HufPo pays nothing to its contributors, and it knows what is happening in the world only because newspapers send out correspondents. If they vanish, blogs will be left in an airless cabin, talking only about themselves.

This doesn’t have to happen. Many people in the increasingly frantic newspaper industry whisper about potential techno-solutions. Some say an easy system of on-line micro-payments – an i-Tunes for the news – will save us. Others invest hope in the Kindle, the hand-held device on which you can buy a newspaper. But we can’t afford to wait for them to go mainstream: journalism’s accumulated structures, brands and wisdom could be lost forever by then.

There is a better way. In an age of bail-outs, several European governments are experimenting with ways to support the world of news-gathering so it will survive for the twenty-first century. The best plan has come from French President Nicholas Sarkozy. He has launched a programme where every French citizen, on her eighteenth birthday, will be given a year’s free subscription to a newspaper of her choice. The effects are subtle. Many young readers will develop a newspaper habit. In turn, newspapers will compete harder to capture this lucrative guaranteed market, and make their product accessible and fresh. A benevolent whirl replaces the current death-spiral.

Of course there is a terrible danger in making newspapers dependent on the government’s actions. Nobody wants that. But there are ways to avoid this trap. In 1971, the Swedish government set up a system of subsidies to newspapers allocated by an independent body on the basis of circulation and revenue data. Intriguingly, the Swedish press became more adversarial and critical after it was introduced, not less.

As the thud of falling newspapers echoes across the Atlantic, we can’t afford to dawdle. Good newspapers – for all their flaws and selective vision – are the sinews of representative government. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Unless we act now, fast, we may be left with the opposite: a government, but no newspapers left to monitor them.

For months, the opponents of Operation Cast Lead – the assault on Gaza that killed 1,434 Palestinians – have been told we are “dupes for Islamic fundamentalists”, or even anti-Semitic. The defenders of Israel’s war claimed that you could only believe the reports that Israeli troops were scrawling “death to Arabs” on the walls, deliberately firing on civilians and trashing olive groves, or using the chemical weapon white phosphorous that burns to the bone, if you were infected with the old European virus of Jew-hatred.

Now at a meeting in Israel covered by Ha'aretz, the very people who fought that war – loyal and proud Jews, conscious of their best traditions – have confirmed we were simply describing reality. One Israeli Defence Force squad leader says of the orders he was given to target civilians: “I call it murder”. As he put it: “In the end the directive was to go into a house, switch on loudspeakers and tell them ‘you have five minutes to run away and whoever doesn’t will be killed.’” In a densely-crowded civilian city, there are all sorts of people who cannot run away: the elderly, the disabled, the pregnant, the terrified. This soldier was told to kill them.

He is not alone. Anybody who has reported from the Occupied Territories has witnessed a culture of racist contempt for ordinary Palestinian civilians. They are treated as suspects simply for walking around their own home-towns, or trying to sell their own produce. This is not a few bad apples: it is endemic to the nature of occupation, blockade and repeated assault.

Yet there is a swelling movement of young Israelis who are speaking out – and refusing to kill on occupied land. It’s a strikingly brave move in a country that is drifting to the right. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s out-going Prime Minister, has publicly bragged that Israel’s response to attack “will naturally be disproportionate”, just as he boasted about the 2006 war in Lebanon: “Half of Lebanon was destroyed - is that a loss?”

None of this had to happen. On the eve of the attack, Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, said that the way to stop rocket attacks on Israel was to draw Hamas, the elected Palestinian government, into negotiation and compromise – but “Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas.”

Instead, Israel launched an attack on civilians that her own soldiers are ashamed of. It can only increase hatred – and make the fair division of the land between Palestinians and Israelis recede even further onto the horizon.

The unlikely story of the state of Israel – 60, sullied, surviving – is intertwined with the unlikely story of Amos Oz. He is, all at once, its most distinguished novelist, its most passionate defender, and its most notorious "traitor" – a word he uses about himself. His friend David Grossman says "Amos is the offspring of all the contradictory urges and pains within the Israeli psyche." To spend a day in his company – to follow his story from the birth of the state to the suicide of his mother, from Zionist idealism to a broken heart – is to tour the dizzying dissonances of the Jewish state as it staggers into the 21st century.

Oz is sitting in the coffee shop of Joseph's bookstore in Golder's Green, north London, looking older and more fragile than his vigorous black-and-white author's picture. He is 70 now, his hair wispier and whiter. He greets me with a gravelly voice, and we order black coffees. It seems far away and long ago, but Oz once dreamed of bombing this city. He was once a child of what he calls "the Jewish intifada" – the stone-throwing, death-defying Jewish rebellion against British occupation. He believed the state that would emerge from the rubble would be a model of justice and idealism for all mankind. If you were a child in Gaza now, Mr Oz, would you be dreaming the same dreams against Israel? "I don't even have to imagine the answer to this question – I know it," he says. "Because I was a kid in Jerusalem in '48 when the city was besieged, shelled, starved, [and] the water supply [was] cut off. And I know the horror, and I know the despair, and I know the hopelessness, and I know the anger, and I know the frustration." He says he was "not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a brainwashed little fanatic, a stone-throwing chauvinist. The first words I ever learnt to say in English were 'British, go home!'"

In his novel Panther in the Basement, he writes: "This is how I remember Jerusalem in that last summer of British rule. A stone city sprawling over hilly slopes. Not so much a city as isolated neighbourhoods separated by fields of thistles and rocks. British armoured cars stood at street corners with their slits almost closed, their machine guns sticking out in front like pointing fingers: You there!"
At the age of eight, he built "an awesome rocket" in the backyard of his house. His plan was "to aim it at Buckingham Palace. I typed out on my father's typewriter a letter of ultimatum addressed to His Majesty King George VI of England... Torrents of blood, soil, fire and iron intoxicated me." His favourite song – a Stern Gang anthem – proclaimed: "We must fight until we breathe our last breath!"

So how did this boy, from this place, end up co-founding Peace Now, and fighting for a free Palestinian state alongside Israel? What contortions did he travel along the way, and since? And how did Israel's story come to this?

I. Jerusalem Dreams

Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem because his parents had nowhere else to go. They were running for their lives. "It was the only life raft they could find," he says. "My parents, they tried to become American, they tried to become British, they tried to become Scandinavian – nobody wanted them, anywhere. So, it's a very common error to assume that in the 1930s, my parents went to a travel agency and inquired about a holiday resort, and they made a mistake – they should have said, 'the French Riviera,' and by mistake they said, 'Jerusalem.'"

It was a city of "dusty tin roofs, urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, [and] parched hillsides". For his parents, it was a barren shock. They were "troubled refugees from Europe, who loved Europe and were kicked out by Europe, who were devoted Europeans at a time when no-one else was a European. Everyone [else] was a pan-Germanic, or pan-Slavonic, or just a Bulgarian or a British patriot. The Jews were the only European Europeans at that time – and Europe kicked them out. They were labelled cosmopolitans, they were labelled ruthless intellectuals, they were labelled parasites. And they came to Jerusalem hoping to create a tiny little Europe in the heart of the Middle East – a European enclave. Which they couldn't, of course. Because there was no Europe. Because their idea of Europe was no more than an idea, not a reality. The Europe of their love, the Europe they loved, did not exist, except in their own imagination."

Oz's mother, Fania, was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Rovno, a city in western Ukraine. She dreamed of being an artist, and soaked herself in the works of Anton Chekhov. But by the time she went to university in Prague, the tide of anti-Semitism was rising fast. She got out just in time: the Nazis killed her brother, her sister-in-law and her nephew. They killed almost all her school friends. They killed the world she grew up in – and then Stalin swept away anything that remained.

So Fania was left beached in Jerusalem, a dry, dusty city that seemed wholly alien to her. Oz says her life consisted of "the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key... If you ever spoke about the past, something bitter and desperate would creep into her voice."

His father, Arieh, was forced to leave Lithuania. He was "a cultivated, well-mannered librarian, severe but also rather shy," Oz says, who believed his true destiny – to be a great scholar of Hebrew literature – was inexplicably thwarted. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he aligned with the Israeli right, who believed the Arabs in Palestine had to be ruthlessly fought and forced out. Fleeing the Nazi persecution of the Jews, he believed Jews had to show strength to the point of brutality, or die. He wrote propaganda for the Stern Gang, which bombed British targets and Arab civilians, and were labelled as terrorists.

Still, his parents felt a sense of inferiority, and exclusion, even within Israel. "We were out-of-the-way Israelis," he says. "The drama took place in Galilee, in the valleys, not in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was out of the way. And my parents were cut off [from] the mainstream of the enthusiasm of the Zionist revolution. They were cut off because they were right-wingers at a time when everyone was a socialist, they were city dwellers when everybody was a toiler of the land, they were academics at a time when academics were regarded with a certain suspicion."

On the night the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel on part of British Mandate Palestine, Arieh crawled into bed with his eight-year-old son. He whispered: "From now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew. Not that. Never again. From tonight that's finished. For ever." It was the only time Oz ever saw his father cry.

That is how he ended up – like a child in Gaza today – under siege. He remembers "the war, the shelling, the siege and starvation" in fragments. He lived in what felt like a "dank submarine", crammed into his house with his parents and a host of other families. He slept on a mattress in the corner with his parents while the food was rationed, the windows were sandbagged, the medical supplies ran down to nothing, and the toilets overflowed with faeces because there was no water to flush them. "Every few minutes, when a shell landed, the whole hill shook, and the stone-built houses shuddered," he says. There was "a massive bombardment whose aim was to cause losses among the civilian population, break their spirit and bring them to submission".

His parents were great linguists: his father spoke 11 languages, and read 17. Yet even when they were locked up together like this with nothing to do, he says: "The only language they taught me was Hebrew. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me, too, to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent."

He was raised under bombardment to be a militant, scorning the British, the Arabs, and the entire Jew-hating world. His grandfather taught him: "We have to beat them up so they'll come and beg us for peace." Does he feel angry when he thinks about the child he was? "No – I feel amused. Bitterly amused. I was a product of a militant upbringing in a militant time, in a state of war, and I grew up in a world where everything was black and white. We were white and our enemies were black. And our enemies were not just the Arabs but the rest of the world. The entire world. The Germans, Europe, Russia – everybody was our enemy. We were alone in the world – we were the few and the just. There was something very sweet about such a simple world, which divides into goodies and baddies, something very attractive for a child in particular, of course, and everything fell neatly into place."

There seems to have been an extraordinary pressure on this only child – to be everything his parents had failed to be. When his father finally had a slim work of scholarship published, he inscribed it to his 11-year-old son: "To my son Amos, in the hope he might carve out a place in our literature."

Both his parents were "immensely inhibited", and could express little emotion beyond this burning ambition. As the news of her family and friends' deaths began to filter through to Israel, Oz's mother became ill and withdrawn. She began to experience "headaches" that lasted for months, and required her to inhale mysterious medicines all the time.

And then, one night, once the state was born and Amos was 12-and-a-half, she walked through a Jerusalem rainstorm to her sister's flat, went to bed, and took a massive overdose. Having run for her life, she now ran to her death. Was there an element of survivor's guilt in her suicide? He looks away. "Possibly. I don't know. I don't know the reasons why she killed herself and I no longer make an attempt to know. I doubt it that... in most cases, when a person kills himself or herself, I doubt it that there is such a thing as one reason. There is an excuse, there is an immediate motive, but there is more than just one reason." He knows his father had an affair; he knows his mother felt lost in Jerusalem.

"I was very angry with her," he says. "I was very angry with my father, I was very angry with myself. I blamed every one of us for the calamity," he says. He wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. The rage lasted for decades. "There was not a drop of compassion in me. Nor did I miss her. I did not grieve at my mother's death. I was too hurt and angry for any other emotion to remain." It was only, he explains, "when I reached the age when I could be my parents' parents [that] I could look at them with a combination of compassion, humour and curiosity." He made them the subject of his masterpiece, his memoir A Tale of Love And Darkness.

He never once discussed his mother's death with his father: "We continued as if she had never lived." But now, through writing, he could express everything he wanted to say. "It was about inviting the dead to my home, offering them a cup of coffee, and saying – let's sit and talk about that which we never discussed when you were still alive. This is a highly recommended practice: invite the dead to your home from time to time, offer them a coffee and a cake, engage yourself in a good conversation with the dead, and then tell them to go away – don't let them stay in my house. Drop by from time to time. That's the proper relationship between the living and the dead." Was it having children himself that made him finally able to forgive his mother? "Yes, definitely," he says with a firm nod. In what way? He is silent for a long time. "This is too personal. I will not discuss that, if you'll forgive me." Then he adds, to change the subject: "I just became old enough to imagine them as immature people. I lost interest in the question of whose fault it is."

Two years after his mother committed suicide, Amos Oz left his father and his father's world – and began his metamorphosis into a very different person.

II. courage

At the age of 14, Oz has written: "I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name, and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda to live there over the ruins."

He ran away from Jerusalem to a kibbutz – and abandoned his father's surname, Klausner, for one of his own invention.

"'Oz' means strength – and it also means courage," he says now. "When I left home at 14 and a half, I decided to become everything [my father] was not, and not to be anything that he was. He was a right-wing intellectual; I decided to be a left-wing socialist. He was a city dweller; I decided to become a tractor driver. He was short; I decided to become very tall. It didn't work out, but I tried – I tried. So, I assumed the name 'Oz', because this courage and strength are what I needed most."

Back in Jerusalem, nobody had asked what happened to the Arabs who had lived in Palestine. They vanished during the war; that was all. In the kibbutz, Oz began to hear whispers – initially to his shock and indignation. This had been their land, and they had been driven from it, by force, by us. Could it be true?

Slowly, he began to imagine the Palestinians driven from their homes, scattered in rotting refugee camps somewhere beyond Israel's borders – and to see their similarity to his own parents. He reached the conclusion "that the clash between Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab is a tragedy, not a wild west movie, with good guys and bad guys. It's a tragedy, because it is a clash between right and right. The Israelis are in Israel because they have nowhere else to go. The Palestinians are in Palestine because they have nowhere else to go. This is a conflict between victims, and between people who both have a just claim to the land."

In 1967, this became a crucial insight, changing the course of Oz's life. He was conscripted and fought on the Egyptian front in the Sinai desert. "I have almost never written about my experience as a soldier on the battlefield, because I tried, and I found that it is beyond my capacity to describe the battlefield," he says. "The battlefield consists mostly of smells, and it is very difficult to describe smells in words – very difficult indeed. There is a stench on the battlefield which doesn't come across in war movies, and in television documentaries, and it doesn't even come across in the reportage of death and devastation and destruction on the battlefields. And this particular stench, which I remember very vividly, very physically, I remember the stench – this I simply cannot describe in words, and without the stench the description will be false."

How did he sustain himself? "When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul, otherwise you would die of terror – you would die of fear. You switch off your soul and you act like an animal or a machine. People under fire change greatly. You know what my first response was? When I found myself under fire, and I could literally see the Egyptian soldiers – it was in '67 – these Egyptian soldiers on the next hill, firing mortar shells at us, and the mortar shells exploding in armies. My immediate instinct was, 'call the police. These people are insane. They can see that there are people here and they are shooting at us.' Maybe that was the last sane response on the battlefield: 'call the police'."

He says, however, he did not do anything he regretted. "I don't think so, no. I have done many things that I am sorry I had to do, but nothing that I am ashamed of. For me, fighting, both in 1967 and in 1973, was a last resort, because I knew very boldly that if I don't fight, and if the others don't fight... my family will be killed – we will be thrown into the ocean. It was not about territories, it was not about holy places. It was about life and death. And such a war... even though that I am an old man now, I would still fight such a war. If they put me with my back against the wall, and they would say, 'Either you fight or your family gets killed,' I'll fight." The wars to defend the settlers – or the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s – are different, he says: "I would rather have gone to prison than fight for them. I would have refused to fight for occupied territories. For an extra bedroom to the nation. For holy places. For resources. I would refuse to fight for anything except for life and freedom."

Amid the triumphalism and the first flood of settlers, Oz was one of the first Israelis to say the land other soldiers had conquered – Gaza and the West Bank – should be returned to the Palestinians for a state of their own. "I asked myself, 'How would I feel if I were a Palestinian in the West Bank and in Gaza?' And, unlike most Israelis – who assumed naively that the Palestinians will be happy about the Israeli occupation, because Israel will bring with it a higher standard of living, and perhaps a better legal system – I immediately could imagine the anger, the frustration, the hatred, the despair of the Palestinians. So I started advocating a two-state solution. And at that time, there were very few of us. In fact, we could conduct our national assembly inside a telephone box."

He was immediately dubbed a "traitor". He says with a smile: "I take this as a compliment. A traitor is he who changes in the eyes of those who cannot change and do not change and does not even conceive a change." All the great Jewish heroes were traitors in their time, he notes: "Jonathan and Michal betrayed their father Saul; Joab and the other sons of Zeruiah, the fair Absalom, Ammon, Adonijah, son of Hagith – they were all traitors, and the worst traitor of all was King David himself, David about whom we still sing the song, 'David King of Israel lives, lives, lives on still.'"

And Oz was indeed betraying his father's vision. He told his son he was "crazy. Simple as that," Oz says. "We had some fierce arguments about peace and about the Palestinians. My father never recognised the Palestinians as a separate national entity. He thought there is a pan-Arabic nation, and this pan-Arabic nation has a territory which is 150 times bigger than the territory of Israel. 'They have enough space. What do they want of us?' He was a great simplifier on this issue." He retorted to his father: "The drowning man clinging to his plank is allowed, by all the rules of natural, objective, universal justice, to make room for himself on the plank, even if in doing so he must push the others aside a little. Even if the others, sitting on that plank, leave him no alternative to force. But he has no natural right to push the others on that plank into the sea."

What would your father think if he could hear you now? "He would be very angry with me – no doubt." Is this, in part, an Oedipal revolt? Oz frowns a little. "There is an element of Oedipal revolt in every father-son relationship, including the relationship between me and my father."

But there was one conviction he inherited from his father and has always retained. They both saw religion as an "archaic dust", a bizarre leftover from a more primitive, less rational age. So when the settlers began to seize the West Bank as part of a Messianic plan to reclaim the entire biblical land of Israel, Oz saw it with horror as an attempt "to push Judaism back through history, back to the Book of Joshua, to the days of the Judges, to the extreme of fanatical tribalism, brutal and closed."

The tragedy is – he believes – that these people believe they are motivated by the best in human nature. He wrote in his novel Black Box: "It is neither the selfishness nor the baseness not the cruelty in our nature that turns us into a species that destroys itself. We annihilate ourselves (and shall soon wipe out our entire species) precisely because of our 'higher' longings, because of the theological disease." The settlers believe they are saving us, even as they drag their tribe towards hell.

"The Jewish people has a great talent for self-destruction," he sighs. "We may be the world champions in self-destruction... [caused by] our characteristic demand for perfection, for totality, for squeezing our ideal to its last dregs or to die trying. [Look at] the history of the ancient Hebrews – they were suicidal by being extremely extremist and fanatical, by not compromising with reality, by not being ready to tolerate a Roman yoke for a while in order to survive and stay in the country. We lost our country in 70AD because we were impatient and we couldn't tolerate a lasting Roman yoke. That was a gross mistake." Likewise, the settlers now seek to seize all of the historical land of Israel – and in so doing, they prevent a two-state solution and could condemn Israel to a slow death.

Then, suddenly, he leans forward. "But let me share with you some good news, because you normally get only the bad news from the Middle East on the press and the media. The good news is that the vast majority of the Israeli Jews and the vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs know, in their heart of hearts, that at the end of the day there will be a two-state solution. They know it. Are they happy with it? They are not happy with it. Will they be dancing in the streets when the two-state solution is implemented? They will not be dancing in the streets. But they know... There is lack of bold leadership on both sides. But the two-state solution remains the only way out."

He has been offering this beautiful, rational vision for 40 years now, and I have happily repeated his lines. But aren't there days when he despairs? Aren't there days when he agrees with Boaz, one of the characters in Black Box, who says: "In the end the Jews will finish [the Palestinians] off or they'll finish each other off and there'll be nothing left in this country again except the Bible and the Koran and the foxes and burned ruins"?

He smiles. "I like Boaz a great deal – I think he's quite a character. But I don't share his pessimism. I think a two-state solution is inevitable. The Israeli Jews are not going anywhere. There are five and a half million of us, and we're not going anywhere – we don't have anywhere to go. The Palestinian Arabs are not going anywhere, either – they don't have anywhere to go. We cannot become one happy family, because we are not one with the Palestinians and we are not family and we are not happy, either. We are two unhappy families. So, it's about turning the house into a semi-detached house. A two-family unit. There is simply no alternative to this. Now, this make take long or may take short. But it will happen."

And then our discussion of his passionate attempt to rescue his country returns, obliquely, to the question of the mother he could not rescue. He believes the answer to the conflict – the temperamental solution – lies in the author she loved, even as her headaches raged and her will to live waned. "At the end of a Shakespeare tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies, and maybe there's some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearian one, for the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy."

III. operation cast lead

Today, Oz lives on the edge of the Negev desert, and it strikes me he has come to resemble it – his manner is dry and slow and vast, and he seems to look down on history from the perspective of thousands of years.

Why is Oz capable of understanding the dark ambiguities – and the need for compromise – when so many of his Netanyahu- and Lieberman-voting countrymen aren't? "See, I get up every morning very early, I drink a cup of coffee, I sit myself by my desk, and I start imagining, 'what if I was him? What if I was her?' That's how I make a living: by imagining the other. I imagine the other. That's my professional life. And my hobby, as well: I sit myself in street cafés, and when I have nothing else to do, when I'm waiting for someone..." He looks out over the café we are sitting in now, and smiles. "I look at the other guests in the cafés and try to imagine their life, who they really are, what are they talking about at that faraway table?

"So that's what I do. It's easy for me. It's much harder for ordinary people who are not writers, who are not novelists, to imagine the other in times of war, or even in times of a family feud. In this I belong in a minority. Most people don't bother." He repeats himself, with a shake of disdain: "Most people don't bother."

This, he adds quickly, isn't unique to Israel. "It is caused by anger, my friend. Anger. War begets anger and hatred and resentment. Very few people in Britain could pay any attention at all to the ordeal of Dresden and Leipzig. Very few people at the end of World War Two in London would pay any attention to the suffering of the innocent civilians in those cities."

And yet, and yet... it seems that Oz has failed, at last, to hold himself to the high standards he has set. He initially supported Operation Cast Lead – the bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 1,400 people, 40 per cent of whom were children – even though he says he knows, from his own experience, that it will make the children of Gaza dream lunatic dreams of revenge. I ask him why. "Hamas fired some 10,000 rockets on southern Israel, where I live. And I don't think any country in the world would simply turn the other cheek to that. I don't think England would restrain if anybody showered Yorkshire with 10,000 rockets. So, an Israeli response was understandable and acceptable, in my view. The dimensions of the response, the disproportion of the response, is something which I severely criticise."

But use your own test – of seeing the other side; of empathising. Using the same logic, you can ask from the Palestinian perspective – what country could tolerate being violently occupied for 40 years, then having part of its territory blockaded and semi-starved, just to punish it for how it voted in a democratic election?

He uncharacteristically changes the subject, and tries to blame somebody else. "Well, I'll tell you something about this blockade. Gaza borders with Egypt. There was no reason why the Egyptians would not provide Gaza with whatever it needs. And there is very little reason for Israel to provide Gaza with what it needs. After all, Gaza is firing on Israel... If Egypt and the rest of the Arab world wanted to invest in Gaza and to rebuild Gaza and to raise the standard of living in Gaza, they could have done it." Yet Oz knows it is Israel that puts vast pressure on Egypt – especially through the US – not to do that. Israel's own security services said Hamas would extend the ceasefire if Israel agreed to ease the blockade. Wouldn't that have been better? Wouldn't fewer children now be dreaming of shooting rockets at Tel Aviv?

Oz – for the first time in our interview – seems unsure. "I don't know. I think we tried. If we tried hard enough, I don't know. I really don't know." He looks down, then away.

Then he says more confidently: "I think in the last days before the Israeli attack on Gaza, the firing of rockets increased to about 80 rockets a day. And our casualties, and our homes destroyed, and there was the suffering of close to one million Israelis who have to live in underground shelters. No government could tolerate this. No government could simply turn the other cheek."

But the Palestinian side was suffering even more horribly – using your logic, they, too, have a right to fight back and bomb. "I could understand and justify, and justified, a limited, proportionate, measured, cautiously targeted Israeli military response – not a full-scale war. You see... I said many times, and I'll say it again – I'm a peacenik, not a pacifist. Yes, the pacifists believe that the ultimate evil in the world is war. I believe that the ultimate evil is not war but aggression, and aggression sometimes has to be blocked by force. Hence the difference between a peacenik and a pacifist."

It is another wriggle. I'm not advocating pacifism – I'm saying this specific war was a bad idea. As if to soothe me, he says: "I think there should be a thorough judicial interrogation of the occurrences in the Gaza war. The Israeli judiciary is independent and bold and I think there should be a thorough, comprehensive interrogation." He then says that "in principle", Israel should negotiate with Hamas. "If Hamas is ready to talk to Israel, Israel should talk to Hamas right away. Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, we need to. It's difficult to compromise with Hamas because Hamas maintains that there should be no Israel at all. Not even I can propose as a compromise that Israel exists Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. But the moment Hamas shows the slightest inclination to recognise Israel, I would talk to it – of course I would."

The he surprises me with a bold prediction. I ask: can you imagine Bibi Netanyahu shaking hands with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on the White House lawn, with Obama smiling in-between? He beams. "Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes." He adds: "Don't swear an oath about Netanyahu not delivering the two-state solution. So far, we have seen almost every right-wing Prime Minister making surprising concessions for peace. Begin over Sinai and the peace with Egypt; Sharon in evacuating the Gaza strip; Netanyahu himself over the Hebron concessions. So, I don't know. I cannot read his mind; I am sure he does not know yet what he is going to do. But it may well be that reality will be stronger than him, that he will sense the mood of the majority of the Israeli people and surprise us." He has met Netanyahu "a few times", and says: "Deep down below, he strikes me as an opportunist, and that's not necessarily a bad quality under the circumstances."

Oz and Netanyahu come from similar backgrounds: right-wing revisionists in a socialist country, demanding tougher, harder, crueller policies. Can you imagine a world where you ended up like him? "Yes, yes," he says. "Well, the question is – would he end up like me?"

What does this support for the attack on Gaza – and the initial bombing of Lebanon in 2007 – suggest about Oz? Is there a desire to be an easy, unconflicted part of the tribe – to belong – at last? Is his empathy running out as rockets rain close to his home? In his latest, tender book, Rhyming Life and Death, a middle-aged novelist wanders the streets of Tel Aviv, feeling disconnected from his country. The character admits to "a profound sadness that he is always an outsider".

Do you feel this, Amos? There is a long pause. "I would say yes," he says. But every follow-on question I ask to tease this out only prompts a subject-changing anecdote about something else. The loneliness of the exhausted, wavering peace campaigner is something he doesn't want to discuss. And so the boy who ran away from his suicide-scarred home at 14 to become a left-wing icon might be allowing flickers of his father's voice to break through – at last, after all this time.

What happened to the Israeli left?

I think the hundreds of thousands of left-wing voters decided more or less, at the very last moment, that they are going to vote for Livni’s centrist party in order to block Netanyahu. They are still leftists.

Three years ago, Israel evacuated Gaza and handed it over to the Palestinians, removing by force some 26 Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip. The general expectation was that now, some peace and quiet will follow. Instead, Israel was showered by a rain of rockets from Gaza on Israeli towns and villages, which lasted for years. No doubt there is disappointment, anger and an urge to respond. I’m not justifying it – I’m just explaining the phenomenon.

Has Israel ceased to be a European country?

Well, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a ‘European country’. Do we mean the Balkans? Do we mean Russia? Do we mean England? What exactly is a European country? It is a common assumption, and a wrong assumption, that the founding of Israel came from enlightened Europe. They did not. Most of them never had any experience with liberal democracy or with the rule of law. The founding fathers and mothers of Israel came primarily from Tsarist Russia, partly from Poland, Hungary – such places. They did not come from very liberal, open-minded countries – they came from dark dictatorships. Very few among the founding fathers and mothers of Israel ever experienced democracy. If I compare Israel to the countries from which the Israelis came, by and large – Tsarist Russia, or Fascist Poland, or Fascist Hungary and Romania, or, for that matter, Morocco and Iraq, Israel is by far better than the countries where the founders came from.

My parents never lived for a single day in their lives in a democratic country before they came to Jerusalem.

How do you explain the rise of Avigdor Liberman?

Lieberman is a complex phenomenon. He stands for tightening the screw on the Israeli Arabs, but he also stands for liberal marriage and for more or less separating the church from state. He stands for a two-state solution. I’m not advocating him, for God’s sake, I’m not defending him, but he stands for a two-state solution and he also stands for two capitals in Jerusalem. So he’s not simply far-right. He’s far-right on the Israeli Arabs, but not on other issues.

This see this as a growing trend everywhere. I remind myself that in peaceful Norway, a far-right, semi-racist party carried more than 20% of the votes. In peaceful Switzerland…So, in peaceful Switzerland some 18% voted for a far-right, semi-racist party – not to mention France and Italy. So, there seems to be a universal phenomenon, and Israel is not immune.

You have said your views on David Ben-Gurion, israel’s founding Prime Minister, have changed. In what way?

Yes, I wonder if I was right, because the more I read about Ben Gurion, the more I realise that, behind his harsh rhetoric, he was a great compromiser. He was willing to accept the two-state solution at any phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – right from the 1930s on, he was willing to accept the idea of partition of the disputed Left. So, his rhetoric was very patriotic and very harsh and full of exclamation marks. But in fact he was a pragmatist.

So you’re not expressing sympathy for there is the driving-out of people or the refusal to let them return?

Look, in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were forcibly driven out by the Israelis. That is something we will have to account for. We cannot let them go back into Israel proper, into pre-1967 Israel, because if they do there will be two Palestinian states and no home for the Jews. But we have to assume moral responsibility, at least partial moral responsibility – perhaps not full moral responsibility.

Why not full moral responsibility?

Because let’s not forget that this happened in the context of an all-out attack of the Arab world on young Israel. An attempt, a vicious attempt, to throw the Jews into the ocean. And let us also not forget that there was a 100% ethnic cleansing of the other side at the same time. Not one Jew was allowed to leave, to remain in the West Bank and in Gaza occupied by Egypt and by Jordan in 1948. There was a Jewish community in the old city of Jerusalem who lived there for more than 1,000 years. In fact, they lived there longer for the Arabs. They were wiped out in 1948. So, the ethnic cleansing took part on both sides. That’s why I say “partial responsibility.”

How do you explain the stance of the European left towards Israel?

In the 20th century, most of the conflicts were Manichean. Colonialism and anti-colonialism was black-and-white. Apartheid was a black-and-white issue – literally. And Vietnam was black-and-white. So many do-gooders in the world are in the habit of waking up in the morning, signing a petition in favour of the good guys, launching a demonstration against the bad guys, and going to sleep feeling very well about themselves. They find it difficult to conceive a phenomenon such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is essentially not black-and-white. I think the syndrome of the 21st century – not just in the Middle East, everywhere – is not about Huntington’s War of Civilisations (not at all, not in the least), it’s about the fanatics against the rest of us. And fanatics exist in Islam, in Judaism, in Christianity, in the left wing, in the right wing – everywhere.

You have said that during your childhood, Holocaust survivors were viewed with discomfort, even disgust, within Israel.

There was a latent version of anti-Jewish feelings. The young Israeli Jews did not want to identify themselves with the eternal victims. They don’t want to be one with the eternal victims. They were throwing at the survivors the horrible accusation, “why didn’t you defend yourselves? Why didn’t you fight back? After all, we are fighting back – why couldn’t you fight back?” That is, of course, forgetting the totally different circumstances – Nazi Europe and in the Middle East. There was a certain deep inclination among the new Israelis to turn over a new leaf – to be born anew. To renounce themselves from those qualities which were allegedly ascribed to the Jews by their worst enemies, by the anti-Semites. So, in a sense, many Israelis accepted certain anti-Semitic clichés, and resented what they found in the Jews as the reason for those anti-Semitic clichés.

Do you believe the European criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, as many Israelis charge?

I’m very reluctant to be inflationary with the usage of the term “anti-Semitism.” I think much of the vehement criticism of Israel is well-deserved. I think, however, that some of the criticism of Israel originates from a certain double standard. And from great expectations. Not from anti-Semitism, but from great expectations. You see, many times I heard it from European friends. They say to me, “well, the Jews, they have been through the death camps and concentration camps. How can they be cruel after such an experience? The Palestinians, on the other hand – they have been humiliated and oppressed. No wonder they are violent – what else do you expect?” This is giving double standards a bad name.

It is actually very condescending to all the Palestinians. And, by and large, very condescending to all the entire Third World. There is a certain attitude, a certain mood, prevailing in this country and elsewhere, that, “right or wrong the Third World, we should stand by it.” I find this very insulting to the Third World. The Third World deserves help, compensation, support – but not a moral concession. No-one in this world deserves a moral concession. Not the Palestinians, not Israelis, not anyone.

The experience of World War Two is fading here. And because, on the British Left, there is a kind of irrational Third World sentiment: “right or wrong, if it’s the Third World then we have to stand by it.” And in every confrontation between what strikes the British as the First World on one hand and the Third World on the other, they automatically stand by the Third World, whether it deserves to be defended or not. That’s why they have very, very little interest – relatively little interest, or perhaps no interest at all – in conflicts within the Third World. And this inclination to Manicheanism is alien to me. And this entire attitude of dividing the world into good guys and bad guys – signing petitions in favour of the good guys, launching demonstrations against the bad guys, and going to sleep feeling very good about themselves – is very alien to me.

My attitude is really more Chekovian. When I see a car accident site, with people bleeding on the roads, asking who is to blame and launching an angry demonstration against the driver would be last on my mind. I will tend the injured people, I will think about healing the wounds, I will think about getting medical aids, I will think about… to stop the bleeding, and I will put off the question of who takes how much of the blame. It’s not urgent. You know, that’s… when I talk to Palestinians. In a sense, it’s easier for me to talk to Palestinians than to talk to some of the friends of Palestine here in Britain and in other European countries. Because when I talk to Palestinians it’s always about the question of what can be done and what should be done. Whereas here, it’s more often than not about the blame, and who takes the blame. So, I am Chekovian in the sense of regarding my role in the peace efforts as the role of a country doctor. “See what I can do; see what I can do.”

Do you think Israel should bomb Iran to stop it acquiring nuclear weapons?

Regrettably, within 15 years or so, every country that wants it will have means of mass destruction, whether nuclear or whatever. So there is no point for Israel in striking Iran, when Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapon, may turn tomorrow into a fundamentalist Islamic country. So, we will have to rely on good old deterrence, rather than launch a pre-emptive strike.

What does you say to those on the right, who say deterrence doesn’t work against people who don’t mind dying in a holy cause?

I don’t think heads of governments are ever the equivalents of suicide bombers. Not even Hitler. If he would have known that Germany is going to be annihilated, he would probably have been more careful. Assuming that both Israel and Iran are going to be nuclear, this may provide for peace and quiet, because it would provide a mutually assured destruction.

How does it feel to come to Britain, a country you dreamed of bombing as a child?

It felt fascinating. I was immensely and endlessly curious about everything British. Because I remember them from the days of the British mandate in Jerusalem in my childhood with a certain ambivalence. I didn’t really hate them; I wanted to hate them, I needed to hate them, I was supposed to hate them. But I couldn’t hate them, because in the end they were not the demons we pictured them to be. They have done their share of incitement between Jews and Arabs – separate and rule, you know. And they have committed their serious misdeeds in the Middle East. But they were not diabolical. And deep down in my heart of hearts, there was a warm niche for the British in my heart. When I first came here, I was glad to come here.

Do you think European repentance about anti-Semitism has been sincere? What do you think of ‘The Reader’?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m not sure there has been a deep soul-searching in Europe about minorities altogether. And, to judge by the way other minorities are being treated by Europe now, I am not sure the soul-searching was really sufficient.

Well, German literature taught me a lesson. First, they wanted me to sympathise with simple German folks during World War Two, which I could do. Then, they wanted me to sympathise with German soldiers during World War Two, which I could do with some difficulties. Now, they want even, want me to sympathise not only with SS, but with war criminals, with SS war criminals. That’s a bit hard.

Do you have high hopes of Barack Obama?

We all have messianic hopes in Obama, and I’m worried about my own hopes, and I’m worried about other people’s hopes. I think we are hoping too much. He declared a week or so that he will deal aggressively with the peace in the Middle East. I never thought I would enjoy hearing an American president using the word “aggressively,” and I would think that this is a positive thing, but here we go! Yes.

Do you believe in sanctions against Israel?

That would be counter-productive, because this will harden the Israelis and corner them, and strengthen the widespread feeling, any widespread feeling, that “the whole world is against us anyway, so why try?”

What do you say to advocates of a one-state solution, accommodating both Israelis and Palestinians?

One-state solution would be a terrible solution, because trying to push into bed together, into a honeymoon bed together, two deadly enemies, after 100 years of bloodshed and suspicion and animosity, would provide for a tragedy. We have seen what happens in former Yugoslavia, we have seen what happens in Cyprus, we have seen what happens in the former Soviet Union. Even Belgium is dissolving now. So a bi-national state is a miserable solution.

What do you say to people who say Israel is a colonial implant in the Middle East?

I would say that colonialists went to overseas countries to get rich. The Jews didn’t come to Israel to get rich. In fact, they pumped a million times more resources into the country than they could have possibly hoped to take out of it. So, this in itself rules out the comparison to colonial enterprises. Moreover, the Jews had nowhere to go.

Is Israel now the country you imagined it would be?

Certainly not. Israel was born out of dreams – out of magnanimous dreams. It is destined, by definition, to be a disappointment. This is not about the nature of Israel; it’s about the nature of dreams. The only way to keep a dream whole and rosy and intact and perfect is never to try to live it out. The moment a dream is fulfilled, it’s flawed and disappointing by definition. This is true of planting a garden; this is true of writing a novel. This is true of living out a sexual fantasy. This is true of everything.

What are the main disappointments?

Many. Many, many. Too many to describe. The initial… one of the initial dreams was that Israel would become a castle of spirituality. In fact, it’s a very creative country – it’s exploding with creativeness. Maybe going through a cultural golden age. The theatre, the cinema, the literature, the music, the sciences are vivacious. But the kind of moral example unto the nations which the founding fathers and mothers hoped for Israel to be is not fulfilled and possibly couldn’t be fulfilled. That’s the unavoidable gap between the magnitude of initial dreams and the realities.

What should British people who are concerned for peace be doing?

They should be more curious. They should be more curious. Be aware of the position of a walking exclamation mark, which is the position of the fanatic. After all, the fanatic is a walking exclamation mark. Be more curious. God in the details, and the devil is also in the details. Study the details. Imagine the other. These are my simple imperatives.

In what way would that inform practical action?

Practical action right now is to help find homes and jobs for hundreds of thousands of homeless Palestinian refugees. This is urgent. Reconstruct Gaza. This is urgent. Help Gaza evacuate the settlers from the West Bank. This is urgent. These are urgent tasks. And everybody could do something in this direction. Everybody could do something – at least something.

You have defended the idea of compromise from its critics.

I’m a great believer in compromises. I know the word “compromise” has a very bad, very negative reputation, especially in radical circles in this country and among the young. Compromise is conceived as inconsistent, as opportunistic, as dishonest. For me, the word “compromise” is synonymous with the word “life”. And where there is life, there should be compromises. And the opposite of “compromise” is not “consistency”, and the opposite of “compromise” is not “idealism” – the opposite of “compromise” is “fanaticism” and “death”. And when I say “compromise”, I don’t mean “capitulation”, and I certainly don’t mean “turn the other cheek”. I mean, “try to meet the other somewhere halfway – somewhere halfway.” And that’s true in a marriage as much as it is true in international relations. It’s about compromises.

What do you say to those on the right who say - okay, what happens if we do what you want; we withdraw to the ’67 borders, we have a peace deal, and the next day, rockets are fired at Israel?

We will fight back. We will definitely fight back. But then, we will fight a just war of self-defence. Yes. This might happen, by the way. There is no guarantee that this will not happen; if Israel withdraws to the ’67 boundaries, there is no guarantee. But we will be fighting a just war of self-defence, and there is all the difference in the world.

I think the Palestinians will have less reasons to want to fight against Israel if they have a state of their own – if they have a homeland of their own. I hope so.