Translated excerpt from my book Det förlorade landet, Bonniers 1996, L’utopie Perdue, Denoël 2000, Das verlorene Land, Suhrkamp, Jüdischer Verlag, 1998). Alex Danzig was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST

I have two class photos from secondary school number nine in Tel Aviv. In one, taken in 1963, we are dressed in the usual light and dark blue school uniform. In the other, taken in 1964, we are wearing the bright khaki of the street days. The pictures were taken in the same place, in a corner of the circular rectangular schoolyard, which is bordered on one side by a wide amphitheatre-like staircase to the upper level of the school, and on the other sides by a covered columned walkway between the classrooms. The photographer has placed us in the shadow between two pillars to make use of the mildly reflected sunlight from the "amphitheatre" and the concrete slabs of the schoolyard. The reflection draws softly, almost plastically. It is easy to see how different we are. Moshe Rubin from Libya, whom we amicably (and cluelessly) nicknamed "kushi", the negro, is really black, red-haired Alex Danzig with his freckles really white. Ester Shafreisen's curly blonde hair shines brightly against Gili Ben Baruch's finely cut brown Yemeni features and warm peppercorn eyes. A class photo from secondary school number nine in the early sixties had good use for every shade and contrast that could be squeezed out of a black and white film roll. I myself am somewhere in the middle of the grey scale, finely grained and integrated into the whole.

For almost thirty years I thought I was the only stranger, the only outsider, in the pictures. Well, except perhaps for the Romanian - I've typically forgotten his name - who had arrived in Israel at about the same time as me and smelled of foreignness. All the others were so Israeli, so at home, so confident in their language and culture, so familiar with the country's unspoken and spoken codes, that I took it for granted that they were native Israelis. I knew that their parents were usually from somewhere else, but not that there was sometimes only a five or ten year gap between my classmates' "ascension" and my own.

We never talked about it. Why should we? It was not a merit to come from somewhere else, quite the contrary. Nor was there anything to say. What we could have said, had we had the slightest reason or ability or will to do so, was that the State of Israel was not only the happy beginning of something new, as we had carefully imprinted and memorised, but also the painful continuation of something old. It was only when we met again half a lifetime later that I learnt that the "super brothers" Ester, Miriam, Alex and Ronit had come to Israel from Poland in the 1950s, and that many of my unmistakably "native" classmates were in fact, like myself, children of the Jewish refugee wreckage of the war years and the end of the war. Palestine and the new state of Israel were populated in those years by what the Israeli historian Tom Segev has suggestively called 'the seventh million'. In 1962, one-fifth of Israel's Jewish population was made up of Holocaust survivors. Jerusalem was a neighbour of Auschwitz.

We don't quite understand it yet, and so we don't talk about it, but in the class photo from secondary school number nine in Tel Aviv, the children of the Holocaust are sitting in the shadow of the Holocaust.

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Did I sense the phobias and demons lurking in my new country? Perhaps I should have been surprised how easily and quickly I forgot, and how easily and quickly I learnt. Was it like that with all of us? Was forgetting part of our new identity?

Now that I know how many of us had a history worth remembering, and remember how little we probably thought it was worth, and marvel at how little we really knew each other, I can't help but see the old class photos from secondary school number nine in a more ambiguous light. I see shadows that weren't there before. I see stories that were never told. I see contrasts that could not be captured.

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Alex Danzig came to Israel from Poland in 1957 (through Gomulka's open doorway). His parents survived the war on false papers in Ukraine and left Poland as convinced Zionists. Alex was red-haired with light blue eyes and large freckles and walked with his feet slightly outwards, always in barefoot sandals. He was the class socialist theorist and undisputed debater. He was also one of the very few who followed the ideological path. After graduating from high school, he traded the white-laced blue shirts for the green uniform of the Nazi units, combining elite military training with agricultural work on a kibbutz.

He ended up in Nir Oz, a left-wing Zionist kibbutz on the dry desert plain east of the Gaza Strip, almost within sight of the Palestinian refugee camp at Khan Yunis. Actually, he had soft-launched his pioneering service as a youth leader in Haifa, but with the growing tension in the spring of 1967, he was sent to Nir Oz to help dig shelters and tunnels. The kibbutz had been founded in the late autumn of 1956, after the Sinai War, when everyone thought things would be quiet and no tunnels were being built. Now nobody really knew what would happen.

Only after the war, in July, did Alex complete his military training as a paratrooper. The parachute troops were a must for the ideologically inclined - or some equivalent elite fighter unit.

He then returned to Nir Oz and settled there.

Today, Nir Oz is one of several flourishing oases in an agricultural belt that borders the entire Gaza Strip, from Yad Mordechai in the north to Kerem Shalom on the Egyptian border in the south. Throughout the fields are fenced-in pumping stations with heavy pipework and large red-colored taps connected to the main national water pipeline. State-subsidised water from Genesaret and modern wastewater treatment systems are the prerequisite for agriculture and settlement in this part of the country. When I enter the gate of the well-fenced and guarded kibbutz, it is already dark outside, but everywhere I hear the quiet ticking of the sprinklers and the splashing of water droplets on rocks and leaves. Even in the light and shadows of the outdoor lighting, the kibbutz area is lavishly planted with avenues, shrubs and lawns. There is a pungent odour from the chicken coop and barn. Few people are on the move and I have to wander for a long time to find them.

Alex lives in the newest neighbourhood, two semi-circles of terraced houses curved away from each other. The large lawn between them was intended to serve as a common playground, but now a beautiful but dense hedge separates the two arms of the house and prevents too much casual socialising. The residents wanted it that way. Some kibbutzes are beginning to resemble terraced suburbs.

Left-wing kibbutzes such as Nir Oz otherwise still resemble kibbutzes, with preserved communal spaces and functions, with strong restrictions on hired labour and with agriculture as the main industry. A factory producing latex paints and silicone-based sealing materials, Nir Lat, is the only industry. The kibbutz's farmland extends west to the border and is intensively cultivated with wheat, peanuts, avocados and apples. Giant, computerised irrigation machines crawl like wide-legged spiders across the fields.

Nir Oz has 175 members and 400 residents. The youngsters of the kibbutz are now given five years to decide whether to stay or not. They are offered opportunities to travel and study, while maintaining a simple home away from home, but about half still choose to leave the kibbutz. The reasons for staying are ever less ideological. The collective aspects of life are diminishing every year. The military-strategic importance of the kibbutz will soon be gone. Even before the peace agreement, the incidents at the border with Khan Yunis were few and far between, mostly thefts, and they have not become more exciting since. Israeli youth are demanding material comfort, cultural quality of life and personal freedom. The kibbutzes that have none of these to offer are not attracting new members.

- "I'm injured," Alex Danzig apologises as he sits in a chair with one leg in a cast, and I typically assume that he has been in a war or occupation. He takes my hand firmly and matter-of-factly, with the lack of ceremony that I have always associated with kibbutz people. For a moment I imagine that he is annoyed by the visit. His once-thin body is now firmly built, his hair has darkened, but the red is clearly visible in his short beard. He is dressed in shorts and an undershirt, which is the only straightforward thing to wear as the evening air is warm and the small living room is still stuffy from the heat of the day. Air conditioning is a luxury that hasn't yet conquered the relatively simple members' accommodation in Nir Oz.

- Football, Alex adds after a while. I slipped in a training match. Six more weeks.

He speaks in short sentences and with an angry tone of voice that I first derive from pent-up anger over broken bones and helplessness, but which I eventually realise is part of his way of being. After a while, the grumpiness thaws into sarcasm and black humour. He demonstrates his disinterest in the past, but is in fact fixated on it. Names and particulars recur in the periphery when they are in fact the centre.

- Didn't you become anti-Israeli? he asks quite promptly, as if he had uploaded. Alex, like some others, had seen my name in connection with Israeli newspaper reports on the pro-Palestinian movement in Europe in the early seventies, and seemed prepared to give me a hard time. He, the school's socialist who saw the Arab problem even then, against the never-doubting pioneer from Sweden, the fighter, the idiot who took off running around the school building but didn't see the political terrain around him. Here was an irresistible irony that he was prepared to squeeze the last drop out of.

- Have you been abroad? I ask to avoid a fight.

- I am abroad, he answers ambiguously.

I ask him to tell me about the time after the 1967 war. How did it affect his view of Israel, his ideals? For a while he insists on talking in the periphery, about Sweden and football, about this or that idiot in class or school, but eventually he gravitates towards the question.

- It was a difficult period, there was a lot of confusion, what should we do with the new areas? In the summer of 1968, I was patrolling the border with Jordan. The Jordan River was a narrow body of water, easy to wade across at night, and sometimes we were heavily exposed. That's how Shamai Shayevitz died, in a Palestinian ambush.

- I know, I say.

- That summer, I was under the command of Rafael "Raful" Eitan, the man who would eventually become commander-in-chief and lead us into Lebanon, and who is now a far-right politician. Our job, as usual, was to guard the border. On the other side of the river, a tractor was rolling. Raful ordered shelling. "They could be terrorists," he said. Some of us protested. Then Raful himself fired.

- The next night I woke up to the sound of tanks and thought I was dreaming. Then at dawn, bang, the tent next to us, which was empty, was hit by an artillery shell. We flew into the air and took cover. The next moment our tent was hit. All my belongings, letters and photos, were burned.

- And so it went on. There were old villages lying along the river, which may have been there for a thousand years. For the inhabitants, the Jordan River was not a border, but a body of water that they used and crossed when necessary. One night we saw three people wading across the river and we shot them. The next day the whole village came and screamed and cried and cursed. Do you know what we did to the village? We emptied it. We drove the inhabitants out.

Gone is the irony in his voice. Only the bitterness remains. In Alex Danzig's world, Raful is more than a mad commander. Raful is the symbol of the forces that have destroyed his Israel, that have made a mockery of his ideas and ideals, that have tarnished his weapons and that in the summer of 1968 made him act against his convictions.

Raful Eitan. I have just seen him flashing by on the 1992 television election programme, a heavily built, slightly greyed man in an open blue shirt, who shortly and uncharismatically advocates Jewish colonisation and annexation of the occupied territories, and who has elsewhere expressed support for the "transfer" of the Palestinian population, which is the regional euphemism for ethnic cleansing. He is not, like Begin, ridden by the nightmares of the Holocaust, but, like his role model and comrade-in-arms Ariel Sharon, a home-grown Israeli plant, raised on an agricultural co-operative, the moshav, and nurtured on essentially the same Zionist and messianic diet as Alex Danzig. He is no mistake, no isolated psychological deviation from the Israeli norm, but the perfectly natural product of a society that staked out heroic careers not only for young men with collectivist pioneering dreams, but also for young men with dreams of physical heroism and war.

Raful was the latter and became a professional fighter in the Israeli army. He served under Sharon in the famous 101 Commando Unit, which in the early fifties made death-defying, bloody and not always militarily motivated raids into Arab territory. He, like Sharon, was characterised by a combination of skill, brutality and contempt for death in battle. He, like Sharon, emerged from the October 1973 war, humiliating for so many others, as a hero. As commander-in-chief under Begin and Sharon, his belief in military force was given unfettered expression, both in the continued brutalisation of the occupation policy (before a parliamentary committee he called demonstrating Palestinians 'drugged cockroaches') and in the siege of West Beirut, where he was the man who, with Sharon, opened the door to the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. And who, when he learnt what was going on, did not lift a finger (which would have been enough) to stop it.

In 1953, the 101st Commando Unit raided the Jordanian village of Qibya, blowing up several houses and a school and leaving 69 residents dead.

An official Israeli investigation into the incident, the Kahan Commission, concluded in its report that "the lack of action by the Commander-in-Chief... constituted a violation of the duty... of the Commander-in-Chief', with the sole consequence that Mr Eitan's appointment as Commander-in-Chief was not renewed.

What is Raful Eitan, I think, but another species of the "new Jewish man"; drunk on his own strength, obsessed with his own righteousness, convinced of the inferiority of the Other, excited by the finger on the trigger. This is the same type of person who speaks out in a chapter of Amos Oz's 1983 reportage book, In the Land of Israel:

"Listen, my friend, a people who let themselves be slaughtered and destroyed, a people who let their children become soap and their women become lampshades, are worse criminals than their tormentors. Worse than the Nazis. To live without fists, without fangs and claws in a world of wolves is a crime worse than murder."

Did Alexander Danzig lose the war in 1967? Did it kill the Israel of his dreams, and give birth to another instead? The Israel of Raful, Sharon, Begin and Shamir?

I formulate that pointed question silently to myself. Alex would never ask it that way. His language is cold and distant, almost nonchalant. Ironies and laconicisms abound, whether we are discussing war or agricultural machinery. And perhaps we must. There is much at stake. To accept my question would be for him to question an existence that is still essentially based on the dreams and ideas of pre-1967. He can allow himself to be critical and bitter, but not to declare thirty years of his life dead.

- The war made us overconfident. It was then that Ezer Weizman, the air force chief, could rhetorically ask: How many are the Egyptians, a hundred million? It took us a week. How many are the Russians, two hundred? It takes us two weeks. Then we had Golda Meir on our hands, a prime minister who didn't know what to make of the victory, who waited for a solution to fall from the sky, who couldn't see a chance for peace if it sat on her nose, who didn't see Sadat's 1971 Newsweek interview offering a peace treaty. Did no one see it but me? Or did nobody not want to see?

To the list of all the things Golda Meir didn't see, he could have added the Palestinians ("they are not a people"), the morally degrading effects of the military occupation, and Sadat's continued peace overtures to UN mediator Gunnar Jarring in 1972 and 1973.

- Instead, we built settlements in the Sinai. He shakes his head slowly, as if still amazed by this unfathomable idiocy: "Everyone knew that Sinai had to be returned, sooner or later. The Yom Kippur War was a war we deserved.

He himself lived through it on the Syrian front, in the bloody battle for Mount Hermon. Dead and wounded friends loom like shadows over his face. There is much that remains unsaid.

The year before, he had travelled to the Olympic Games in Munich to discover the world, but after the massacre of the Israeli squad, he had discovered enough. When he tried to return the tickets, the German organisers looked completely uncomprehending. Germans, of all people.

What happened to Alexander Danzig, aged 24, between Munich 1972 and Yom Kippur 1973?

- Do you know that Haia Levinger lives here too? he says suddenly. Do you remember her? Of course I remember her. She had been a member of the wise-cracking gang around Alex, a cool, perhaps shy, but at the same time striking beauty with high cheeks and dark eyebrows. She wore her long, thick, black hair in a sturdy braid down her back, was always neatly and pioneeringly dressed, and had an aura of seriousness and determination that was hard to crack. I had heard that she lived in Nir Oz, but found it difficult to transcend the former distance. Some people you just didn't ring up without a second thought. She probably didn't remember who I was either.

She is quite defensive when Alex calls and tells her that the "Swede" from the other ring is visiting. It's cleaning day, she says. Then she comes walking across the lawn in a white blouse and black shorts, still very beautiful, but her sharp features have deepened and her thick hair is cut short and streaked with grey. She doesn't seem surprised to see me, but I don't think Haia Levinger, now Klingbeil, would show surprise at much. She carries with her, like a shield, the dry, unsentimental objectivity that I have so often encountered in kibbutz people. -

- So, what are you doing here?

Haia Levinger came to Nir Oz in 1967, via the same nahal group as Alex Danzig. Two years later, aged 21, she married a fellow member of the group. Today she is the mother of four children and the kibbutz's treasurer. I ask her if she has ever regretted her choice, and I immediately realise that she is the kind of person who makes up her mind and never looks back.

- "I have been able to do everything I wanted in life," she says. "On this kibbutz we let people develop.

After a few minutes, the conversation turns into a discussion between Alex and Haia, an orchestrated dialogue, it seems to me, as if they preferred to talk by talking. They discuss the kibbutz and the issue of women. The women's issue is high on the agenda, Haia says sharply, not to me but to Alex. "We have invested in collective child rearing to liberate women, yet women's business has remained women's business. The canteen, kitchen, household, nursery and school are run by women, not by men.

Nir Oz is one of the last kibbutzes with collective child rearing. Everywhere else, kibbutz children now sleep with their parents. During the Gulf War, the collective orphanages were evacuated and in many kibbutzes they never reopened. The family and the individual suck the life out of the collective, Haia Klingbeil suggests, and I am allowed to understand that yet another internal ideological battle is brewing at Nir Oz.

- You always see a glass half empty, says Alex. I always see a half-full one.

He doesn't want to appear in public with his plastered leg, so Haia takes me on an evening walk around the kibbutz. In the small courtyards in front of the houses, individualism flourishes. In one place, someone has exhibited their own archaeological finds, several mosaic fragments from the Roman era. Another courtyard is filled with their own sculptures around a small goldfish pool, illuminated at night by spotlights. A third member displays homemade flower pots for sale. Laughter can be heard from the pub next to the communal dining room; Thursday night is community night. We walk out of the neighbourhood, past animal stables and farm buildings. On a large gravel field below a facade-lit grain silo, giant lorries are parked for the night. A fan drowns out the crickets. At the end of the access road, the outer gate slides shut and the night watchman takes his place. Across the fields, the lights of the neighbouring kibbutzes glimmer, and further to the west, the illuminated sky of Khan Yunis. There is not much more room to grow in Nir Oz. New housing estates are being added to old ones, fields are closing in tightly, precious land has been set aside for an Olympic-class swimming pool, a set of tennis courts and a riding club.

- 'This is a country club,' says Haia Klingbeil not entirely jokingly, and not without distance.

- What is the future? I ask.

- Consolidate, she replies after a while. Consolidate what we have.

- Consolidate what? I ask. The land has been conquered, the patriotic goals have been achieved, there is peace with the Palestinians, agriculture is unsustainable, water is scarce, debts are large, the lure of individual life is growing stronger, the collective elements of kibbutz life are diminishing, membership is more a matter of comfort and freedom than of collective ideals.

For my pioneering Israeli generation, for Haia Klingbeil and Alexander Danzig, the kibbutz was the symbol of a better and richer life than that offered by the competitive capitalist society outside. Here people would collectively work together to provide the necessities of life, ensuring that everyone had food, clothing, housing, education, social and medical care. They would also jointly take care of each other's children and the elderly. This would also create the conditions for real individual freedom. Kibbutz members would have the time and resources to develop their own unique abilities and interests - without regard to collective benefit or necessity. Once the necessary work was organised and mastered, the door to the realm of freedom opened.

Was it a dream doomed to end in disappointment?

Alex is married to Rachel, who comes from a Moroccan-Jewish immigrant family, where the father and several of the six siblings are anything but left-wing Zionist kibbutz sympathisers. Their marriage has consequently crossed borders. Rachel is dark and pained, with a narrow and sharply drawn face. She works as a school teacher and paints pictures in her spare time. This evening she has brought home food from the dining room, partly to save Alex the walk, partly, I suppose, to make the dinner more formal. We set out sesame paste, tehina, vegetable salad, white cheese, pickled red peppers and a turkey omelette that Rachel heats on the stove. After dinner, she pulls out a folder of oil paintings, abstract motifs in bright, almost fluorescent colours, sometimes with what looks like naked tree trunks.

Alex and Rachel have three sons who are about to complete their three years in the military, and who in various constellations go in and out of the house during my visits there. The living room has a colour TV with satellite channels and a programmable video recorder. Football and news are the favourite programmes of this small male community. The rest of the room, like the other rooms, is well covered with books, many in Polish. They represent, I discover, Alexander Danzig's glass half full. They are the world to which he travels after the end of the collective work, after another stormy members' meeting in the dining room, after another evening of muttering in front of the Israeli television news. Poland. Polish literature. Polish politics. Alex Danzig was nine years old when he came to Israel from Poland. Why is he returning? To what?

We drink coffee in front of the television. The election parties introduce themselves. The religious settler movement's own Valkyrie, Daniella Weiss, appears with a covered head and steel-blue eyes, talking about blood and holy ground. The gun-toting Rabbi Moshe Levinger on a carnal walk in Hebron fades in. The crack of a gunshot ends the presentation.

-"If they take power, I'll move," says Alex.

Soon he will immerse himself in his Polish books again. And live his life in the half-full part. The half empty one he refuses to discuss.

On the way home at night, I listen to the settler radio station Arutz Sheva, a pirate medium-wave station that broadcasts a mixture of Jewish heroic tales, nationalist propaganda and interpretations of God's will in Hebron, Jerusalem and other parts of the coming Messiah's kingdom. This evening, a woman tells in a low voice about a member of the right-wing nationalist guerrilla organisation Lehi, the Star League, who later became Ben Gurion's own bodyguard. The moral is that Ben Gurion would rather trust his life to a right-wing nationalist 'enemy' (i.e. a true patriot) than to a 'friend' in his own ranks (i.e. a potential traitor). A rabbi with a strong American accent comments on the political situation. The presentation is lined with religious code words, and I can clearly hear the cold, superior smile of one who knows what is to come.

At one of the small, deserted junctions on the narrow country roads along the Gaza Strip up to the main road to Tel Aviv, I am stopped by a policeman in the dark.

- You didn't signal with your directional light.

He is an older man with a slight European accent. How many wars does he have behind him? Maybe he saw something else, really. A few days before, a Mr Kalman Weinstock has shot a Mr Amad a-Din with a pistol on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, on the sole grounds that Mr a-Din's West Bank-signed truck was driving strangely.

An unlit turn signal - by the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time - is a signal straight to the Israeli nervous system.

- This is Israel, says the policeman, just in case, before letting me drive on.

I return to Nir Oz just over a year later, in September 1993. I get lost again in the darkness of the kibbutz and park at the silo. Young Russian voices are heard from one of the walkways. Five hundred metres away, the Palestinian state is growing. As a gift, I bring a t-shirt made by a lucky Jericho restaurant owner, scrawled with peace doves and olive branches and the word 'peace' in at least three languages.

Alex's leg is healthy so we go to the self-serve dining room and help ourselves to cheese, salad, vegetables, pickled herring and coffee from a vending machine. Another counter serves spaghetti with sauce. The almost ritual procedure of chopping onion, tomato and cucumber directly on the plate, mixing with cheese and olive oil and otherwise individualising according to availability and imagination, works like a madeleine cake. The rest of the dining room does not. Gone are the mud and shiny serving trolleys and the waiters on duty in rolled-up work shorts and heavy boots. Many pick up food in small cans and bins to eat at home. The tables are fairly empty.

The members of Nir Oz are not among the most affluent kibbutz residents in the country, but Alex and Rachel now have access to a car and, if money permits, to foreign holidays and study abroad. Their children are regularly granted both. The realm of necessity has expanded. The common result must cover more and more. Constant new income is a condition of survival, and the kibbutz's character as a collective capitalist has become more apparent. Some kibbutzes are better at making money than others, and their members consequently have nicer houses, more cars, more generous study abroad programmes and more expensive holidays.

Lately, Nir Oz, as one of the last kibbutzes, has decided to close the children's house. Shelf metres of literature on collective child-rearing can be packed up. In other kibbutzes, privatisation goes much further; members are allowed to own property outside the kibbutz, are allowed to own their own cars, are allowed to keep inherited wealth, are encouraged to take well-paid jobs outside the kibbutz and are allowed to keep part of their salary for themselves. From the perspective of the sixties, from the years when Alex and Haia formed their collective ideals, it is perhaps difficult to see this development as anything other than an ideological failure. Viewed through the individualistic eyes of the 1990s, the kibbutz is certainly an increasingly free form of society, but perhaps also with a contemporary core of collective community.

The kibbutz's role as ideological educator, strategic conqueror and Jewish nation-builder is over. Can it find another?

The next day we go to Magen, the neighbouring kibbutz, to repair some pipes for an irrigation machine.

- "Romanians," says Alex the Pole, his voice full of contempt. "They only think about money. When all the other kibbutzes were cash-strapped because of the recession, the Magen happened to have money, I repeat happened to have money, not because they were particularly smart or skilful. So they took the opportunity to lend and invest and are now sitting pretty. But they are not having fun. And they are not nice.

-"They're the only ones who fix this kind of thing," explains his workmate, Amnon, married to a blonde Finnish woman, taking out the broken pipe fittings.

In Magen's mechanical workshop, order and prosperity prevail. But the paint and silicone they use are not from Nir Lat, a kilometre away.

- Just give us a decent price, says the 'Romanian'.

I see what Alex Danzig thinks about decency.

We return to the broken irrigation machine that fragilely straddles a peanut field several hundred metres long and fifty metres wide. Just below its far end is the border with Palestinian Gaza. Alex Danzig welcomes the border, indeed longs for it. He longs for an end to ambivalence and uncertainty. He longs for clean lines and clear papers. He longs for the divorce from the Palestinians. Jews and Palestinians have nothing more to say to each other, nothing to give each other. Decades of rhetoric about co-operation and brotherhood are long gone. He makes it very clear that he does not like the Palestinians. His tone is matter-of-fact and without irony.

He thinks even less of the religious settlers, the twenty or so families, "madmen", who have taken up residence on the other side, in Gush Katif and Kfar Darom. But he cannot separate himself from them.

And on second thought, not from the Palestinians either. Borders and gates no longer protect Alexander Danzig's world.