How are you going to colonize a land the size of three counties with 15–17 million people?

‘And what will you do with the indigenous Arabs, who also have the right to a natural death, rather than an abrupt one by Zionist extermination? How will you bring to life an artificial conglomeration of people brought from every corner of the earth through a so-called national process, while ignoring the bloodiest problems of the proletariat, social class, falsified political economy? I’d like to know if this Mr Jabotinski has heard of Palestinian labour unrest, of a Palestinian proletariat, of Palestinian finance. And I’d like to know how he proposes to accommodate them.

‘In fact, I don’t need to know. Because I know without him telling me.

‘I can almost hear him saying it: “The problem of social struggle is subordinate to the national imperative.” Not even Mussolini talks that way. Not even German counter-revolutionaries. Not even Nicholas I, the Tsar of all Russians.

‘Jewish national unity is an absurdity. I don’t know any Jews: I know workers and the bourgeoisie. I don’t know of a Palestinian national problem. I know about a practical economic problem involving Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, which is not any more interesting than the problems of Cuba, Indochina and Eastern Rumelia. The rest is a myth, an idyll, a chimera.’

S.T.H. is an incurable Marxist. It’s gone beyond a system of political thought and is now a complete inability to understand life in any other terms. Anything that’s not expressible in figures is for him not real. For every fact there is a document, every proof a counterproof, and beyond that everything else – as he puts it with terrible finality – is an idyll …

I was afraid Winkler would be provoked and feel compelled to make counter-arguments. I don’t know if he’d have lost the battle – polemicists like ST.H. put up a stiff fight – but I know we would have spent a wasted evening. Winkler would have produced a set of figures, demonstrating the viability of a Jewish Palestinian state, and S.T.H. would have produced another set of figures to demonstrate the exact opposite.

Again I observe that Winkler, despite his obtuse exterior, can sense nuances when he has to and size up a situation. He replied to S.T.H. by shifting the plane of the argument.

‘I’m not going to argue with you about matters of Palestinian geography and economics, though I could do so. Nor will I attempt to show you that your arguments about the Arabs and the Jewish proletariat carry no weight. I don’t deny their reality, but there’s a hierarchy of realities which you refuse to recognize. So between two equally valid arguments, one may cancel the other, because it has another meaning, is of another order. So let’s leave it.

‘The question for me isn’t whether Jews can create a Palestinian state, but whether they can do anything but. Understand? The chances of the enterprise succeeding matter less than the fact that it is so pressing. If we don’t do this, we die. If we do – according to you – we still die. I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. And for this “maybe” it’s worth making the journey. Don’t ask a nation on the road to creating a country to count its money, take out an insurance policy and make a hotel reservation. In the end, to be honest with you, I find this whole argument pointless.