On Netanyahu’s defeat: Since the assassination of [former prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin [in 1995], there simply was no chance of the wounds of the country being healed by Benjamin Netanyahu, because he had been seen at demonstrations protesting against Rabin, because he had actually walked in front of a [symbolic] coffin which had the words RABIN THE MURDERER OF ZIONISM on it… The assassination [was] without any question the major traumatic event in Israel in the ’90s. It’s the defining event just as the Six Day War was in the ’60s, because it shocked Israel about itself… And so you needed a healer.

Now, a healer doesn’t need to be a great visionary. In [the United States], you know, President Ford was not a great man, but he saw that after the trauma of Nixon, you had to heal the country. And because he was honest, he was able to heal the country…

Netanyahu was… politically unscrupulous enough to take advantage of all of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society in order to advance his own political career. And because he was that kind of man he was never going to be someone who could heal [Israel’s] wounds.

On Barak’s win: I think the Palestinian state is a fait accompli… Even [several years ago, with the peace process] in apparent deadlock, everybody knew that Netanyahu would go and would be replaced by somebody who would move toward a Palestinian state… In other words, what we’re talking about is a Gaullist settlement, aren’t we? We are talking about exactly what happened in Algeria, where everyone–whatever their secular position, be it right wing, left wing–virtually says, “Look, we have to secure some sort of stability in the region, both through military strength but also through the drawing of boundaries.” And everybody knows that settlement has got to come. It can’t drift in the way it’s drifted for the last three years…

What [Barak has] done is exactly what [Britain’s] Tony Blair has done, which is that he is coming from a left-center party, but he’s dropped its old name–he called it “One Israel,” just as Tony Blair called [his party] “New Labor”… In the historical situation, it seems the right thing to do…

Just as a very tiny example, 10 years ago you could not have brought “Via Dolorosa” to New York. [Now,] one of Netanyahu’s few achievements was to so divide opinion abroad so that it is no longer thought to be either anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist to criticize the government of Israel.

On the Palestinian leadership: The naive, romantic view of the area is that Israel is the oppressor and that these are heroic, oppressed people. Well… the guys that are the leaders are corrupt… I see continuing conflict unless there is some economic and social justice for the Palestinians, provided either by the nature of the relationship with the Israelis or from internal reform… but I don’t think with the proximity to Israel that a small dictatorship with a rotten human-rights record and systematic use of torture and abuse and corruption can coexist alongside a modern Western state…

I describe in the play the disillusionment of the generation that led the revolt on the streets [in 1987 and 1988]… They’ve seen the people from Tunis come in and take the cars, they’ve taken the apartments, they’ve taken the telephone lines. They’ve taken the goods, they’ve literally ripped the international community off, and these kids are totally disillusioned.