And yet, in the last analysis, our wickedness, if you will, was almost religiously selfless. We served the cause with both the good and the bad in us, and that makes us a thousand times better than this new race of rascals that’s sprung up around you, and around me, and everywhere you look. Ah, well! It’s all over with now. You, if I may say so, are a fatter, more bloated old dotard than even the cartoonists make you out to be, while I’m a hunchback curmudgeon with—it shouldn’t happen even to you—a bad ear in the bargain. And quite ill as well, by the way.

But this isn’t the point either. Believe me, for once I’m not writing to you in order to quarrel. We’ve already quarreled more than enough, the two of us. On the contrary, it’s high time we made up, you and I, from the far ends of our two vast deserts of loneliness. That’s why I’m not going to have it out with you again over the Lavon affair and all that. Whatever I have to say on the subject has already been said, both to your face and in the press, and deep down in your heart you know only too well that you’ll broil on a low flame in hell for your part in the whole charming episode. Finis.

The main thing is that we are defeated, my dear Eshkol. Defeated once and for all. My hand rebels against writing these words, but the truth takes precedence. It’s two o’clock in the morning now, the rain keeps falling like a curse, and it’s all over with, the whole long journey. In vain, my friend, was all our devotion, in vain all our dreams, in vain all the years we plotted with subtle cunning to save the Jewish people—na, these Yids of ours—from their own hands and those of the Gentiles. An ill wind is tearing it all up now. Pulling it up by the roots. I tell you, it’s the end of everything. The cities. The towns. The kibbutzim. And worst of all, of course, the youth. The Devil has had the last laugh. We simply carried the virus of Jewish exile with us to this country, and now we see a new exile sprouting right under our nose. We’ve gone from the frying pan to the fire, I tell you.