Yoram Kaniuk died. He was 83. He had cancer. And he was by far the most pessimistic Israeli author I knew. We had dinner in a fish restaurant in the old port of Jaffa in 1992 on the day before the Israeli elections and he informed me that the left would never win and even if they did, nothing would change for the better because the religious nationalist right held the country hostage. The next day Yitzhak Rabin won the elections and embarked on a journey to peace via the Oslo accords. Kaniuk was not impressed. Looking back, it seems as if he was right. Rabin did not stop the Israeli settlements when it was still possible to do so.

But Kaniuk was not a politician. He looked at his country as an intellectual, not interested in pragmatic solutions, but in a deeper understanding of the society he lived in. His pessimism was the undercurrent of his work, which paradoxically fed his brilliant, dry and dark sense of humour. Whenever his small, delicate smile crossed his face after he had cracked a joke, he looked like the young, life-loving boy he would have preferred to have been instead of the old man with leukemia he had become in the last years of his life.

I saw him three weeks ago in Tel Aviv. I called him to ask if I could come and visit to talk about his book "1948", which came out in German recently. Yoram describes himself as the 18-year-old soldier he was during the war of independence. For him it turned out to be also a war of aggression, not only defence. He came to Ramla when it had just been emptied of Palestinians and was told not to worry about the people who left their meals on the table when they were forced to leave. The next day Kaniuk the soldier watched how 15 trucks arrived. Holocaust survivors climbed out of the vehicles and took over the houses of the Palestinians. "There are no morals in wars", Kaniuk told me.

The author of the concentration camp novel "Adam Resurrected" came from a German family, but his parents arrived before the Holocaust in Palestine. He certainly fought for his country. Not only in wars. He fought for an Israel which he saw was getting lost in its own limitations. He was part of a tiny minority in Israel who fought for the rights of Palestinians, for the rights of non-Jews in Israel, for the idea that human rights are universal. He forced the interior ministry as the first Jewish Israeli ever to take the word "Jewish" out of his Israeli passport. He was upset because Israel did not accept his daughters and grandchildren as Jewish Israelis, because his wife was an American non-Jew.

His beautiful wife Miranda opened the door for me when I came to see Yoram in their ground floor flat in Tel Aviv. I said: "I hope he feels well enough to see me?" She replied: "He has been looking forward the whole day to seeing you." In reality they had just returned home from hospital.

When I entered the room he was sitting in his chair with an I-Pad on his lap listening to Beethovens 9th Symphony. "Freude, schöner Götterfunke", he said mockingly. "Schiller's words are so stupid." And then he smiled. I will miss his smile which lightened every conversation we had, conversations in which he described with sarcastic, deeply pessimistic words the sad state Israel and the world are in.