Throughout his adult life in Central Europe, Kafka was interested by Zionism and Palestine, but never fell in with the movement. He wrote that Zionism was a "soul-sustaining community," but he was antisocial, and was "nauseated by it." In 1913 he attended the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna and sent his mistress a note suggesting the enterprise was "hopeless" and saying of the crowd:
Yesterday I finally began reading Jeffrey Goldberg's book Prisoners, and he writes of Ketziot, the prison in the Negev where he served and where they abused Palestinian prisoners,
I share this prejudice and would add that the brain drain is now a big issue in Israel, with many of the country's best leaving and many of our worst going over there under the crazy Law of Return.
