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Israeli novelist David Grossman has, in the teeth of the evidence, leveled the charge of “genocide” at his own country: “Israeli author David Grossman says his country is committing genocide in Gaza,” by Lorenzo Tondo, Guardian, August 1, 2025:

Grossman’s comments come days after two major Israeli rights groups said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, amid growing global alarm over starvation in the besieged territory.

The author, who has long been a critic of the Israeli government, told La Repubblica he was using the word “with immense pain and with a broken heart”.

“Reading in a newspaper or hearing in conversations with friends in Europe the association of the words ‘Israel’ and ‘hunger’ – especially when this comes from our own history, from our supposed sensitivity to human suffering, from the moral responsibility we’ve always claimed to hold toward every human being, not just toward Jews – this is devastating,” said Grossman, who won the country’s top literary prize, the Israel prize, in 2018 for his work spanning more than three decades.

“The occupation has corrupted us,” he said. “I am absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Maybe people are tired of hearing about it, but that’s the truth. We’ve become militarily powerful, and we’ve fallen into the temptation born of our absolute power, and the idea that we can do anything.”

But what Grossman calls an “occupation” is nothing of the sort. The Jews of Israel do not “occupy” their ancestral land, where they have lived for the past 3500 years. They do not “occupy” the territory that the League of Nations assigned to the Mandate for Palestine, in the expectation that that territory would become the independent Jewish state. They do not “occupy” land that they were entitled to retain in order that, as specified in UN Security Council Resolution 242, Israel would have “secure and defensible” borders.

What does David Grossman think Israel should have done in June 1967, after Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, made the UN’s U Thant remove peacekeeping troops from the Sinai, and sent tens of thousands of Egyptian troops northward through the now wide open Sinai, where they were in danger of invading Israel? Wasn’t Israel justified at that point to strike first, destroying virtually the entire Egyptian air force while the planes were still on the ground? And after the war was over, has Grossman forgotten that Israel had offered to give up the territory it had won if the Arab states were in exchange to make peace, and the Arabs offered their answer at an Arab League meeting in Khartoum in September 1967: “No peace with Israel, No negotiations with Israel, and No recognition of Israel.” What would he have had Israel do at that point? Unilaterally withdraw from all the territory it had won in the June war, so that the Arabs could launch another war of aggression from those very territories?

Grossman appears indifferent to Israel’s historic claims to Judea and Samaria, claims reinforced by both the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, and by UNSC Resolution 242. He seems to think that Israel should be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, which Lord Caradon, the author of UNSC Resolution 1942 described as a “rotten line,” nothing more than the line that marked where, when the guns fell silent on a certain day, the Israeli and the Arab armies stood. Does he really think Israel could survive a future war, given the enormous increase, thanks to oil, in Arab arsenals, if it were forced back within those 1949 armistice lines?

Asked what he thought of France and the UK being among the latest countries preparing to formally recognise a state of Palestine, Grossman said: “I actually think it’s a good idea, and I don’t understand the hysteria around it here in Israel….

And just how does Grossman think that the demilitarization of this future “state of Palestine” could be maintained? Would Israel have to constantly monitor, with its forces on the ground inside “Palestine,” whether arms were being smuggled in? Wouldn’t the Palestinian Arabs find ways to launch attacks against those IDF troops inside “Palestine,”and against the state of Israel, now so greatly reduced in size?