Award-winning Israeli author David Grossman, for the first time, called the country’s campaign in Gaza a “genocide” on Friday, noting that he uses the term with “immense pain and a broken heart,” in conversation with the Italian daily La Repubblica.
His comments came amid rising global alarm and anger over widespread hunger in the war-torn territory due to the insufficient entry of food.
“For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide,’” the prominent writer and peace activist told the newspaper. “But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help but use it.
“This word is an avalanche: Once you say it, it just gets bigger, like an avalanche. And it adds even more destruction and suffering,” he said. “Even just saying that word — ‘genocide’ — in reference to Israel, to the Jewish people, the fact that such a comparison is even being made, tells us that something very bad is happening to us.”
Grossman’s works, which have been translated into dozens of languages, have won many international prizes.
He also won Israel’s top literary prize in 2018, the Israel Prize for Literature, for his work spanning more than three decades.
Grossman noted that “Israel cannot be solely blamed for all the atrocities we’re witnessing” and that the death toll figures are “controlled” by the Hamas terror group.
However, he said it was “devastating” to “put the words ‘Israel’ and ‘famine’ together,” because of the Holocaust and the Jewish people’s “presumed sensitivity to human suffering, the moral responsibility we’ve always claimed to have towards all human beings, not only toward Jews.”
He argued that both Israelis and Palestinians have been unable “to resist the temptation of power.”
Following the victory in the Six Day War in 1967, Israel “became very strong militarily, and we fell into the temptation that comes with absolute power — the idea that we can do whatever we want,” Grossman said.
“The occupation has corrupted us. I’m absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967,” he continued.
At the same time, he said Palestinian leadership had made similar errors, noting that its “great mistake” was not rebuilding Gaza following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005, and instead, “gave in to fanaticism and used [the territory] as a launching pad for missiles against Israel.”
“Had they chosen the other path, perhaps that would have pushed Israel to also give up the West Bank and end the occupation years ago,” he said.
“The Palestinians were also unable to resist the temptation of power: they shot at us, we shot at them, and we ended up in the same old situation. If both we and they had been more politically mature, more courageous, reality could have been completely different.”
Despite this, Grossman said he remains “desperately faithful to the idea of two states,” primarily because he sees no other options available.
Grossman also said that he thought French President Emanuel Macron’s recent announcement that France would recognize a Palestinian state was “a good idea.”
“Perhaps dealing with a real state, with actual responsibilities, instead of an ambiguous entity like the Palestinian Authority, will have its advantages,” he said, while adding that there would need to be specific conditions, including a demilitarized state, and transparent elections in which “anyone who supports violence against Israel is banned.”
A dovish figure and longtime critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, he has repeatedly attended and spoken at anti-government rallies.
According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, 60,034 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive against Hamas, which began when the terrorist organization attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251, on October 7, 2023.
The Hamas figures cannot be independently verified and do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hamas has claimed women and children make up about half the dead.
Israel said it had killed some 20,000 gunmen in Gaza as of January, its latest official estimate, and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.
Israel also says it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.