DayofPal– Award-winning Israeli author David Grossman confirms what many international organizations describe as genocide in Gaza, saying for many years he has refused to use the word but now he “can’t help” but use the term.
Grossman’s comments came days after two major Israeli rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, amid growing global alarm over starvation in the besieged enclave.
The announcement was the first time major Israeli rights groups have publicly concluded that the Gaza war is a genocide, an assessment previously reached by some organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In an interview published on Friday, the world-renowned writer and peace activist told the Italian daily La Repubblica, “I ask myself: how did we get here?”
“How did we come to be accused of genocide? Just uttering that word – ‘genocide’ – in reference to Israel, to the Jewish people, that alone, the fact that this association can even be made, should be enough to tell us that something very wrong is happening to us.”
Grossman said that for many years he had refused to use the term. “But now I can’t help myself – not after what I’ve read in the papers, not after the images I’ve seen, not after speaking with people who’ve been there. 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.
The author said 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 Israel’s top literary prize, the Israel prize, in 2018 for his work spanning more than three decades.
“The occupation has corrupted us,” Grossman also 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.”
In 2021, he said Israel’s occupation of the West Bank had turned into an “apartheid”.
“Maybe it should no longer be called an ‘occupation,’ but there are much harsher names, like ‘apartheid,’ for example,” he told Army Radio.
Shortlink for this post: https://daysofpalestine.ps/?p=66302
