The Israeli novelist David Grossman has joined a growing number of Jews and Jewish organizations saying that Israel is carrying out a “genocide” in Gaza.
Grossman is a longtime left-wing peace activist whose son was killed while serving in the Israeli army in Lebanon in 2006. He told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in an interview published on Friday that he had not wanted to level the charge, which Israel rejects, and did so only with “intense pain and a broken heart.”
“For many years I refused to use this word,” he said. “But now, after the images I’ve seen, what I’ve read, and what I’ve heard from people who were there, I can’t help but use it.”
He noted that the charge, leveled by pro-Palestinian activists throughout the Israel-Hamas war, is especially freighted when applied to the Jewish state. Israel was born after the Holocaust, which the word “genocide” was coined to describe.
“How did we come to be accused of genocide?” Grossman said. “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’s comments come amid an international furor over a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, 22 months into the war that began when Hamas attacked Israel from the enclave. Last month, the genocide scholar Omer Bartov announced in a New York Times essay that he had changed his earlier stance and concluded that Israel’s campaign now constituted genocide. And earlier this week, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said they, too, had come to the conclusion.
“Recognizing this truth is not easy. Even for us, people who have spent years documenting state violence against Palestinians, the mind resists it. It rejects the facts like poison, tries to spit them out,” Yuli Novak, B’Tselem’s executive director, wrote in The Guardian. “But the poison is here.”
Israel and its defenders staunchly deny that it is committing genocide in either intent or effect, noting that despite a heavy death toll the population of Gaza does not reflect a sustained campaign of elimination. “Few claims are more offensive and blatantly wrong,” the American Jewish Committee said in a response to Bartov’s essay.
It remains to be seen whether Grossman’s comments change the conversation in Israel the way he said his criticism of the occupation landed differently after his son was killed.
“There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn’t know what life was made of,” he said in 2010. “I think those people were forced to realize that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it.”
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