đź“Ť By Malik Mukhtar – blogger
“With immense pain and a broken heart—I now call it what it is: a genocide.”
— David Grossman, interview in La Repubblica, August 1, 2025
When Israel’s conscience finally shouts genocide.
Grossman—son lost to Israel’s wars, laureate of literature, beacon of moral clarity—has shattered his silence. He describes how he refused to use this word for years, until:
“What I’ve read… the images I’ve seen… speaking with people who were there”
left him no choice.
“This word is an avalanche… it just keeps growing… and it brings even more destruction and suffering.”
He also reflects:
“The occupation has corrupted us. I’m absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.”
And yet the false savior complex persists:
“Had they [Palestinians] been more politically mature… reality could have been completely different.”
Still, he insists:
“I remain desperately faithful to the idea of two states… there is no other plan.”
đź“š Additional Quotes: Grossman on Peace, Activism & Two States
From essays, speeches, and decades of heartbreak, Grossman offers searing clarity:
“It humiliates me as a person to despair. To give up. To say ‘nothing can be done’… I don’t believe that. When you say you’ve despaired you’re saying you’re a victim. I’m not prepared to be a victim.”
— Times of Israel
From Imagining Peace:
“To imagine peace means that we have a future… not good nor bad, only possibility of having a future.”
From an essay in The Guardian:
“When we write… we manage to experience the almost forgotten flexibility of a change of perspective… we can free ourselves from the official story… and enter the core of our fear.”
From Death as a Way of Life:
“Now we’ll have the celebrations… we told you Palestinians don’t keep agreements… whereas we honor all agreements… tighten the noose… so their hearts will… come to love us.”
(Sarcastically mocking Israel's expectation of enforced love through occupation.)
đź“ť A Brooding Conscience: When the Pen Becomes a Warning
This, then, is his trumpet—instead of lullabies.
David Grossman, who once avoided the word genocide, now cannot unsee what’s unfolding. He says Israel’s occupation “corrupted us,” and that the curse began with 1967. He acknowledges Palestinian missteps—but refuses to surrender hope.
“There is no other plan.”
Too often, peace is dismissed as utopian. But Grossman refuses that quiet nihilism—even in grief.
“It humiliates me… to despair… I’m not prepared to be a victim.”
His activism is no Stockholm Syndrome for power. In Death as a Way of Life, he ridiculed the delusion that oppression breeds love:
“You will compel our enemies to love us… they resign themselves to our mistreatment… then declare it just.”
He offers vision—not victims.
In Imagining Peace, he meditated on the dream of peace not as poetry, but as necessity. In The Guardian, he champions empathy as resistance: seeing the enemy not as an object of fear, but as equally tormented—and equally human.
So here is the voice: not of blame, but of challenge.
He is not despairing.
He is insisting.
Justice demands naming.
Hope demands action.
Grossman’s moral rupture calls not merely for sorrow, but for repentance—not only from world leaders, but from each of us.
Each of us who hears the word genocide, feels its weight, and asks:
What then will I do?
“If peace feels impossible, despair becomes a choice—one I refuse to make.”
— David Grossman, Summer 2025
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