By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Aug 7 2025 – On August the first, the Italian daily La Repubblica published an interview with David Grossman, Israel’s most renown author and supporter of a “two-state solution”, as well as an outspoken critic of Israel’s violence against Palestinian civilians.
Israeli presence on the West Bank. The orange and red patches are what remains of Palestinian controlled areas.
Grossman’s interview received international attention and was quoted by respected newspapers like The Guardian, Le Figaro and Haaretz. It was emphasized that so far, few Israeli intellectuals have reacted against what is happening in Gaza. The New Yorker reminded that wars waged by the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan transpired in far-away places, unlike the current destruction of lives and cities taking place close to Israel. In some places, Israelis might hear explosions, see attack planes and missiles thundering past, while they quietly enjoy their drinks by the beach. How is it possible that so many Israelis are able to indifferently accept that tens of thousands of innocent people are being mutilated and killed in their close vicinity?
Grossman suffers from crimes against humanity committed in the name of Israel, a country where he was born and learned to love. A nation for which his twenty-one years old son Uri lost his life while fighting in Lebanon. During his entire life Grossman has strived for understanding between Palestinians and Israelis. However, he has been forced to experience how people instead of helping each other to achieve peace and prosperity, have armed themselves while preaching vengeance and death. Grossman states that surrendering to fear and hate is much easier than trying to promote empathy and conciliation. He does not deny that Hamas acted in a deplorable manner when its members on the 7th of October 2023 crossed the border and spread terror in Israel. However, after that date many of Grossman’s friends have abandoned their earlier liberal and tolerant convictions and fallen victims to fear and chauvinism.
According to Grossman “Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. We became militarily strong and fell into the temptation of our absolute power and the idea that we can do anything.” He states that up until now he has been reluctant to use the word “genocide”, which for a Jew is “an avalanche word; once you utter it, it just keeps growing, like an avalanche. And it brings even more destruction.” Can a Jew, a Jewish state, really commit genocide? A terrible crime that their close of kin suffered less than hundred years ago? Grossman says that unfortunately the word has to be uttered loud and clear – Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. “It breaks my heart, but I have to say it now.” Fear and power madness brought Israel to a breaking point where so many have lost their respect for the lives and welfare of others. Grossman knows that many Israelis and Palestinians “have our heart in the right place, but it beats in a world without any heart at all.”
The day after the Grossman interview, Liana Segre, 95 years old and an Auschwitz survivor, reacted in the same paper: “It must be clear that Israel is neither the heir, nor the representative of the European victims of the Shoah, which must not be used as a shield to justify its excesses, and neither should the behaviour of the Israeli state be used as a pretext for returning to hating the entire Jewish people.” It ought to be possible to criticize Israel’s killing of innocent civilians without being accused of being an antisemite. Grossman’s use of the term “genocide” for what is currently happening in Gaza is actually defensible and ought to be disconnected from allusions to anti-Semitism, regardless of what Netanyahu’s regime might imply. It is actually he and Trump who misuse words by throwing the epithet “anti-Semite” in the face of anyone who questions the slaughter of civilians in Gaza.
While addressing the thorny issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations one might pay attention to the history of Hamas. The Hamas movement was founded in 1987. For years, various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu tried to create a rift between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. His idea was to prevent PLO from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Accordingly, Hamas was upgraded from being just one of many terror groups to become an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, discreetly allowing it to receive infusions of cash from abroad, while increasing the number of work permits granted to Gazan labourers, who kept money flowing into Gaza. Since 2018, Israel also allowed millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza. Apparently, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. This while Hamas grew stronger and stronger until its terrorists crossed the border to Israel, slaughtering hundreds of Israelis and kidnapping 251, to be used in exchange för Hamas prisoners held in Israel. Since then, as of 30 July 2025, over 62,700 people (60,785 Palestinians and 1,983 Israelis) have been reported killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Among them 217 journalists and media workers and 224 humanitarian aid workers, including 179 employees of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Considering the great number of civilian casualties, it might be opportune to emphasize what opponents to the Hamas regime often have stated: “The world thinks that Gaza is Hamas and Hamas is Gaza.” Actually, during Hamas reign in Gaza it has always been dangerous to speaking out against the Organization. In polls taken before 7th of October 2023, 44 percent of Gazans claimed they had no trust at all in the Hamas government, while 23 percent had “not a lot of trust.” Only 29 percent expressed either a great deal or quite a lot of trust in Hamas. When it came to Hamas’ corruption, 72 percent stated they believed there was a large amount of corruption in government institutions, and only a minority thought Hamas was taking meaningful steps to address the problem.
Hamas consolidated its power in the Gaza strip through the Battle of Gaza in 2007, a brief civil war between Fatah (the largest faction of the multi-party PLO). Fatah lost and its officials were either taken as prisoners, executed, or expelled, while the Palestinian territories came to be divided into two entities – the West Bank, governed by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the Gaza Strip governed by Hamas. In March 2019, Gaza witnessed widespread protests, reflecting dissatisfaction with the severe living conditions, which were marked by a 70 percent unemployment rate among young people. Dozens of individuals, including activists, journalists, and human rights workers were beaten, arrested and subjected to home raids.
While considering Nethanyahu’s, and to a certain degree successful, policies to sabotage Palestinian efforts to constitute a two-state solution his support to Israeli settlements on the West Bank might be added. These settlements have been constructed on lands that Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967. All these settlements are illegal under international law.
As of January 2023, there were 144 settlements on the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem. The West Bank is also hosting at least 196 so called outposts, settlements not officially authorized by the Israeli government. Over 450,000 Israeli settlers reside in the West Bank, while 220,000 live in East Jerusalem. The presence of settlements and Jewish-only bypass roads creates a fragmented Palestinian territory, seriously hindering economic development and freedom of movement for Palestinians. The Israeli Government spends more than double per citizen in the settlements than it does on citizens within Israel.
In March 2024, the Israeli government announced that it was planning to construct more than 3,300 new homes in the West Bank. This while, according to the UN, since October 7, 2023 at least 964 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. During the same period, more than 2,900 home demolitions were carried out. In January this year, Israel launched a major military operation called “Iron Wall”, forcibly displacing 30,000 Palestinians in the West Bank.
It is easy to forget the individuals behind the statistics. Two days before Grossman’s interview was published in La Repubblica, Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who helped to make the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was killed. A settler had been driving a bulldozer trough land belonging to Palestinians in the village of Umm al-Khair, south of Hebron and close to an Israeli settlement. The vehicle was destroying trees and cultivated land. When a Palestinian resident approached to ask the driver to stop, he knocked him down with the blade of the bulldozer. Residents began to throw stones. Yinon Levi, a well-known, militant settler, who by Donald Trump had been removed from a U.S. sanctions list, was captured on a video wildly firing his gun at the Palestinians. Awdah Hathaleen, who was standing a distance away from the confrontation, was hit by a bullet and died immediately.
The Israeli government is currently punishing an entire population for the misdeeds of a violent, corrupt regime, which it earlier had been supporting. The Netanyahu regime thrives in a climate of fear and violence. The Israeli war on the civil population of Gaza is accompanied by the defense of what actually appears to be ethnic cleansing. A suspicion supported by Netanyahu’s flagrant disregard for international law in his support to illegal settlements on Palestinian territory and his portrayal of every critic as an anti-Semite, thus hiding the misdemeanors of his regime behind an abuse of the memory of the millions of Jews who perished in European genocides. The crimes of Netanyahu’s regime contribute to an increasingly powerful and unsavory anti-Semitism. A nasty situation in which sensible individual voices like Gossman’s barely can be distinguished.
IPS UN Bureau
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