In a 1st, Israeli author calls his country's action in Gaza 'genocide'

Tel Aviv: Israel’s award-winning author, David Grossman, called his country's barbarism in Gaza a “genocide” for the first time, with “immense pain and a broken heart”. Talking with the Italian daily La Repubblica, Grossman said that he refused to use the word ‘genocide’ for many years, but the images he had seen and conversations with people in the war-torn enclave led him to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, according to the Times of Israel.

“For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide’. But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help but use it,” he was quoted as saying.

Grossman, whose works were translated into dozens of languages and have won many international prizes, said that the word ‘genocide’ is an avalanche and once one says it, “it just gets bigger like an avalanche”. The word adds more destruction and suffering, the writer told the newspaper.

He said that saying the word ‘genocide’ in reference to Israel and the Jewish people, or the fact that such a comparison is even made, proves that something very bad is happening.

He further said that it was devastating to put the words ‘Israel’ and ‘famine’ together since Jewish people’s presumed sensitivity to human suffering, because of the Holocaust. He said that Jewish people always claimed to have moral responsibility towards all human beings and not just jews.

Grossman went on to say that after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel became a very strong military power and fell into the belief that it can do whatever it wants. He said that he is absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.

He added that he remains desperately faithful to the idea of two states.