August 1, 2025, 1:18pm

David Grossman, widely considered to be Israel’s most prominent novelist, has described his country’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide.

Speaking to Italian daily La Repubblica, in an interview published earlier today, the award-winning author and recipient of the 2018 Israel Prize for literature said that, after years of resistance to the term, he now “can’t help” but use it:

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.

Grossman’s comments come just days after two major Israeli rights groups—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, amid growing global condemnation of the enforced starvation that has brought the strip to the brink of famine. Israel’s 22-month assault on the besieged enclave has claimed the lives of more than 60,000 people, at least 18,500 of them children (though leading authorities such as The Lancet consider these figures to be a significant undercount). B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights join Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and dozens of other human rights organizations in classifying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

“The occupation has corrupted us,” Grossman—an outspoken peace activist who was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar—went on to say. “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.”

Grossman’s comments are welcome, and will hopefully encourage other prominent cultural figures to finally speak up, but one wonders what took him so long. As is the case with the dozens of western politicians, journalists, and assorted public figures who have decided that this is the week to become a vertebrate, I can’t help but think about the thousands—the tens of thousands—of innocent lives that would have been saved had those with clout decided, at any point during the last year and a half, that stopping the indiscriminate slaughter of caged civilians was more important than protecting Israeli and American Zionists from terminology they find distasteful.

[h/t The Guardian]