If you ignore the Palestinians, and many among those countries want to ignore the Palestinians or the Palestinians cause, if you ignore them, you will not have peace. It will explode in your face. It will be a peace of the riches, and a peace of the riches doesn’t work.
It just doesn’t work, says Israeli writer David Grossman.
David Grossman, first of all, thank you for being here. I can only imagine how difficult these days are for you and how much strength it takes for you not to remain silent. Thank you for that. Immediately after October 7th, you spoke about a ranking in the hierarchy of evil. This is a terrible image. How does this gradation of evil look now?
When people told me: what did you expect? Israel was occupying Palestine for 56 years, so the Palestinians only reacted, I said no, that there also grades in brutality and hatred, not everything is legitimate. Not every protest is legitimate, and what we saw on October 7th was really beyond our ability to describe, there are no words for it. You know that for the Jewish people it’s the worst crime that we have experienced since the Holocaust. And it’s not just a saying, it is like that, and people do feel like that and getting back to life will be to find ways to live together with the hatred that we were surrounded by, with the brutality.
In one of your texts where you talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you point out something that leads to a situation of social schizophrenia, that almost an entire generation refers to the conflict with the term "situation". This reminds me of the boy whose parents don't tell him about the Nazi beast; he only hears them screaming at night and somehow grows up internalizing the trauma of the untold story. Does this situation resemble that one?
The situation is different. It's an interesting question that you ask, Magda, because when it came to the Shoah, to the Holocaust, there was a whole generation, my generation, that grew up in the silence of our parents. they did not want to tell us because they felt that we shall be polluted and destroyed and devastated by the knowledge of the Shoah and its cruelty and we did not want to hear because we were directed into the future we were the young generation the daring generation, the strong one so there was a kind of silent agreement of two parties who didn't want to talk about it here now with what happens on October 7th. It's the opposite. People want to know; people obsessively are talking about it. You cannot open the television, no matter what channel, no matter what hour, and you find another testimony of what happened there on October 7th.
So it's a development. I wonder what to relate it to maybe the culture now is more a culture of talking unlike the end of the 40s people are speaking and they know they want to speak they go to a psychologist they write to the papers, every news magazine starts with that and people found a way to talk about it. Does it diminish the pain? No, not at all. Does it make the pain less painful? Not at all.
I was wondering if October 7th will be a significant part of Israeli narrative like Shoah was.
It's, again, a very curious question. I also asked myself this. Already there is a competition of all kinds of organizations that monopolize the rights to create the museum of the October 7th. Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu immediately recognized the opportunity here for manipulation. But I guess that there will be other organizations that will take over the line of the story and I wish they do it cleverly, that people will know what happened then and still feel the wish to live, that people will not be paralyzed by the atrocity, but to find a way to contain this inhuman brutality and to continue with life and to find reasons to live and to find reasons to live in a world that is very, very hostile against us. All of these are huge tasks.
You are talking about the huge polarization in Israel, about the hatred between tribes, you call them tribes, but this polarization regarding Israeli-Palestinian conflict also exists outside Israel. We are witnessing pro-Palestinian protests which are becoming anti-Israeli movements. Do you believe that anti-Semitism can return, despite the trauma left by the Holocaust?
I’m very suspicious towards this approach regarding the Jews and regarding antisemitism. Israel can be criticized, should be criticized, occupation must be criticized, we must make it unforgettable unless it ends, but there is a difference between antisemitism and criticism, and I must tell you that being a Jew I developed very delicate ways to tell you when something that is addressed towards me is legitimate criticism and when it is antisemitism. And with that, with antisemitism, we should not collaborate. We should not be tempted to use it as a weapon against Israel.
How is Benjamin Netanyahu still holding on to power? Before October 7th, there were protests against his regime; there are still protests now, and yet Netanyahu still looks strong, surrounded by even more radical politicians. What keeps him in power?
The attraction of people towards fear and towards authority. He knows how to play the game. He’s a genius orator. He provoked all the time the deepest fears of Israelis, of Jews, of human beings. He knows how to do it. I think that the greatest crime even of Mr. Netanyahu is not corruption or all those things he's been accused of. But the way he allowed Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of Interior Security, this fascist who behaves in horrible ways, who is really leading the people of Israel into catastrophe, with the terminology he uses, with the fears that he spreads around him. And Netanyahu is kind of captive in the hands of this person.
But they want to be captive that's the tragedy they are not rebelling against it many of them on the contrary you will hear people saying: Netanyahu is a real man, look what he did to the Palestinians, look how he magnetized at the beginning Joe Biden, until Joe Biden was fed up by him. He knows what to do, he knows how to manipulate the whole world, like the whole world allows us to do what we want. It's terrible to see a whole people going astray and as long as there is growing hatred towards Netanyahu, and there is, yet at the same time more and more people are convinced that he is right, and they are just blinding themselves in order to believe in him. He tells them what they want to hear, that the whole world is against us, that the whole world hates us, that there is no chance ever to any peace between us and the Palestinians. All the things that have a nucleus of truth in them, I cannot deny most of these things. We are not living in Switzerland, we are living in the toughest neighborhood - not in the region, but in the world. He knows how to take these dozens of percent of people who support him, and he enlarges it again and again.
There are different situations, but in Russia for example they said that there is a Putin generation, to explain why Russians are not revolting. Can we speak of a Netanyahu generation and of a Hamas generation, because Hamas has been in power in Gaza for a long time, as was Netanyahu in Israel. But how can such a generation be recovered and how can you make a politician to trade in hope rather than fear?
Almost impossible. Really, almost impossible. We were exposed to such brutality by the Palestinians on October 7th that is very hard to convince Israelis that there are other Palestinians or that peace is the only way to heal. I can believe in that, but I know that I belong to a very small minority.
The transitivity of evil has always seemed to me the hardest exercise, to put yourself in the place of somebody that you could harm, and this will stop you from actually doing it. Is this exercise possible today between Israelis and Palestinians?
It's impossible and very needed at the same time. You know there is this the theory of roles in the psychoanalysis, who said: imagine yourself a moment before you are going to be born, when you don't know whom you shall be, will you be white or black, man or woman, slave or master, all the possible contradictions and now go and decide how you are going to act in a certain situation.
It's very useful, yet when time of animosity comes, people are not very thoughtful and they are acting from the guts, not from the mind, not from the brain, and they get the pleasure of acting from the guts because there is pleasure in not thinking, after all, in not confiscating your mind for decades on moral questions. People want to feel the pleasure of brutality and the pleasure of just doing things that they feel primal, and intensely forgetting about the way that they will pay a heavy price for all this forgetfulness.
In theory, they usually say that solutions come from moderates. Do these moderates still exist in Israel and Palestine? Hamas seems to have become the spokespersons for the entire Palestinian cause, Abbas doesn’t seem to exist anymore in this picture, he’s completely absent.
He may be absent, but don’t forget that he collaborates with Israel, for some years now, in quite an efficient way and he helps Israel to fight terrorism in the West Bank and also within Israel. It doesn't mean that he likes Israel or trust Israel, but he's doing some useful steps. Is it possible for a young generation of Israelis to reconcile in the future? Is it possible for young people of the Hamas?
I don't know.
I just don't know. And if you ask me, today, at this point, I think that it's almost impossible. But what we have to aspire to is not mutual peace and love, but what we can achieve at this point of time. And this is slow healing of our situation and of the Palestinian situation and make life possible for them, so they will be able to collaborate more and more, not only with Israel, but with the idea of having Israel here, of the inevitability of Israel.
In the text you wrote in March for The New York Times, you mentioned that the other nations interested in resolving the conflict should understand that Israel and Palestine are no longer capable of saving themselves. Who are these other nations? And who can actually ensure peace? The United States are also at a crossroad,, especially with the possible return of Trump, while Europe is dealing with the war waged by Russia.
Well, other nations are nations that will not act extremely, that understand the complexity of this situation. Here, in the Middle East, it can be Saudi Arabi, the Emirates, also Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, because Jordan knows that they are also dependent on us in helping them from the extremists within Jordan, so they behave in a double-booking way. All these people and of course Israel. But if you ignore the Palestinians, and many among those countries want to ignore the Palestinians or the Palestinians cause, if you ignore them, you will not have peace. You will not have real peace. You will not have a chance to improve the situation. It will explode in your face. It will be a peace of the riches, and a peace of the riches doesn't work. It just doesn't work.
The outside perception is that it's very easy to take someone's side. Intellectuals like yourself don't do that, on the contrary. How would you summarize this decades-long conflict, where the victim is not just on one side? And what does it mean to be both a victim and an aggressor at the same time?
Exhausting. But I think it's really if you seriously want to solve the problem, if you seriously want to solve any other human problem, like a clash between you and your wife, or with a brother or another sibling, you must bereft yourself from prejudices, from all kind of flat beliefs, and try to expose yourself to the complexity of the situation. Also of your enemy. It will not make you lose your identity, on the contrary, it will make your identity stronger because it will be more in contact with reality. You will be able to explore the complexity of this situation, to understand the points where your enemy can break, where you can break, the place where you are making mistakes, or your enemy makes mistakes.
In that sense, I think that being a writer is very helpful for me, because what is a writer doing? You just try to read reality through the eyes of so many other people, some of them are your enemy, some of them are your haters, and yet you do it. You expose yourself to the multi-layeredness of reality. You do not protect yourself from reality. If you are doing so, so many new things are revealed to you. You feel how you have been trapped by one legislative story of yourself, of your history. If you do that, you are not in contact with reality. On the contrary, you are in contact with illusion, with fake words and fake languages.
Were you able to write literature this past year?
No, actually I just wrote one book for children, for young children and I wrote a poem. A long poem that will be played here with music, quite soon. But I still feel that still I don't have words to describe what we were exposed to, and I think it's not so bad not to have words, because we are in a time of grieving and when you're grieving you don't really have words to describe it. You can cry, you can shout, you can sigh, but you don't try to heal immediately, because what we were victim to was so horrible, that it's better that we shall recover more slowly than usually, in other catastrophes.
And you still have hostages in Gaza and in Gaza, people that die there.
Yes, in tunnels, in terrible situations. I feel I have two different watches. One of the trivial watches says that right now it's 5.30 or something. And then there is the inner watch, the watch of the hostages, of the captive people, of the starving people, of the raped women, of the babies, all these people. To think about it is impossible, it is so painful and yet this is our duty, our civil and moral duty, not to collaborate with indifference, but also to be there in the time of the inner watch.
What is your biggest fear concerning this war and the future? You asked this question, like an obsession: who will we be when the war comes to an end?
It’s a serious question, because we shall come out different very different from ourselves, we shall be different in all walks of life, everything will be different: the way we look at things, the way we are with people, families will break, children will have no childhood, adolescents will make a leap over their adolescence period. Many, many things will be changed, the things that we liked to do. I will not go over all the things that will be changed.
What is my greatest fear? That this reality will change us forever, that it will make us too stiff and though, not nuanced, not precised. If we are doing that we will collaborate with evil, maybe not with the highest level of evil, as we spoke at the beginning, but with some sort of evil. I don't want to belong to it. I have my way, I'm a writer, so I can liberate myself through writing, but most people do not, and especially children or youngsters. They are more liable to be corrupted by this situation.
What about the solution, is there any other solution that the two-state solution, that is still on the table, officially, but it's now frozen?
It’s frozen, of course, almost it is non-existent, but actually and surprisingly, it is this period that that suggests a possible solution. I do not see why the solution for this conflict between Israel and Palestine - that hopefully will be achieved soon with the mediation of the United States and other countries - why this peace would not set the first steps for a wider, larger peace, or let’s say an arrangement and a dialogue between us and the Palestinians. Because both sides now know, they learned in the cruelest way, that this war cannot be won and that we must find a way to live in this reality, in a way of peace, because otherwise we are doomed to kill and to be killed, to live by the sword and to die by the sword. To think of all the people who have been murdered so brutally, and to think what the ending of this will be, of what they have sacrificed, to think that there will be only this half-baked peace instead of being able to use it to act differently….
If I were to whisper on the ear of the Prime-Minister, I would tell him: go to the Palestinians today, go and tell them, now that the leader of October 7th is gone, that Israel suggests something new. We are very strong, and, in the end, we can crush you and we have all the right to do it, after what you did to us, there is no justification for what you did for us. But we want to suggest you something else, something new: to have peace instead of this circle of revenge, of this vicious circle of revenge. Let's try, for 10 years, the way of peace. And then, if we fail, we can always go back to fight each other. We are very good experts in fighting and killing, but I would say: no, let's try the other way.
You know better than me that it's not about Israel and Palestine, it's also about Iran.
Iran is there to stay, and Iraq is there to stay, and other countries as well. But our way to confront Iran is to start to advocate peace. You know, I know it sounds very naive, but there were years when there were very good and warm relationships between Israelis and Iran. And we had really strong and deep relationships with the Iranians. So, it's about people, in the end, they created this reality. Of course, the Iranians of today do not want to have anything to do with us, but maybe after some years, maybe the Guards of the Revolution in Iran will be weaker and weaker. Maybe there will be a new generation - that already started to flourish, we saw them. And they will demand their right to live a normal life, without fear, without hatred, and many things can change.