David Grossman

So in November 2024, you were suspended for six months, the longest suspension in the history of the Knesset.

And then on August 4th of 2025, you stood at the podium in the Knesset and read a quotation from David Grossman, one of Israel's most beloved novelists, who had told La Republica, For years, I refused to use the term genocide.

But now, after the images I've seen and after speaking to people who were there, I can no longer avoid it.

And you said Grossman spoke with immense pain and a broken heart.

So I said to myself, okay, nobody can tell you not to quote, but

when I

quote David Grossman, so as you said before, The deputy of the Knesset speaker said, no, you just invented it.

It's not a real quote.

Self-willed blind- it's a good term

You know, the Israeli novelist, David Grossman, said that the Palestinians are transparent, and it was too frightening to actually see them because what do you do? Nothing's going to work.

We tried peace.

We tried war.

He's really funny.

And another thing is people probably say Amos Oz or Aleph Bet Yehoshua or David Grossman, but... thing about my biography is I played I'm a really bad football soccer player but I played for the Israeli national authors team so I was really bad but I have many friends from there like my own generation of writers Asaf Gavron and Udi Sharabani and I like to check out and see their work because they speak my language in many other ways so this is what I'm focusing about but like I said I want to read stories and characters.

Most of the writers that I follow are foreign, are from UK and the USA probably.

Stories are stories.

There's Professor E.L. Weitzman of the Forensic Architecture.

There's other writers, for example, there's David Grossman, there's Gideon Levy, there is Ofer Kasif.

These are all Israeli entities, all of which have said that it is genocide.

And then there are endless entities outside of Israel, academic, institutional, that have all said it meets the definition.

Distance, as a concept, is vital for understanding the horror of war, because without it, it's all just too, well, horrible to comprehend.

David Grossman provides an effective summary of this dynamic when he writes the following, quote, "...throughout World War II, bomber crews on both sides killed millions of women, children, and elderly people, no different from their own wives, children, and parents.

The pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners in these aircraft were able to bring themselves to kill these civilians primarily through the application of mental leverage provided to them by the distance factor." intellectually, they understood the horror of what they were doing.

Emotionally, the distance involved permitted them to deny it." But distance is not just between the air and the ground.

You know, I, I think we talked about it in the past.

David Grossman has always been my favorite Israeli author.

By the way, he just published a new and beautiful book.

It's called Words Where Are You? And I think I was a young reporter some 30 years ago when he published The Yellow Wind, HaZman HaTzehova, painful and passionate and dark report on what was going on in the West Bank, and a sort of prophecy of the moral cost of occupation.

It's the later chapter.

And, and why do I point to Till the End of the Land? You know, it's a story of a mother whose son went to war, and she's terrified of what might happen to him, and she decides to go on a hiking trip across Israel for the mere purpose of not being home when the bearers of bad news arrive.

And, and David Grossman, in a way, tries to imagine for us a future in which all parents breach the covenant, the contract between us and the state.

We will not be there for the bad news to come that our kids died in the war, and the state will not send them to die in the war anymore.