For years, I refused to use the word genocide. But now I cannot help it, after what I have read in the newspapers, the images I have seen and the conversations I have had with people who have been there, says the Israeli author David Grossman in an interview with La Repubblica.
Grossman has been an active voice in the public conversation about Israel's war and the conflict with Palestine. In the war against Lebanon in 2006, he lost his 20-year-old son Uri, who was killed by an anti-tank rocket during an Israeli military operation just before the UN-brokered ceasefire came into effect.
I want to speak as someone who has done everything he can to avoid calling Israel a genocidal state. And now, with infinite pain and a broken heart, I am forced to see it happening before my eyes. Genocide. It is an avalanche word – once you say it, it only grows, like an avalanche. And it brings even more destruction and suffering.
When it comes to a possible solution to the seemingly endless conflict, Grossman says that he is "desperately convinced of the two-state solution – mainly because I do not see any alternative".
