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We know David Grossman's voice of ringing moral clarity from way back: since the late 1980s and The Yellow Wind, his classic work on the urgency of the two-state solution and the price paid by both occupier and occupied, he has been criticizing his country's government and pushing for paths to a lasting peace. Just after October 7th, 2023, he retreated inwards to ask himself anew these difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation:
How could this massacre have happened?
How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, have failed to protect its citizens?
And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it the last hope of a two-state solution?
In these eleven essays, which appeared in newspapers and journals at key moments when Grossman wanted to hold the government to account, he traces the failures leading up to that day and the ensuing war, enabled and abetted by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power. He documents the struggle being fought on both sides between those committed to conflict, and the many who want to live in peace and equality with their neighbors.
He asks what the meaning and purpose of a Jewish state can be, when the core values of Judaism, with its reverence for the dignity of each human life, are cast aside, and how his people, so accustomed throughout history to being in the minority, have not proved able to exist as a majority with the dignity and humanity that the job demands.
Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all: Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?
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Release date
January 14, 2025 -
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9798217007066
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9798217007066
- File size: 1513 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 15, 2024
The noted Israeli novelist ponders the state of his corner of the world after Oct. 7, 2023. Make no mistake, urges Grossman, the author ofTo the End of the Land and other novels: Israel is in a state of war, and "If I may hazard a guess: Israel after the war will be much more right-wing, militant, and racist." This, says Grossman, is an unfortunate but logical outcome of Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigent view that Israel is alone in the world and that he's the only one who can save the nation--unfortunate, Grossman notes, because, in his view, "we will probably not be able to win the next war on our own." That next war may involve Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic State, and the Yemeni Houthis, who are already enemies singly but who may decide to act in concert. "Even the IDF [the Israel Defense Forces] will not be able to withstand a simultaneous attack by several states--including Iran--on several fronts." Israelis sense this, Grossman suggests, to the extent that the national mood has gone from confidence to "fragility and anxiety," at least in part because the sense that the nation is fundamentally united is also gone: Leftists and rightists "view one another as an actual existential threat." The fault for the conflict is not Israel's alone, Grossman urges, but the opportunity to lead a movement for peace among neighbors lies there, in a state committed to some sort of national solution for Palestine rather than one willing to accommodate the present system of repression and "a total denial of reality." This brief collection of occasional pieces never arrives at a fully developed thesis for solving the region's present maladies, but it is both suggestive and provocative, especially in Grossman's view that giving in to cynicism and apathy will lead to the obvious: "a short path to religious fanaticism, nationalism, fascism." An urgent appeal for peace in a time of growing war.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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