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Yahoo
03-08-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Novelist David Grossman says Israel is committing ‘genocide' in Gaza, joining a rising chorus
Grossman, a longtime left-wing peace activist whose son was killed while serving in the Israeli army in Lebanon in 2006, has joined a growing number of Jews accusing Israel. The Israeli novelist David Grossman has joined a growing number of Jews and Jewish organizations saying that Israel is carrying out a 'genocide' in Gaza. Grossman is a longtime left-wing peace activist whose son was killed while serving in the Israeli army in Lebanon in 2006. He told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in an interview published on Friday that he had not wanted to level the charge, which Israel rejects, and did so only with 'intense pain and a broken heart.' 'For many years I refused to use this word,' he said. 'But now, after the images I've seen, what I've read, and what I've heard from people who were there, I can't help but use it.' He noted that the charge, leveled by pro-Palestinian activists throughout the Israel-Hamas war, is especially freighted when applied to the Jewish state. Israel was born after the Holocaust, which the word 'genocide' was coined to describe. 'How did we come to be accused of genocide?' Grossman said. 'Just uttering that word — 'genocide' — in reference to Israel, to the Jewish people, that alone, the fact that this association can even be made, should be enough to tell us that something very wrong is happening to us.' International furor over Gaza's humanitarian aid Grossman's comments come amid an international furor over a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, 22 months into the war that began when Hamas attacked Israel from the enclave. Last month, the genocide scholar Omer Bartov announced in a New York Times essay that he had changed his earlier stance and concluded that Israel's campaign now constituted genocide. And earlier this week,B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said they, too, had come to the conclusion. 'Recognizing this truth is not easy. Even for us, people who have spent years documenting state violence against Palestinians, the mind resists it. It rejects the facts like poison, tries to spit them out,' Yuli Novak, B'Tselem's executive director, wrote in The Guardian. 'But the poison is here.' Israel and its defenders staunchly deny that it is committing genocide in either intent or effect, noting that despite a heavy death toll the population of Gaza does not reflect a sustained campaign of elimination. 'Few claims are more offensive and blatantly wrong,' the American Jewish Committee said in a response to Bartov's essay. It remains to be seen whether Grossman's comments change the conversation in Israel the way he said his criticism of the occupation landed differently after his son was killed. 'There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn't know what life was made of,' he said in 2010. 'I think those people were forced to realize that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it.' Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
31-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Museums Lobby Against Strengthening a Holocaust Art Recovery Law
An effort in Congress to extend a 2016 law meant to help Holocaust victims and their heirs retrieve artworks stolen by the Nazis is pitting Jewish organizations that want to strengthen the law against major museums that have been quietly lobbying to keep it as it is. The law, which is set to expire at the end of next year if it is not renewed, was intended to loosen the statute of limitations to help people recover art that was looted or sold under duress more than 80 years ago. It gave people a new window of up to six years to file lawsuits from the time they discover the location of the artwork and can show their right to it. The law has been used successfully in some high-profile cases, including to recover valuable works by Egon Schiele. But in some cases, courts have ruled that the passage of so many decades had unfairly hindered the ability of the current owners of disputed artworks, including major museums, to mount effective defenses. A bipartisan bill in the Senate aims to strengthen it by explicitly barring defenses based on the passage of time. 'The intent of this act is to permit claims to recover Nazi-looted art to be brought, notwithstanding the passage of time since World War II,' states the new bill, whose sponsors include Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican, and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Democrat. Those changes have drawn the support of a number of prominent Jewish organizations, which say that they are necessary to make sure that people with valid claims to confiscated artworks are not prevented from recovering them just because so much time has passed. 'Hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork were taken from the Jewish people during the Holocaust, and survivors in the United States should not be unfairly barred from claiming artwork that is theirs,' Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a Republican, said in a statement. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
