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In his first public statement on the conflict with Iran, David Grossman, the leading Israeli novelist of the last generation and strongest voice of his country’s moral conscience, told "The Nation" that he opposed an attack on the Islamic republic by Israel or the U.S., saying the likely consequences were more daunting even than those of Iran building nuclear weapons.
“I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but I think that if the sanctions do not work, Israel and the whole world, painfully, will have to live with it,” Grossman said, warning that bombing Iran would set in motion “a nightmare that’s hard to describe.” Nonetheless, he said he had “a very bad feeling” that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were going to order an attack, even against America’s wishes. “There is a dynamic to all these warlike declarations,” he said.
spoke with Larry Derfner by phone from his home outside Jerusalem on Tuesday. The day before, Netanyahu had brought his militant views on Iran to a White House meeting with President Barack Obama, and later delivered a fright-inducing speech to the AIPAC convention, employing Holocaust analogies and vowing that “never again” would the Jewish people entrust their survival to any nation but their own.
“Israel,” said Grossman, “is a deeply traumatized community that finds it very difficult to separate between real dangers and echoes of past traumas, and sometimes I think our prime minister fires himself up in mixing these real dangers with those echoes from the past.”
He said he feared that Netanyahu and Barak would bomb Iran partly out of a perceived strategic need to back up their threats with action, but also because of what he sees as Netanyahu’s sense of historic responsibility to save the “people of eternity.”
“He has this idea that we are the people of eternity, am ha’netzach from the Bible, and our negotiations, as he sees it, are with eternity, with the primal currents of history and mankind, while the United States, with all due respect, is just another superpower like Rome or Athens or Babylon, and we’ve survived them all,” said Grossman. “I’m afraid that this way of thinking might encourage Netanyahu to take the step” of attacking Iran.
Grossman’s son, Uri, was killed in the 2006 Lebanon War two days after the author called publicly for a cease-fire, and while he was writing the last chapters of his greatly acclaimed epic of war and peace, “To the End of the Land.” An impassioned critic of Israeli militarism and treatment of Palestinians, he deplored the overkill of the December 2008-January 2009 war in Gaza, and took part in last year’s weekly protests against the dispossession of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, getting beaten by Israeli police at one of them.
Citing the large presence of “more secular, educated, realistic” people in Iran, masses of whom protested bravely in 2009 against the regime, Grossman said this face of Iran held out the hope of a future leadership that might be less hostile to Israel – but he warned that this hope would be destroyed, too, in an Israeli attack.
“If Israel bombs Iran,” he said, “I think it will be seen as an arrogant, megalomaniacal, violent nation even by the most sober, moderate Iranians.” Thus, Israel’s hope for peace, or even just quiet, with a future, better Iranian government “would be eradicated for generations,” he maintained.
A Communist Party of Israel leading member praised Grossman declaration: "An attack on Iran will not prevent its further nuclear arming. An attack on Iran will enflame the entire Middle East. A nuclear Iran is indeed a threat to the region, but an attack will lead to an inevitable catastrophe. There's no agreement amongst the Israeli people for an attack that stands against our country's interest!"
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David Grossman speaks out against war Iran
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