© 2025 Fdr / RESY CANONICA
When European media no longer knows which way to turn, it turns to Israeli intellectuals. It has just happened again, with writer David Grossman declaring—"with a broken heart"—that what is happening in Gaza amounts to genocide. The figure of the “good Israeli,” along with his alter ego, the “good Palestinian,” is the legacy of a persistent Orientalist distortion—one that reduces the Middle East conflict to a matter of sentiment, absolving those involved from accountability.
Grossman's statement to La Repubblica came just days after the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel also used the term “genocide” to describe what is unfolding in Gaza, nearly two years after the military campaign began in the wake of October 7, 2023.
For years, Grossman—alongside the late Abraham Yehoshua and Amos Oz—has served as a kind of moral refuge for their readership and the European press. Whenever the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian conflict threatens to push us into despair, they are summoned to restore our shaken sense of meaning.
Once again, Grossman has been asked to reassure us. By acknowledging that a genocide is underway in Gaza, he rebalances the moral universe. For many, the world regains its contours, once more divided neatly into good and bad—this time, into good Israelis and bad Israelis.
The same reflex is triggered—albeit far less frequently—when a Palestinian is called upon to reassure us that not everyone in Gaza supports Hamas. That simple reassurance brings us comfort. It reconciles us with the world—and with ourselves.
Widen the lens, and the pattern becomes clear. We are always searching for “good Arabs.” The same mechanism is at play with Russians in the context of the war in Ukraine: we are soothed by the idea that some of them are “good,” too.
This impulse—obsessively Orientalist in nature—profoundly distorts our understanding of reality (not only in the Middle East) and of life itself. It leads us to believe that terrible situations and horrific actions are the result of monstrous individuals.
But clinging to the figure of “the good” spares us a harder truth: that under certain circumstances, in certain configurations, we too could be capable of the worst.
This painful but essential understanding does not absolve the perpetrators, nor does it lift the weight of responsibility from their shoulders. On the contrary—it pins them to it. And it does so far more rigorously than any moral certificate of virtue for some and wickedness for others ever could.
Just as radically, this truth spares us the illusion that, when all is said and done, horror is merely a matter of sentiment.
(gianluca grossi)