The Thinking Heart Essays on Israel and Palestine

Searing essays from International Booker Prize-winning Israeli author and long-time peace activist David Grossman carry us up to and through the cataclysm of Oct 7th and what followed

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?

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and has been translated into more than forty languages. He is the recipient of many international prizes, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Italy’s Premio Roma per la Pace el’Azione Umanitaria and Premio Ischia International Award for Journalism, Israel’s EMET Prize, the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation, the Erasmus Prize given by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, and the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Jerusalem.