The Thinking Heart

A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person's soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier?

Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature

A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person's soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier?

International Booker Prize-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself 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, fail to protect its citizens?

And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution?

In eleven essays, David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures 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 simply want to live in peace.

Ultimately, Grossman arrives at the most important question of all—Will there ever be a lasting peace in the region?