Renowned author Jelinek condemns ‘land grabbing’ in Gaza, West Bank, calls 2-state solution talk a ‘lie’

Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek has condemned “land grabbing” in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, arguing that Western discourse on a two-state solution in the Middle East amounts to a “lie.”

The 79-year-old writer, a major German-language intellectual figure, has previously spoken out against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. She was also among the most prominent signatories of a 2024 letter rejecting attempts “to boycott, harass and scapegoat Jewish and Israeli authors and literary institutions.”

In an essay, Jelinek, whose Jewish father survived the Holocaust, evoked her “love for the Jewish state, which also took in several of my ancestors.”

But she argued that history should not prevent criticism, calling for European Union sanctions over Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and land confiscations.

In the text, entitled “In a promised land,” Jelinek criticized talk about a Palestinian state “as though one did not know that it can never exist along the current path.”

“Yet with this unspoken lie, thought itself also collapses; it shatters against the circumstances, against the land grabbing” of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, she wrote in the German-language text published on her website last Friday.

She added she feared “ethnic cleansing” because “where the land is lacking, people themselves become meaningless.”

She also referred to “plans” for the land, “perhaps a famous resort straight from the brains of [US President Donald] Trump and [his son-in-law and adviser Jared] Kushner.”

Trump has described Gaza as a “beautiful piece of property” and previously weighed the US taking it over, an idea he has since abandoned.

Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004.