Annie Ernaux was invited by the French TV literature discussion programme La Grande Librairie in June 2025. She took the opportunity to speak out about Gaza. This is what she said:
For months, every day I have watched images from Gaza, filmed by reporters risking their lives, images of schools and hospitals destroyed, children dead or mutilated, a whole population trying to flee the bombs, in vain. And all the time a feeling was growing inside me that something must be done, and that I am not doing it, and this feeling renders the act of writing derisory, even cowardly. I was writing as if I hadn’t seen these terrifying images, hadn’t read that the sole obsession of the inhabitants of Gaza is the struggle to avoid being blown to pieces, because for them reality now is no longer life but death.
I was not alone with this feeling. Last week, we, hundreds of French language writers united to do something, to speak out, to denounce the genocide taking place in Gaza, transmitted to us, the proof before our eyes: the blocking of aid to create widespread famine, the forced movement of families like cattle, the massacre of a population whose only crime is that of being born there.
The annihilation of Palestinian civilisation is taking place through the destruction of its monuments, its ancestral traces, the exile or death of its writers, artists and film-makers. In its place, a riviera, and tourists.
The silence is being broken. Refusing to be intimidated by the most abject accusations, people are raising their voices. I wish them strength and the determination to demand a permanent ceasefire, the return of the Israeli hostages and the liberation of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank, bringing pressure to bear on the French government and international bodies. This necessary precursor has to be accompanied by an end to the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement, the naming and interrogation of the racist imaginary in relation to Arab peoples which is at the heart of the acceptance of the martyrdom of the people of Gaza. Our humanity is at stake. As the young writer from Gaza Nour ElAssy recently wrote:
“If human rights, and morality have any sense, Gaza is the place where these values must survive or die, for if the world can watch us disappear without doing anything, nothing that it claims to defend is real”.
Translated by Lyn Thomas