Israeli author David Grossman has been called the country's "moral conscience."

And, in a new interview in The Sun Magazine, a literary monthly magazine based in North Carolina, Grossman succeeds in summing up the current state of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a succinct 117 words:

"We are talking about two peoples so heavily damaged and distorted by past and present traumas that they can no longer identify what their real interests are. And quite often they act against those interests just to cause some damage to the enemy. Both peoples need a long and deep process of recovery, and this recovery will not start until they have identities that are separate and not interwoven, identities that allow each other just to be and to start to build up their own nation without occupation, terror, or hatred. Only then will both of them start to recover and lead the lives that they deserve to live and have been deprived of for so long."

There you go. That's all you need to read about the state of the conflict.

The interview, "My Enemy, My Brother," conducted by my friend Anna Blackshaw, delves deeply into the open wounds, the prospects (or lack thereof) for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and the role of literature in such a dysfunctional conflict.

Only part of the interview is on-line, and there are a couple of other interesting reflections from Grossman worth excerpting here for those unable to get The Sun:

"As the world shrinks, we feel the need to minimize the surface of our soul that comes into contact with its harshness, because if we feel more, we suffer more. It is much more comfortable to entrench ourselves in the official position that we are the victims, that we are right and they are wrong, that they want only to kill us and will always try to kill us. Reality then adjusts to this position.

"Since language is an extension of your soul, if you close the doors of your soul, the language with which you describe reality becomes limited and superficial, and you surrender to stereotypes and prejudices... The mass media tempt people to think in a narrow, banal way. Living under threat, you feel how language narrows and reduces itself, how people talk in cliches. People repeat the same slogans because they don't have the energy to be articulate, to separate reality into its nuances and subtleties."

Anna also asks Grossman what he would say to American Jews "who are proud of their heritage but opposed to Israeli government policy."

"I see no contradiction," Grossman replied. "For Jews in the United States, Israel is not just another country. It is a country that extends itself towards them. Even if they are loyal American citizens, they have some expectations of Israel; they have some wishes. If they are silent, if they do not make their opinions heard here, Israel will believe that all Jewish Americans support Israel's occupation of Palestine. If U.S. Jews continue to support the megalomaniacal hallucinations of Israel and to finance the occupation and allow only the right-wingers in American Jewry to express their opinions, they actually support the deterioration of Israel. I am sure they do not want to do that. It is important that Jewish Americans who oppose the occupation communicate their point of view here, because we mainly hear from right-wingers, who are much more vocal and sure of themselves."