Arnon Grunberg is leaving Humo after Herman Brusselmans column about Gaza

Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg has retired as a columnist for the Belgian magazine Humo. The writer published his open employment letter in the newspaper De Standard. Grunberg is upset about a column about Gaza by Herman Brusselmans and the editor-in-chief’s comment on it.

Brusselmans wrote in his column last week: “I see an image of a crying and screaming Palestinian boy who is completely out of his mind asking for his mother lying under the rubble, and I thinking that that boy is my own son Roman, and the mother, my own friend Lena, and I get so angry that I want to tear a sharp knife down the throat of every Jew I meet.”

Brusselmans himself says of his column that he used a “metaphorical image” and that it is “not an incitement to murder”. He also said that he wrote in a later sentence that he does not tar all Israelis with the same brush.

Initially, Humo left the column untouched and the editors said that the Brussels statements were made as part of “a satirical column, not a journalistic article or interview”.

However, the column was taken offline last Friday after complaints about it from the Jewish community. The European Jewish Association (EJA), among others, had complained about it. The case received international attention, among other things, through an article CNN.

Grunberg wrote columns for Humo for about 25 years. “There is a lower limit, I never thought I would write this down, and it has been reached,” the 53-year-old Jewish writer says in his resignation letter.

He is “for the broadest concept of freedom of expression,” he writes. “I would defend the right of neo-Nazis to demonstrate, but that doesn’t mean I have to go along with the demonstration. He believes the weekly magazine is “not nearly anti-Semitic”.

Humo has existed in various forms since 1936 and provides satire, but also journalistic reports, music reviews and media news. Apart from Brussels, Jan Mulder, among others, also writes columns for the magazine.

Grunberg has several best sellers to his name, including Ghost arm pain (2000), Tirzah (2006), Skin and Hair (2010) in With us in Auschwitz (2020). He won the AKO Literary Award twice, the Libris Literary Award and the PC Hooft Award for his entire oeuvre.

Grunberg already wrote one yesterday column in De Standaard about the weak response, in his opinion, from the editor-in-chief of Humo. This was followed by a response from the editor-in-chief that Grunberg did not like, after which he resigned.

“We regret this decision and would like to thank Arnon Grunberg for 25 years of cooperation,” deputy chief Matthias Vanderaspoilden told the Belgian news agency.

Brusselmans responds to the issue by introducing a new one column just not talking about the war, but “talking about other things”. “You can be excited, but you better not worry anyone about it, because if you do, you’ll be pushed into a corner you’ve never been in.”