Elfriede Jelinek condemns Gaza, West Bank 'land grabbing'

Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek has condemned what she called “land grabbing” in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, and argued that Western talk of a two-state solution in the Middle East amounts to a “lie”.

In a text titled “In a promised land” and published on her website on Friday, the 79-year-old writer criticised discussion of a Palestinian state “as though one did not know that it can never exist along the current path”.

Jelinek wrote that she feared “ethnic cleansing” because “where the land is lacking, people themselves become meaningless”. She also called for European Union sanctions over Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and land confiscations.

Jelinek, whose Jewish father survived the Holocaust, wrote of her “love for the Jewish state”, but said that history should not prevent criticism. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004.