Gideon Levy (journalist)

Gideon Levy (journalist)   (journalist, author)
Born	2 Jun 1953 Tel Aviv
In January 2025, Levy called for the immediate suspension and arrest of Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach, commander of IDF 252nd Division

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author who writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Levy has won prizes for his articles on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In 2021, he won Israel's top award for journalism, the Sokolov Award.

Background

Gideon Levy's father, Heinz (Zvi) Loewy, was born in the town of Saaz in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, and earned a law degree from the University of Prague. He fled the Nazis in 1939, together with 800 other refugees, on a journey organised by two Slovak Jews. He spent six weeks as an illegal immigrant on the Panamanian-registered ship Frossoula, which was denied entry into Turkey and Palestine, and was permitted only temporary anchorage at Tripoli. He was then imprisoned in a detention camp at Beirut for six weeks. The group was then allowed to leave aboard another Panamanian-registered ship, Tiger Hill, which reached Palestine on 1 September. Royal Air Force aircraft strafed the ship, killing two refugees, but her crew ran her aground on Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv, where the remaining refugees got ashore.

Levy's mother, Thea, from Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, was brought to Palestine in 1939 in a rescue operation for children and placed in a kibbutz. His grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. His father opened a bakery in Herzliya with his sister and worked as a newspaper deliveryman and then an office clerk.

The family at first lived in poverty, but their lives became relatively comfortable when the German Holocaust reparations arrived. Levy attended Tel Aviv's Ironi Aleph High School. He and his younger brother Rafi often sang together, notably songs by Haim Hefer. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Arab artillery hit the street adjacent to his home. In 2007, Levy described his political views while a teenager as mainstream: "I was a full member of the nationalistic religious orgy. We all were under the feeling that the whole project [of Israel] is in an existentialistic danger. We all felt that another holocaust is around the corner."

Journalism and media career

Levy was drafted into the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in 1974 and served as a reporter for Army Radio. From 1978 to 1982, he worked as an aide and spokesman for Shimon Peres, then the leader of the Israeli Labour Party. In 1982, he began to write for the Israeli daily Haaretz. In 1983–87, he was a deputy editor. Despite his coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he speaks no Arabic. He has written a column called "Twilight Zone" about the hardships of the Palestinians since 1988. In 2004, Levy published a compilation of articles entitled "Twilight Zone – Life and Death under the Israeli Occupation." With Haim Yavin, he co-edited Whispering Embers, a documentary series on Russian Jewry after the fall of communism. He hosted "A Personal Meeting with Gideon Levy", a weekly talk show that was broadcast on Israeli Channel 3, and has appeared periodically on other television talk shows.

Levy has said that his views on Israel's policies toward the Palestinians developed only after joining Haaretz;

"When I first started covering the West Bank for Haaretz, I was young and brainwashed", he said in a 2009 interview.

"I would see settlers cutting down olive trees and soldiers mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, and I would think, 'These are exceptions, not part of government policy.'

"It took me a long time to see that these were not exceptions – they were the substance of government policy."

In an interview, he said he doubts that any newspaper in Israel other than Haaretz would give him the journalistic freedom to publish the kind of pieces he writes.

Views and opinions

Levy defines himself as a "patriotic Israeli". He criticises what he sees as Israeli society's moral blindness to the effects of its acts of war and occupation. He has referred to the construction of settlements on private Palestinian land as "the most criminal enterprise in Israel's history". He opposed the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2007, he said that the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, then under Israeli blockade, made him ashamed to be Israeli. "My modest mission is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say 'We didn't know'", he has said.

Levy supports unilateral withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories without concessions:

"Israel is not being asked 'to give' anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return – to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity."

Levy used to support a two-state solution, but now feels it has become untenable, and supports a one-state solution.

In an editorial, Levy wrote that the Gaza War (2008–09) was a failed campaign that did not achieve its objectives:

"The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law."

In 2010, Levy described Hamas as a fundamentalist organisation and held it responsible for the Qassam rockets fired at Israeli cities:

"Hamas is to be blamed for launching the Qassams. This is unbearable. No sovereign state would have tolerated it. Israel had the right to react".

"But the first question you have to ask yourselves is why Hamas launched the missiles. Before criticising Hamas I would rather criticise my own government which carries a much bigger responsibility for the occupation and conditions in Gaza [...] And our behaviour was unacceptable."

Levy supports boycotting Israel, saying it is "the Israeli patriot's final refuge". He has said that economic boycott is more important, but that he also supports academic and cultural boycotts.

During the 2023-2025 Israel-Hamas War, Levy called for "lifting the criminal siege on the Gaza Strip". On 2 January 2025, Levy wrote in Haaretz:

"If the military police don't immediately open an investigation into the conduct of Brigadier-General Yehuda Vach, if Vach isn't immediately suspended from his post as commander of the 252nd Division and detained for questioning, if the army doesn't immediately renounce his actions and the government doesn't do the same, then Israelis, the International Criminal Court and the world will all know that the Israel Defence Forces has a division commander suspected of committing war crimes on a massive scale, yet he remains in his job and continues living his life as if nothing had happened."

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 3 January 2025.
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