| Gideon Levy | |
|---|---|
Gideon Levy in 2011. |
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| Born | 1953 Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Education | M.A. Political Science, Tel Aviv University |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Nationality | Israeli |
Gideon Levy (Hebrew: גדעון לוי; born 1953) is an Israeli journalist. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. A notable journalist on the Israeli left,[1] Levy has been characterized variously as a "propagandist for the Hamas"[2] to a "heroic journalist".[3]
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Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv, the son of immigrants from Germany. Levy’s father was a German Jewish lawyer from the Sudetenland. Fleeing from the Nazis in 1939, Levy senior parted from his parents at a railway station in Prague and never saw them again. For six months he lived on a refugee boat that was turned away from many ports until finally reaching Mandate Palestine.[4] Levy attended Public School Alef. Levy and his younger brother Rafi would often sing together, notably songs composed by Haim Hefer.[5] During the Six-Day War, the street adjacent to his home was hit by Arab artillery.[6] Levy describes his political views as a teenager as typically 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."[7]
Levy resides in the Ramat Aviv neighborhood of Tel Aviv (on the lands of Sheikh Munis)[8], and is a divorced father of two.[9]
In 1974, Levy was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces where he served as a reporter for Israel Army Radio. From 1978 to 1982 he worked as an aide to Shimon Peres, then leader of the Israeli Labor Party. In 1982, he began to write for the Israeli daily Haaretz. In 1983–1987, he was an assistant to the editor-in-chief.[9] Despite his coverage of the Israeli-Arab conflict, he speaks no Arabic.[9] 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.[10] 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 cable TV on channel 3,[9] 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 an interview.[11] "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 other newspaper in Israel apart from Haaretz would give him the journalistic freedom to publish the kind of pieces he writes.[9]
Levy defines himself as a "patriotic Israeli."[12] He criticizes 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".[13] He opposed the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, and the view that civilian casualties were inevitable. In 2007, he said that the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, then under Israeli blockade, made him ashamed to be an Israeli.[14] "My modest mission is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say 'We didn't know'," said Levy in an interview.[7]
Levy supports unilateral withdrawal from 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."[15]
Levy wrote that the Gaza War was a failed campaign and its objectives were not achieved. "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," he wrote in an editorial.[16]
In 2010, Levy described Hamas as a fundamentalist organization and holds 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."[17] He is against boycotting Israel: "I am an Israeli who does not boycott Israel so I cannot call on others to do so."[18]
Levy's writing has aroused controversy. He has been praised by Johann Hari of The Independent as "the heroic Israeli journalist",[3] and his columns are cited often in The New York Times[19] and other newspapers. The French newspaper Le Monde praised him as a 'thorn in Israel's flank'[20] and Der Spiegel characterized him as "[Israel's] most radical commentator".[9][21]-[a]
His opponents criticize him for being anti-Israeli, and for supporting Palestinian radicalism. "Is it wrong to ask of reporters in a country that is in the midst of a difficult war to show a little more empathy for their people and their country?" asked Amnon Dankner of the Maariv newspaper.[22] Ben Dror Yemini, the editor of the opinion page of Maariv, called Levy one of the "propagandists for the Hamas".[2] Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian Media Watch, writes in the website of Arutz Sheva, a publication supporting the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, "[One of] the current Israeli heroes [of the Hamas], from whom the Palestinians garner support for their ways, [is] Gideon Levy ..."[23] Arutz Sheva also lambasted Levy's article about the Jerusalem bulldozer attack in Jerusalem in 2008, which was translated into Arabic on a Hamas website.[24] In 2006, Gideon Ezra, Israel's former deputy Minister of Internal Security, suggested that the General Security Services should monitor Levy as a borderline security risk.[25]
Israeli novelist Irit Linur set off a wave of subscription cancellations to Haaretz in 2002, when she wrote an open letter to the paper cancelling her own subscription.[26] "It is a person's right to be a radical leftist, and publish a newspaper in accordance with his world view... However Haaretz has reached the point where its anti-Zionism has become stupid and evil," she wrote.[26] She also accused Levy of amateurism because he does not speak Arabic.[27][28]
Other public figures also cancelled their subscriptions, including Roni Daniel, the military and security correspondent for Israeli Channel 2.[29] Haaretz's publisher, Amos Schocken, expressed puzzlement at Linur's letter, describing his newspaper as "exceedingly Zionist" and defending Levy's reports as "a description of the effects of the Israeli occupation in the territories".[26] Levy himself joked that there is a thick file of anti-Levy cancellations in the Haaretz newsroom.[21]
In 2008, the Anna Lindh foundation, which describes its goal as "bring[ing] people together from across the Mediterranean to improve mutual respect between cultures," awarded Levy the Anna Lindh journalism prize for an article he wrote about Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces.[30] The Association for Civil Rights in Israel awarded him the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award in 1996[31] for promoting human rights, and he has won numerous other awards for his writing.[9]