Product Code Database
Gideon Levy (, ; born 2 June 1953) is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy 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 Israeli-occupied territories. In 2021, he won Israel's top award for journalism, the Sokolov Award.
His 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 Nazi Germany in 1939, together with 800 other refugees, on a journey organized by two Slovak Jews. He spent six weeks as an illegal immigrant on the -registered ship , 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, , 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 is in an existentialistic danger. We all felt that another holocaust is around the corner."
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.
On the issue of copyright violations in journalism, Levy voiced support in June 2011 for Johann Hari, then writing for The Independent of London, who was accused of plagiarism, while confirming that Hari had lifted quotes from Levy's newspaper column.
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.
Levy wrote that the 2008–2009 Gaza War 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", he wrote in an editorial.
In 2010, Levy described Hamas as a fundamentalist organization 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", he continued, "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 boycott.
During the Gaza war, Levy called for "lifting the criminal siege on the Gaza Strip".
In 2021, Levy was awarded Israel's top journalism award, the Sokolov Award. In its citation, the prize committee wrote that Levy "presents original and independent positions that do not surrender to convention or social codes, and in doing so enriches the public discourse fearlessly."
In 2002, Israeli novelist Irit Linur set off a wave of subscription cancellations to Haaretz when she wrote an open letter to the paper cancelling her own subscription.
aTranslation: "it is a person's right to be a radical leftist, and publish a newspaper in accordance with this world view.... However Haaretz reached a stage where its anti-Zionism turns too frequently to silly and mean journalism." Original:
bTranslation: "When Gideon Levy accuses Israel of turning Marwan Barghouti from a peace seeker to an impresario of suicide bombings, it is as logical an interpretation, just as the claim that the wave of attacks on 11 September were a plot by Mossad. In a private conversation with him, he told me one time that he would not travel a hundred meters to save the life of a settler, and it seems to me that his loves and hates have been long tainting his heart-rending reports from the occupied Palestinian territories." Original: "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. She also accused Levy of amateurism because he does not speak Arabic.Translation: Furthermore, and maybe this also does not have to be noted, his whole career is touched with frivolousness, since he is one of the few journalists for Arab matters in the world who does not speak Arabic, does not understand Arabic and does not read Arabic. He gets a simultaneous translation, and that's enough. For me, that is amateur journalism.Levy himself confirmed in an interview in 2002 that he does not speak Arabic. See Interview with Gideon Levy (in Hebrew)
Other public figures also cancelled their subscriptions, including Roni Daniel, the military and security correspondent for Israeli Channel 2. Levy himself joked that there is a thick file of anti-Levy cancellations in the Haaretz newsroom.
In an open letter to Levy in 2009, Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua, formerly a supporter of Levy, described his comparison of Gazan-Israeli death tolls as absurd and questioned his motives.
In 2013, Levy published an article about what he views as a disgraceful attitude towards African asylum seekers in Israel. In considering the reasons for this attitude, he wrote, "This time the issue is not security, Israel's state religion. Nor are still talking about a flood of refugees, because the border with Egypt has been closed. So the only explanation for this disgraceful treatment lies in the national psyche. The migrants' color is the problem. A million immigrants from Russia, a third of them non-Jews, some of whom were also found to have a degree of alcohol and crime in their blood, were not a problem. Tens of thousands of Africans are the ultimate threat." Levy's remarks about Russians produced accusations of racism from Eddie Zhensker, executive director of the Russian advocacy NGO Morashtenu, who accused Levy of "brute and coarse prejudices". Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver demanded that Levy be placed on trial. Levy later apologised to those who were offended, but claimed that the real problem was that he had called Russian "immigrants" instead of "olim" and compared them to Africans.
During the 2014 Gaza war, the chairman of the Likud Yisrael Beiteinu faction in the Knesset, Yariv Levin, called for Levy to be put on trial for treason.
In February 2016, after Levy criticized the Israel Labor Party, its Secretary General, Yehiel Bar, wrote in Haaretz that Levy is a Trojan horse: "Sad, that Levy who used to be a moral compass, became a broken compass: at all time, with no connection to circumstances or reality, Levy's compass points negative, points despair, points irrelevant". Bar added that Levy regards Palestinians as uneducated children who are exempt from any responsibility for their actions.
Personal life
Levy resides in the Ramat Aviv neighborhood of Tel Aviv, on a site that was, before 1948, part of the Palestinian Arab village of Sheikh Munis. He is a divorced father of two. He says his sons do not share his politics and do not read anything he writes. He has received death threats. 'Meanwhile, Gideon Levy receives a death threat,' Haaretz 11 January 2015
Awards
Published works
External links
Categories: 1953 Births, Living People, Israeli Columnists, Israeli Journalists, Israeli People Of Czech-jewish Descent, Israeli People Of German-jewish Descent, Israeli Political Writers, Writers From Tel Aviv, Haaretz People, Writers On The Middle East, Jewish Israeli Activists For Palestinian Solidarity, Israeli Activists For Palestinian Solidarity, Sokolov Award Recipients
|
|
