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Gideon Levy (Template:Lang-he; born 1953) is an Israeli journalist and editor for the Haaretz newspaper, and is an outspoken and controversial opponent of Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Levy's weekly column in Haaretz, "The Twilight Zone", deals with the politically and emotionally charged subject of the hardships of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and their conflicts with the Israeli military and Jewish settlers. He has been called everything from a "propagandist for the Hamas" to "this heroic journalist". He has won awards for defending human rights, and has been vilified as a possible security risk by a former cabinet minister.

In addition to his work at Haaretz, Levy has published a book, hosted a television show, and edited or written documentaries and other programs.

Biography

Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv, the eldest of two sons of Holocaust survivors. He lived through the 1967 Six-Day War, when a shell fired by an Arab army exploded in a street adjacent to his home. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Levy's political views were typically mainstream. "I was a full member of the nationalistic religious orgy," said Levy of his childhood. "We all were under the feeling that the whole project is in an existentialistic danger. We all felt that another holocaust is around the corner."

Levy began his journalism career in 1974, when he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a writer and editor for the Israel Army Radio, until his discharge in 1978. From 1978 to 1982 he served, together with left-wing politician Yossi Beilin, as an aide to Shimon Peres, then leader of the Israel Labor party. In 1982 he began working for the Israeli daily Haaretz and in the years 1983–1987 he worked as the vice editor-in-chief. He has been writing the "Twilight Zone" column since 1988.

In addition to his work for Haaretz, Levy published a compilation of his articles in 2004, entitled Twilight Zone – Life and Death under the Israeli Occupation. He coedited, with Haim Yavin, a documentary series, Whispering Embers (Template:Lang-he), on Russian Jewry after the fall of communism, hosted A Personal meeting with Gideon Levy, a weekly talk show that was broadcast on Israeli cable TV on channel 3., and has appeared periodically on other television talk shows.

Levy has said that his dissident views on Israel's policies toward the Palestinians developed only after he began working for Haaretz. "When I first started covering the West Bank for Haaretz, I was young and brainwashed," he said in an 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."

Levy resides in Tel Aviv and is a divorced father of two.

Political views

"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. He often criticizes what he describes as Israeli society's "moral blindness" to the effects of its acts of war and occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. He has referred to the construction of settlements on private Palestinian land as "the most criminal enterprise in history". He opposed the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, and the popular view that civilian casualties in that war were both inevitable and acceptable. He said in 2007 that the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, which was under a strict blockade by Israel, made him ashamed to be an Israeli.

Levy supports unilateral withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories without demanding 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 wrote that the Gaza War was a complete failure for Israel, and that none of the objectives of the war was 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.

Reception

Levy's writing has raised considerable controversy. He won the Anna Lindh journalism prize in 2008, for promoting cultural dialogue, for an article he wrote about Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel awarded him the the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award in 1996 for promoting human rights, and he has won numerous other awards for his writing. He has been praised by Johann Hari of The Independent as "the heroic Israeli journalist", and his columns are cited often in the New York Times and other newspapers. The French newspaper Le Monde praised him as a 'thorn in Israel's flank' and Der Spiegel characterized him as " most radical commentator".

On the other hand, his opponents have criticized 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?" asks Amnon Dankner of the moderate Maariv newspaper. Ben Dror Yemini, the editor of the opinion page of Maariv, calls Levy one of the "propagandists for the Hamas". 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, " the current Israeli heroes , from whom the Palestinians garner support for their ways, Gideon Levy ..." Arutz Sheva also reported extensively on an article of Levy's that was translated into Arabic on a Hamas website, to justify two rampages by Palestinians driving bulldozers in Jerusalem in 2008. Gideon Ezra, a member of Parliament from the Kadima party, and former deputy Minister of Internal Security in Israel, even suggested in 2006 that the General Security Services should monitor Levy as a borderline security risk.

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. "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.

Other public figures also cancelled their subscriptions, including Roni Daniel, the military and security correspondent for Israeli Channel 2. Haaretz's publisher, Amos Schocken, expressed puzzlement at Linur's public 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". Levy himself joked that there is a thick file of anti-Levy cancellations in the Haaretz newsroom.

Publications

• "Twilight Zone - Life and Death under the Israeli Occupation. 1988-2003". Babylon Priniting 2004, Tel Aviv

References

1. ^ Yemini, Ben Dror (2009-01-17). "Conscience pimps - סרסורי מצפון" (in Hebrew). Ma'ariv. Retrieved 2009-04-09.
2. ^ the heroic Israeli journalist
3. אזור הדמדומים | 100 בהיסטוריה, by Gideon Levy.
4. ^ Six Day War prompts reflection in Middle East ABC, 11 June 2007
5. ^ "לקסיקון אנציקלופדי לתקשורת ועיתונות - גדעון לוי" (in Hebrew). העין השביעית. 26/02/2008. Retrieved 30 January 2010. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
6. Robert Hirschfield, "Israel’s Gadfly", In These Times, September 4, 2009
7. What do you mean when you say 'no'? Haaretz, 18 November 2007
8. Ha'aretz, Israel's Liberal Beacon The Nation, 6 September 2007
9. Gideon Levy, ‘Demands of a thief,’ Haaretz 25/11/2007
10. Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 22/01/2009.
11. Gideon Levy wins Anna Lindh Journalistic Prize for his exceptional writings on the challanges of the region
12. [http://www.acri.org.il/story.aspx?id=176 מקבלי אות זכויות האדם ע"ש אמיל גרינצוויג ז"ל]
13. "List of recipients of the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award on the Association of Human Rights in Israel website" (in Hebrew). Retrieved 2010-06-20.
14. see, for example, Eric Etheridge, "Morning Skim: Kinsley on Debt, Testing Obama, Israel’s Direction", February 20, 2009, or Thomas Friedman, "Wanted: An Arab Sharon", January 11, 2006
15. Gideon Lévy : une épine dans le flanc d'Israël Le Monde, 4 September 2006 Template:Fr icon
16. ^ Problems at Israel's Haaretz: A Newspaper Without a Country
17. Amnon Dankner, Maariv, May 1, 2002, quoted in Gaby Weiman, "Ten Dilemmas of Journalism in Days of Terror"
18. מרכוס, איתמר (6/5/2009). "גיבורי הפלסטינים: גדעון לוי, עמירה הס, ודני רובינשטיין" (in Hebrew). Arutz Sheva. Retrieved 2009-04-09. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
19. השראה לתעמולת חמאס: גדעון לוי
20. אירועי תקשורת Israel Democracy Institute Template:He icon
21. ^ Irit Linur's letter (quotation) News First Class Template:He icon
    Translation: 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:
    זכותו של אדם להיות שמאלני-רדיקלי, ולהוציא עיתון בהתאם להשקפת עולמו... אבל "הארץ" הגיע לשלב בו האנטי-ציונות שלו הופכת לעתים קרובות מדי לעיתונות מטופשת ומרושעת.Translation: 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 the September 11 were a plot by the 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:
    כשגדעון לוי מאשים את ישראל בהפיכתו של מרואן ברגותי משוחר שלום לאמרגן פיגועי התאבדות, זו פרשנות הגיונית, ממש כמו הטענה שגל הפיגועים ב-11 בספטמבר הוא מזימה של המוסד. בשיחה פרטית איתו, אמר לי פעם שהוא לא היה נוסע מאה מטר כדי להציל את חייו של מתנחל, ונראה לי שאהבותיו ושנאותיו מכתימות כבר מזמן את דיווחיו הנוגעים ללב מהשטחים הפלשתינים הכבושים. Cite error: The named reference "IritLetter" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
22. Translation:
    Furthermore, and maybe this also does not have to be noted, his whole carrer is touched with unseriousness, 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.
    Original:
    כמו כן, ואולי גם את זה לא צריך לציין, כל הקריירה שלו נגועה בחלטוריזם, מכיוון שהוא אחד הכתבים היחידים בעולם לעניינים ערביים, שלא יודע ערבית, לא מבין ערבית ולא קורא ערבית. מתרגמים לו סימולטנית, וזה מספיק. לטעמי, זו עיתונות חובבנית.
23. Levy himself confirmed in an interview in 2002 that he does not speak Arabic. See Interview with Gideon Levy (in Hebrew)
24. שכניק, רז (2009-01-16). "עד מתי אוקטובר 65'" (in Hebrew). מוסף "7 לילות" של "ידיעות אחרונות". {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)

External links

• Interview with Levy on PBS (2003)
• Selection of articles by Levy
• Gideon Levy's Official Lecturer Page
• An open letter to Gideon Levy By A.B. Yehoshua, Haaretz 16/01/2009
• An open response to A.B. Yehoshua By Gideon Levy

• Israeli Jews
• Israeli journalists
• Post-Zionists
• 1955 births
• Living people
• Writers on Zionism
• People of Haaretz