Gideon Levy: the most hated man in Israel by Michael R. Burch, an editor of Holocaust and Nakba poetry Gideon Levy has been called the most hated man in Israel, because he speaks truth to power. Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv. His father was a German Jewish lawyer who fled the Nazi Holocaust. Levy describes his early political views as typically mainstream. I was a full member of the nationalistic religious orgy. We all were under the feeling that the whole project [of creating a Jewish state in Palestine] is in an existentialistic danger. We all felt that another holocaust is around the corner. 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 newspaper Haaretz. In 2004, Levy published a compilation of articles entitled Twilight Zone—Life and Death under the Israeli Occupation. Levy’s views changed after he joined 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 defines himself as a patriotic Israeli but he criticizes what he calls Israeli societys moral blindness to the effects of its acts of war and occupation. In 2007, he said that the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, then under Israeli blockade, made him ashamed to be an Israeli. My modest mission is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say We didnt know, Levy said in an interview. 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. Levy also says 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. In 2006, Gideon Ezra, Israels former deputy Minister of Internal Security, suggested that the General Security Services should monitor Levy as a security risk. Levy has joked that there is a thick file of anti-Levy cancellations in the Haaretz newsroom. In 2008, the Anna Lindh foundation, which describes its goal as bringing 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. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel awarded him the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award in 1996 for promoting human rights, and he has won numerous other awards for his writing. Unfortunately, just over 50% of Israelies would support an APARTHEID NATION, if they gobble up the remainder of Palestinian land, and would support mistreatment of the palestinians.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 02:06:26 +0000