Post by pieter on Dec 19, 2017 20:48:42 GMT -7
Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board.
Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He is the author of the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 25 years, as well as the writer of political editorials for the newspaper.
Levy was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996.
His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso Publishing House in London and New York.
Levy defines himself as a "patriotic Israeli". 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". He opposed the 2006 Lebanon War, 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. "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.
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 used to support the two-state solution, but he argues that it has become untenable, and he now supports the one-state solution.
Levy wrote that the 2008–09 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 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."
Levy supports boycotting Israel, saying it is "the Israeli patriot's final refuge". Levy has said that economic boycott is more important, but that he also supports academic and cultural boycott.
He has been subject to death threats.