Gideon Levy

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist, a political commentator for Ha'aretz and a member of its editorial board, and a former spokesman for Shimon Peres A recurring theme of his articles is what he calls the 'moral blindness' of Israeli society to the effects of its acts of war and occupation, an attitude which he attributes to the systematic dehumanization of Israel's neighbors. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, he joined a distinct minority of Israeli commentators in rejecting the view that it was a 'just war' in which civilian casualties were inevitable and acceptable.

Background

Levy was born in 1955 in Tel Aviv, the son of European immigrants. From 1978 to 1982 he served, together with Yossi Beilin as an aide to Shimon Peres. Since 1982 he has written for the Israeli daily Haaretz, in which, from 1986, he has written extensively on 'the occupation and Palestinian life under the occupation'. In 1996 he was awarded the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Criticism

Irit Linur public letter to Haaretz

Irit Linur, writer, radio broadcaster, and fellow Israeli journalist, wrote a letter, whch gained wide circulation, explaining the reason for her decision to cancel her long time subscription to Haaretz. In the letter, she stated that there is nothing wrong with taking a radical left, anti-Zionist stance and publishing a newspaper in that spirit - but that the paper's anti-Zionism had reached the point where its journalism had become silly and mean.

In the same letter, Linur attacked Gideon Levy. She stated that when Levi accused Israel of having turned Marwan Barghouti from an individual desiring peace into an organizer of suicide attacks, the charge was as illogical as the claim that the September 11, 2001 attacks were a Mosad conspiracy.

In addition, she suspected that Levy's reportage was affected by his ideological perspective, the most glaring part of which she identified as his pro-Palestinian stance. Levi's entire career was, she asserted, tainted by 'shoddy work' (Hebrew: חלטוריזם), in that he was

'one of the few reporters in the world dealing with issues regarding Arabs who doesn't know Arabic, doesn't understand Arabic and doesn't read Arabic. He gets simultaneous translations and that is enough (for him). In my opinion, that is amateurish journalism.'

.

Linur attacked Levy's reports as narrow minded, shallow, and journalistically and morally impaired, suggesting that Levi, and his Haaretz colleague Amira Hass, intentionally refrain from reporting on fratricidal strife among the Palestinians themselves. In addition she charged that the two 'never seem to meet Palestinians who are Anti-semitic, Chauvinistic, corrupt or who clap at the news of suicide bombings'.

Amos Schocken, Haaretz's publisher, responded publicly to Linur's letter, stating that Linur's description of himself and the two above-mentioned writers as 'radical leftist' and anti-Zionist confused him, as he never had never thought of either himself or them as radical leftists. He considered considered that Haaretz is and always had been a highly Zionist newspaper. Schocken noted that Amira Hass had reported on a Palestinian extrajudicial execution, and that she had also written both about Palestinian corruption and celebrations of suicide attacks.

He added that,

'In my opinion, Gideon Levy’s reports should be read principally as a description of the effect of the Israeli occupation on the lives of the Palestinians in the territories,'

and that he found nothing radical or anti-Zionist in Levi's writings.

External links

• Interview with Levy on PBS (2003)
• Selection of articles by Levy
• Article about Levy in the French daily Le Monde September 2006
• Gideon Levy's Official Lecturer Page