Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2010 5:57 pm Post subject: Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy in conversation with Jon Snow: why the media's role in the occupation of Palestine matters
With a protracted, complex and bloody conflict between Israel and Islamic forces in Palestine, the need for independent journalism has never been greater. Isreali journalist Gideon Levy says that when he started writing, "There [was] no one there to tell the Israelis what they don't want to hear."
Levy, who spoke to Channel 4's Jon Snow at a Frontline event last night, says that the Israeli media plays a far more important role in the conflict than many would like to admit.
Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2010 8:12 am Post subject: Gideon Levy interview for New Left Project
Against the Stream
For decades Gideon Levy has used the platform provided by the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz to shine a light on the brutal realities of Israel’s occupation. His journalism, along with that of his colleague Amira Hass, has been an invaluable resource not only for Israeli readers but, through the Ha’aretz website, for international audiences seeking an informed and humane Israeli perspective on the conflict. It would be difficult to overstate how isolated Levy is within his own society, an isolation that increased over the past decade as Israeli public opinion stampeded to the right. He has described elsewhere how Ha’aretz keeps a thick folder of subscription cancellations from readers outraged by his articles. Despite this hostility, his critique of Israeli policies has become more, not less, radical over time.
His recent book, The Punishment of Gaza, is a select compilation of his Ha’aretz columns from 2006, when Hamas’s electoral victory prompted harsh sanctions and violent reprisals from Israel and its international backers, through to the aftermath of last year’s Gaza massacre, which represented a bloody culmination of that same anti-democratic reaction. This chronology is itself something of a novelty – for most journalists, even those critical of the attack, the relevant background to the massacre stretched to the month of Qassam rockets that preceded it, or at most to the year and half since Hamas took control of the Strip. But Gideon Levy is not most journalists, and his critique of Israeli policies and society goes far beyond the weasel words and euphemistic equivocation offered by most of his contemporaries in the media, and those on the ‘Israeli left’. Whereas liberal Zionist intellectuals like Amos Oz and David Grossman supported the attack in principle, if subsequently criticising its excesses, Levy is clear: this wasn’t a “war”, he writes, it was “a wild onslaught upon the most helpless population in the world”, an “aimless, futile, criminal, superfluous offensive”. When ‘Operation Cast Lead’ was launched the Israeli media not only fell into line, it cheered the massacre on with a jingoistic fervour that was almost beyond belief. In this climate, Levy again distinguished himself, condemning the attack from the outset as a “war crime” that crossed “every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom”.
This rare intellectual courage is also evident in his sharp criticism of those Israeli ‘liberals’ who, when their liberal values clash with their Zionist ones, betray the former every time. One of the most remarkable columns reproduced in the book is a response to prominent liberal Zionist A.B. Yehoshua. Despite being friends on a personal level, Levy did not shy from excoriating the author’s gross apologetics for war crimes in Gaza in the most direct and unsparing manner. “It is as if”, he wrote, “the mighty, including you, have all succumbed to a great and terrible conflagration that has consumed any remnant of a moral backbone.” This integrity was evident again in a column published last week, in which Levy criticised his Ha’aretz colleague and editor Aluf Benn for his blindness to and reflexive complicity in the brutalities of occupation. “You were a complete accomplice to the crime,” he writes of Benn’s service in an IDF that tortured and mistreated Palestinian detainees, “and you don’t even have a guilty conscience.” Reading his columns, it is clear that this is what disturbs Levy the most – not merely that his colleagues and fellow citizens tolerate and commit acts of brutality, but that they feel so good about doing so. His tireless commitment to challenging that complacency and dogged determination to force his readers to confront the consequences of their actions stands as an inspiration to and indictment of the vast majority of his colleagues, and not only in Israel. “This is what we look like,” he insists, relentlessly. “This is our moral portrait.”
I met up with him in London a couple of weeks ago to discuss his book, the Israeli left, the political climate in Israel and the prospects for peace. The full interview follows.
***
Over the past decade Israeli public opinion seems to have gone over the cliff - the last elections produced the most right-wing and possibly, as your recent columns have suggested, the most racist Knesset in Israel’s history. What is behind this trend?
There were two things happening. One was the failure of the Camp David conference in 2000, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak comes back and claims there is no ‘Palestinian partner’. This lie was well spread and convinced Israelis from across the political spectrum. And then came the Second Intifada – the exploding buses, the suicide bombers – and the entire so-called ‘Israeli Left’ totally crashed—which makes me think, ‘how solid was it in the first place?’ Because if it was so easy to crash it, then I’m not sure it was very solid before. But in any case, nothing was left of the Israeli Left, except for some small, devoted, courageous groups which are still very active. Unfortunately, they are not very influential.
Why is the Left so weak – is it for those two reasons?
Yeah, because those two developments – the belief that there is no ‘Palestinian partner’ and Palestinian terror – made it very easy for all the leftists to change their minds. Which makes me doubt very much that they were really leftists in the first place.
Do you see much hope for a revival of the Left in the Sheikh Jarrah protests?
The other day I was there, on one of the Friday protests, with an American friend and she told me, “this is exactly the way it was when the anti-war movement in the United States started in ‘60s”. I am more sceptical, more pessimistic. I think that it’s remarkable what’s going on there and I have full appreciation for those people who come Friday after Friday, but I don’t see it becoming influential, no.
Reading Ha’aretz, it seems like democratic forces within Israel are coming increasingly under threat, for instance in academia.
That’s my main concern now, even more than the occupation, because it’s going to destroy Israel from within. I think that Israeli democracy is now facing its biggest challenge ever: a systematic campaign against any kind of alternative voices. So far it hasn’t touched the media, because most of the media is anyhow recruiting itself to collaborate with the occupation project, and those of us – the very few – who go against the stream, until now we were untouched, but this I don’t take for granted. At the same time there are already the new bills and the campaigns against the NGOs, against academia, and it’s deteriorating day after day. It might touch me personally very soon but so far it hasn’t touched me personally or journalists in general.
Israeli media
You close the introduction to your book with a tribute to the courage of Ha’aretz editors in standing by your writings and continuing to publish them in an atmosphere of increasing intolerance and chauvinism. How unique is Ha’aretz in this regard? I notice, for example, that B. Michael appears to have disappeared from Yedioth Ahronoth [Israel’s largest-circulation daily] after his columns criticising ‘Cast Lead’.
He was just fired. He didn’t ‘disappear’, he was just fired. [See here]
So is the Israeli media quite jingoistic in its coverage generally? How unique is Ha’aretz?
It is very clear to make the division between Ha’aretz and all the rest. It’s a very, very clear division – nobody can argue about this. The Israeli so-called democracy would look entirely different if Ha’aretz didn’t exist, while any other newspaper or TV outlet could disappear tomorrow and there would be no change. Ha’aretz is really the last outpost in the Israel media keeping democracy alive. But Ha’aretz, as you know, is a relatively small newspaper, quite elitist, and it doesn’t approach the masses. All the rest are commercial, free, professional, but when it comes to issues like the occupation, all the media, except for Ha’aretz, recruited itself – nobody recruited it, it recruited itself, voluntarily – to collaborate with the occupation, to dehumanise systematically the Palestinians, to demonise and to spread fears that are often totally artificial and exaggerated. The media in Israel is playing a fatal role, mainly in maintaining the occupation and the nationalistic and militaristic emotions and sentiments in the Israeli society. I think it’s a criminal role that the Israeli media as a whole is playing, really except for Ha’aretz – not because I work for Ha’aretz, but Ha’aretz is really the only sane voice around.
Why do you think the rest of the media “recruited itself” to supporting the occupation?
No censorship – no governmental one, no military one, almost nothing, no pressures of that kind. It’s only about trying to please the readers, it’s only about commercial factors – commercial considerations. To please the reader, not to bother him, not to frustrate him, not to make him furious. And this is the most dangerous kind of bias, because there is no resistance against it – it is voluntary, it is not imposed on anyone, everyone is happy. The government is happy, the readers are happy, the publishers are happy, everyone is happy about it, and so there will be no resistance.
Ha’aretz has significant influence outside of Israel. Is it influential within Israel too?
Traditionally, yes. Ha’aretz was always the most influential newspaper in Israel, because the elite reads it and it traditionally had an influence not only on politicians and the economic elite, but also on other media. I think this influence has decreased in a way, but it’s still there – Ha’aretz still plays a role, it’s not being marginalised, not at all. So the influence of Ha’aretz is much wider than its circulation in Israel. And also the fact that it’s being read all over the world through the website, gives Ha’aretz a special position also within Israel, because people are aware that everyone in the world who has an interest in the Middle East is reading it. This gives Ha’aretz a lot of power within Israel, because they understand that it has influence outside. So from this point of view, Ha’aretz still has its influence – but let’s not exaggerate about it.
Dealing with ‘48
I’ve noticed a shift in your own writings, which seem to have become increasingly radical in their criticism. I’m thinking in particular of a recent column in which you argued that “[d]efining Israel as a Jewish state condemns us to living in a racist state”, and urged people to “recognize the racist nature of the state”. Has there been a shift in your writings, do you think, and if so, what’s behind it?
It’s not a shift, it’s a process. My views became more and more radical throughout the years, in contrast to the opposite stream of the entire society – the more Israel becomes nationalistic, the more the government becomes violent and aggressive, like in ‘Cast Lead’, like in the Second Lebanese War, like with the flotilla, all those developments put me in a much more radical position, obviously, because there is much more to protest against. So yes, I am becoming more and more radical, but you can’t put a finger to say one day I became a radical. It’s an ongoing process.
Would you accept the label ‘anti-Zionist’ to characterise your views?
It depends what is ‘Zionism’. Because Zionism is a very fluid concept – who can define what is Zionism? If Zionism means the right of the Jews to have a state, I am a Zionist. If Zionism means occupation, I’m an anti-Zionist. So I never know how to answer this question. If Zionism means to have a Jewish state at the expense of being a democratic state, then I am anti-Zionist, because I truly believe those two definitions are contradictory – ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’. For me, Israel should be a democratic state.
So would it be right to say that you support a state for Jews, but not a ‘Jewish state’ in the sense of a state that artificially maintains a Jewish majority?
Absolutely. It should be a state for Jews that will be a just state, a democratic state, and if there will be a Palestinian majority, there will be a Palestinian majority. The idea is that Jews have to have their place, but it can’t be exclusively theirs, because this land is not exclusively theirs.
This brings us nicely to the ‘liberal Zionists’, of whom you’ve been very critical. You have written that “[a] left wing unwilling to dare to deal with 1948 is not a genuine left wing”. Firstly, in terms of the Palestinian refugees – do you have a view about whether they should be permitted to return?
First of all, something must be very clear – the problem must be solved. And as long as their problem will not be solved, nothing will be solved. Those hundreds of thousands of refugees cannot continue, generation after generation, to live in their conditions. They have rights. Now on the other hand, you can’t, and you don’t want, to solve the problem and to create a new problem. Full return means creating new refugees. The place I live in Tel Aviv belonged to a Palestinian village. If the owners of this village will come back, I will have to go somewhere else. All Israel is originally Palestinian – if not its villages then its land, its fields… almost all of it belonged to the Palestinians. So if you do a total return, you create a new problem. And also there are very few precedents in history in which everyone was allowed to return to his original home decades after the war. But it must be solved.
I think there could be a solution, but it requires Israel to have good will – which it doesn’t have. It would involve, first of all, Israel recognising its moral responsibility. That’s the first condition. It’s about time for Israel to take accountability for what happened in ’48 and realise and recognise that there was a kind of ethnic cleansing, and expelling 650,000 people from their lands was not inevitable and was criminal. I think that taking responsibility will be the first step. Second step, Israel has to participate in an international project of rehabilitating the refugees – some of them in the places where they live. The third stage, obviously, is full return to the Palestinian state, if there will be a Palestinian state. And the last stage should be a symbolic, limited return also into Israel. It goes without saying, Israel has absorbed within the last few years one million Russians, and half of them were not Jewish. Why can we absorb half a million non-Jewish Russians and not absorb a few hundred or tens of thousands of Palestinians, who belong to this place, whose families are living in Israel? So that’s the way I see it.
Do you have a preference – two-states against one state? And if you prefer a two-state settlement, what is that preference based on? For example, my ideal outcome would be a bi-national or one-state solution, but I think that for now the most just solution that can be achieved is a two-state settlement. So if you have a preference for a two-state settlement, is that because you think it’s the most just settlement, period, or merely the most just settlement that can realistically be achieved in the foreseeable future?
First of all, I totally agree with the way you phrased it, I couldn’t phrase it better. The ideal, the utopia? One state for Palestinians and Jews, with equal rights, a real democracy, with real equality between the two peoples. The problem is that I don’t see it happening now, and I’m very afraid that a one-state would become an apartheid state. The two communities are very – there is a big gap between them. We have to realise that the Jewish community in Israel is more developed today, more rich, and to immediately mix both societies will create a lot of friction. There is also a lot of bad blood between the two communities. I don’t see it working, and for sure I don’t see it working in equal terms. So the only other solution left is the two-state solution. The problem is that it’s starting to become too late for this, because to evacuate half a million settlers – who will do it? No one. So I’m quite desperate. And the other solution, which I think will be the most probable, will be all kinds of artificial solutions - of half a Palestinian state, on half the land…this will not last, and this will not solve anything.
‘Liberal Zionism’
I’ve just finished reading Yitzhak Laor’s ‘Myths of Liberal Zionism’, which is obviously very critical of the ‘Zionist Left’. What do you think of the politics of people like David Grossman, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and Meretz? Do they offer a sufficiently radical critique of Israeli policy, and if not, why is their critique so compromised?
First of all, I had Oz and Yehoshua at my home for dinner a few weeks ago, so I have to be very cautious in what I say, but I am very critical about this kind of thinking. You can add [Israeli President] Shimon Peres and Labor to this. This is the typical Israeli hypocrisy, and I in many ways appreciate [Israel’s far-right Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman more than Shimon Peres, because with Lieberman, at least, what you see is what you get. It’s very clear what he stands for. With people like Shimon Peres or Meretz – and I don’t say they are identical – or Oz and Yehoshua and Grossman, they want to eat the cake and leave it complete, as we say in Hebrew. This doesn’t work.
I think they lack courage, some of them. Others, like Shimon Peres, are hypocrites who talk about peace and do the opposite. I think that Oz and Yehoshua and Grossman, who I know very well personally, mean well. But in many ways they are still chained in the Zionistic ideology. They haven’t released themselves from the old Zionistic ideology, which basically hasn’t changed since ’48 – namely, that the Jews have the right to this land, almost the exclusive right. They are trying to find their way to be Zionistic, and to be for peace, and to be for justice. The problem is that Zionism in its present meaning, in its common meaning, is contradictory to human rights, to equality, to democracy, and they don’t recognise it. It’s too hard for them to recognise it, to realise it. And therefore their position is an impossible position, because they want everything: they want Zionism, they want democracy, they want a Jewish state, but they want also rights for the Palestinians… it’s very nice to want everything, but you have to make your choice and they are not courageous enough to make the choice.
Meretz supported Gaza massacre –
And so did Yehoshua! In the book there is an exchange between him and I. So did he.
Why did it support it? Was it public pressure? Has this had implications for the Israeli left?
Meretz lost its way a long time ago and it’s now almost a non-entity. It’s a group of three members of parliament - which is nothing - each of whom has his own interest, nothing to do with the occupation. One is dealing with gay rights, the other is dealing with economical questions, and the occupation is totally forgotten. Meretz right now is in a deep, deep crisis, and they supported ‘Cast Lead’ like they support most of what this government is doing, in a way that is shameful for Meretz. But Meretz is anyhow very, very marginal – three members of parliament – and they are losing all their worlds, because they will never become accepted by the right-wingers, and they lose the left-wingers, because what are they? To support ‘Cast Lead’, I can vote Likud – what do I need Meretz for?
Occupation
Let’s turn to the occupation directly. Why does Israel choose to occupy the Palestinians? Is the occupation driven by economic interests, or ideology, or…?
I don’t think it’s the economy, because economically I can also draw you a picture in which peace will bring much more prosperity to Israel. The settlement project is one of the most expensive projects that Israel has invested in, so I don’t see… it’s not economical, for sure not.
But even if overall ending the occupation would be a net benefit for the Israeli economy, are there not certain powerful economic interests for whose benefit the occupation is maintained?
I don’t think so. It’s for sure not a major consideration. The occupation is a continuation of the same ideology that established the state - the more, the better; the bigger, the better… it’s still this old ideology that we have to get ‘dunam after dunam’, as we say in Hebrew. It’s about real estate, it’s about having as much real estate as possible. It’s about believing that the bigger we will be the stronger we will be, which is not the case – on the contrary, the bigger we become the weaker we become. But this ideology never changed since ’48.
I recently interviewed Norman Finkelstein and he suggested that it has got to the point where – and he analogised it in this respect to the occupation of Lebanon – Israel refuses to withdraw simply because it’s already there, and others are demanding that it withdraw, and it doesn’t want to withdraw under pressure. Do you think there’s any truth to this?
There is for sure a lot of truth in the fact that Israelis don’t care so much about the territories, but their life is so good, and their interest in and knowledge about the occupied territories is so little, that what reason do they have to go through the hassle of withdrawal? Why to bother? And in a situation in which the majority of the society is indifferent, the only meaningful active group in the society are the settlers, so they can dictate, because all the rest couldn’t care less, and there is not a real, meaningful movement in favour of evacuating the settlements.
Is there any elite opposition to occupation within Israel?
No. I wrote once that the present Knesset is the first in which out of 120 MKs, there is not one single Jewish member for whom fighting against the occupation is his first ticket. None. There are some supporters of anti-occupation movements, but for none of them is opposition to the occupation his first, main flag. This tells everything.
Gaza
Turning to Gaza – in your book you describe ‘Cast Lead’ as “a war that was no war”, a “wild onslaught upon the most helpless population in the world”. Can you talk a bit about how the massacre was perceived in Israel – both at a popular level and by political and media commentators?
First of all, it’s the same. The way it was described in the media is the way that the people see it – that’s the big influence of the media in Israel. So first, there was the stage in which there were the Qassams – they were described in an exaggerated way. Then came the demand from the media and the people to ‘do something’. Then came the stage of demonising Gaza – reports like ‘arsenal of Iranian weapons are being smuggled in through the tunnels!’, which turned out to be a big lie, because in Gaza there is hardly weapons, except for the primitive Qassams. But it was all about demonising them and exaggerating their power. And then came the demand to ‘do something and go to war’ – calling it a ‘war’, which is also a lie. This was not a ‘war’, because war is usually between two armies, with some kind of resistance – there was hardly resistance, it was just a brutal attack on a civilian population. There was no fighting. Out of the very few Israeli soldiers who were killed in Cast Lead, many of them were killed by friendly fire. So this is not a war. But that’s the way it was perceived.
What do you think are the objectives behind Israeli policy towards Gaza – the siege and the periodic military attacks? How do ‘security concerns’ figure?
I think security is one factor – I don’t want to say it’s not. The problem is that when Gaza is peaceful, nobody in Israel cares about Gaza. No doubt the government cannot tolerate attacks on the southern part of Israel – no government in the world would have tolerated it. It couldn’t go on, Qassams every second day and the state lives with it? This is out of the question. The problem is that nobody asks why they launched the Qassams. I guess that if Gaza would have been free, there would have been no Qassams. But Gaza is not free, and the occupation didn’t end in Gaza – it just changed its form. I think that the Israeli government would like to push Gaza into Egyptian hands - which will not take place because Egypt rejects this - and also to separate Gaza and the West Bank, weakening the Palestinians. In this, they succeeded. And Palestinians also carry some responsibility for this – the fact that they can’t get united is fatal from their point of view. So altogether it’s about doing anything possible to depress Gaza, to put it under walls and fences, and not to hear from it any more.
There were a couple of points in your book where it seemed like you withdrew into the standard ‘liberal Zionist’ criticism, of the kind we discussed already. For example (as pointed out by Asa Winstanley in his review) in your column immediately after the launch of ‘Cast Lead’, you were very critical obviously – probably the most critical in the Israeli press – but you still described it as an ‘overreaction’, which seemed to me to play into the idea that it was somehow a ‘response’ to Palestinian violence, rather than an Israeli aggression. Do you still stand by that?
It’s a very good question, if I may say so. One should always read those articles in the context of the time they were published. It’s not very easy to criticise a war when it just starts. There were many Israelis who were criticising the first Lebanese war, the second Lebanese war, and ‘Cast Lead’, but only after they ended or after they developed into fiascos. My first article appeared – Saturday it broke, Saturday afternoon I wrote it, Sunday it appeared. In this context, I had to be a little bit more cautious in order to reach the Israeli attention. And I had to take into account also the way that Israelis see it. Now I can say the same today, and I just said it, that the Qassams are not something that the government can just ignore – no way, no government in the world. The only thing is that I think Israel should ask why the Qassams are launched. By and large, for sure today I would write it a little differently – but just slightly different.
What about the fact that prior to the invasion, Hamas had adhered to a ceasefire and offered to renew it?
Absolutely, but this I wrote at once. I wrote that if it’s about a ceasefire, we can reach it without a war, and we don’t need a war to reach a ceasefire, no doubt about this. And I can tell you that from war to war, I can assure you one thing: the next war, I’ll be even more radical. Because as an Israeli, I always leave some room for doubt – maybe, maybe, this time it will go differently – but it’s not the case. Don’t forget that when it started, I wasn’t sure it was going to be what it became – it could have been a one-day operation, we didn’t know what was going on.
Prospects for peace
Now, it was recently announced that a new round of ‘peace talks’ will start in September. Do you have any optimism about what they might achieve? [Note: this interview was conducted on August 20, before the ‘peace talks’ had begun]
None whatsoever. It’s another scene in this ongoing masquerade, another photo opportunity. But it’s not only about being sceptical about the chances of something good coming out of it – we have to remember that it can also be very dangerous, because failures of the so-called ‘peace process’ might lead to another bloodshed. We saw it in 2000, what happened after the failure of Camp David. So it’s not only about ‘let’s give them a chance, maybe something will come out of it’. Nothing will come out of it, and it might also lead to another bloodshed.
Do you see much change in how the Obama administration has approached the conflict, compared to its predecessors?
I’d be more than happy to hear any sign of change. There’s been nothing. When he was elected and gave that speech in Chicago, I had tears in my eyes. I really hoped and believed that it was going to be a new atmosphere, a new world and a new Middle East. Nothing, but nothing, out of this. It’s a deep, deep disappointment.
Do you think, honestly, that Israel will ever dismantle the settlements? Is that realistic? It would obviously be a huge trauma for Israeli society – the settlers have grown to become a substantial part of the population. Is it going to happen?
First of all, you have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles. I don’t see it happening without a miracle, but things like this have happened in history. France pulled out one million settlers from Algeria, not so many years ago. I don’t say it’s the same – it’s not the same, because Algeria was overseas and this is in our backyard, so it’s not so simple. With all my willingness to be optimistic, I don’t see it happening, but so many things in very recent history were unexpected and happened – look what happened to Soviet Russia, look what happened to the wall in Berlin, look what happened to the apartheid regime. They were all unexpected developments. Realistically, rationally, I don’t see it happening.
What should supporters of justice in Palestine in the UK and the US be doing?
First of all, raise your voice and try to put pressure on your governments to stop supporting the occupation. Because your governments in Europe are supporting the occupation, are supporting the siege of Gaza, are supporting the boycott of Hamas, are supporting Israel as an occupier. This should come to an end. As for BDS: here I have to say two things. First of all, as an Israeli who does not boycott Israel, I can’t call on others to boycott Israel – I don’t do it myself. Secondly, boycott is a legitimate weapon – Israel is doing a lot of boycotting: Gaza, Hamas, Iran… Israel is a big boycotter. It was effective in a few examples in history, like South Africa. No doubt that Israel deserves boycott. But will it be effective in this case? I’m not sure. The risk is that it might also provoke Israeli society into becoming even more nationalistic, and more closed to the world. Here, I don’t have an answer – will it have a positive effect or not? I understand the sentiment to punish Israel, but boycott cannot be a goal. It is just a means. And as a means, I’m not sure it will be effective, I really don’t know. I wish it will be, but I’m not sure.
If activists in the US succeeded in changing American foreign policy significantly, could Israel continue the occupation without US support?
No way. Israel cannot carry on anything, including its existence, without the support of the United States. Israel was never so isolated and never so dependent on the United States as now. So the key is in Washington, no doubt. The problem is that I don’t see… I see a change in Washington, but a very minor one.
When I told my dad [an Israeli citizen, living in Israel] that I was interviewing you, he laughed. When I asked why, he said that you were hated in Israel. How isolated do you think you are within Israeli society?
I think your father’s reaction is a typical one. For sure my voice is a very marginal voice, but I still have the privilege to be heard – I’m on TV a lot, mainstream TV, and I’m writing my columns in total freedom in Ha’aretz, which is a mainstream newspaper. And yes, I’m quite lonely and my voice is quite a lonely voice, but you know history is full of cases in which the majorities were wrong and the minorities were right.
Final question: do you find it difficult to keep carrying on, isolated, while remaining as critical as you are?
No. It’s not always very pleasant, but do I have a choice? I can’t change my mind, I will not stop raising my voice as long as I can raise my voice, and as long as I have the platforms to raise my voice – and altogether I still, as I said, feel very free to do so. With all the price that I’m paying, it’s a relatively minor price.
Gideon Levy is a prominent Israeli journalist and member of the Ha’aretz editorial board. His most recent book is The Punishment of Gaza, published by Verso.
About this article
Published on 08 September, 2010
By Gideon Levy, Jamie Stern-Weiner
Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic? For three decades, the writer and journalist Gideon Levy has been a lone voice, telling his readers the truth about what goes on in the Occupied Territories.
Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist and author
Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most heroic. This “good Tel Aviv boy” – a sober, serious child of the Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defence Force, been threatened with being “beaten to a pulp” on the country’s streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be tightly monitored as “a security risk.” This is because he has done something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda. “My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many people want him silenced.
The story of Gideon Levy – and the attempt to deride, suppress or deny his words – is the story of Israel distilled. If he loses, Israel itself is lost.
I meet him in a hotel bar in Scotland, as part of his European tour to promote his new book, ‘The Punishment of Gaza’. The 57 year-old looks like an Eastern European intellectual on a day off – tall and broad and dressed in black, speaking accented English in a lyrical baritone. He seems so at home in the world of book festivals and black coffee that it is hard, at first, to picture him on the last occasion he was in Gaza – in November, 2006, before the Israeli government changed the law to stop him going.
He reported that day on a killing, another of the hundreds he has documented over the years. As twenty little children pulled up in their school bus at the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, their 20 year-old teacher, Najawa Khalif, waved to them – and an Israel shell hit her and she was blasted to pieces in front of them. He arrived a day later, to find the shaking children drawing pictures of the chunks of her corpse. The children were “astonished to see a Jew without weapons. All they had ever seen were soldiers and settlers.”
“My biggest struggle,” he says, “is to rehumanize the Palestinians. There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us? So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard.”
So he describes the lives of ordinary Palestinians like Najawa and her pupils in the pages of Ha’aretz, Israel’s establishment newspaper. The tales read like Chekovian short stories of trapped people, in which nothing happens, and everything happens, and the only escape is death. One article was entitled “The last meal of the Wahbas family.” He wrote: “They’d all sat down to have lunch at home: the mother Fatma, three months pregnant; her daughter Farah, two; her son Khaled, one; Fatma’s brother, Dr Zakariya Ahmed; his daughter in law Shayma, nine months pregnant; and the seventy-eight year old grandmother. A Wahba family gathering in Khan Yunis in honour of Dr Ahmed, who’d arrived home six days earlier from Saudi Arabia. A big boom is heard outside. Fatma hurriedly scoops up the littlest one and tries to escape to an inner room, but another boom follows immediately. This time is a direct hit.”
In small biographical details, he recovers their humanity from the blankness of an ever-growing death toll. The Wahbas had tried for years to have a child before she finally became pregnant at the age of 36. The grandmother tried to lift little Khaled off the floor: that’s when she realised her son and daughter were dead.
Levy uses a simple technique. He asks his fellow Israelis: how would we feel, if this was done to us by a vastly superior military power? Once, in Jenin, his car was stuck behind an ambulance at a checkpoint for an hour. He saw there was a sick woman in the back and asked the driver what was going on, and he was told the ambulances were always made to wait this long. Furious, he asked the Israeli soldiers how they would feel if it was their mother in the ambulance – and they looked bemused at first, then angry, pointing their guns at him and telling him to shut up.
“I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what’s going on fifteen minutes away from their homes,” he says. “The brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is] almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people so full of ignorance and cruelty.” He gives an example. During Operation Cast Lead, the Israel bombing of blockaded Gaza in 2008-9, “a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and it on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.”
At times, the occupation seems to him less tragic than absurd. In 2009, Spain’s most famous clown, Ivan Prado, agreed to attend a clowning festival on Ramallah in the West Bank. He was detained at the airport in Israel, and then deported “for security reasons.” Levy leans forward and asks: “Was the clown considering transferring Spain’s vast stockpiles of laughter to hostile elements? Joke bombs to the jihadists? A devastating punch line to Hamas?”
Yet the absurdity nearly killed him. In the summer of 2003, he was travelling in a clearly marked Israeli taxi on the West Bank. He explains: “At a certain stage the army stopped us and asked what we were doing there. We showed them our papers, which were all in order. They sent us up a road – and when we went onto this road, they shot us. They directed their fire to the centre of the front window. Straight at the head. No shooting in the air, no megaphone calling to stop, no shooting at the wheels. Shoot to kill immediately. If it hadn’t been bullet-proof, I wouldn’t be here now. I don’t think they knew who we were. They shot us like they would shoot anyone else. They were trigger-happy, as they always are. It was like having a cigarette. They didn’t shoot just one bullet. The whole car was full of bullets. Do they know who they are going to kill? No. They don’t know and don’t care.”
He shakes his head with a hardened bewilderment. “They shoot at the Palestinians like this on a daily basis. You have only heard about this because, for once, they shot at an Israeli.”
I “Who lived in this house? Where is he now?”
How did Gideon Levy become so different to his countrymen? Why does he offer empathy to the Palestinians while so many others offer only bullets and bombs? At first, he was just like them: his argument with other Israelis is an argument with his younger self. He was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv and as a young man “I was totally nationalistic, like everyone else. I thought – we are the best, and the Arabs just want to kill. I didn’t question.”
He was fourteen during the Six Day War, and soon after his parents took him to see the newly conquered Occupied Territories. “We were so proud going to see Rachel’s Tomb [in Bethlehem] and we just didn’t see the Palestinians. We looked right through them, like they were invisible,” he says. “It had always been like that. We were passing as children so many ruins [of Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed in 1948]. We never asked: ‘Who lived in this house? Where is he now? He must be alive. He must be somewhere.’ It was part of the landscape, like a tree, like a river.” Long into his twenties, “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.’”
Levy says he became different due to “an accident.” He carried out his military service with Israeli Army Radio and then continued working as a journalist, “so I started going to the Occupied Territories a lot, which most Israelis don’t do. And after a while, gradually, I came to see them as they really are.”
But can that be all? Plenty of Israelis go to the territories – not least the occupying troops and settlers – without recoiling. “I think it was also – you see, my parents were refugees. I saw what it had done to them. So I suppose? I saw these people and thought of my parents.” Levy’s father was a German Jewish lawyer from the Sudetenland. At the age of 26 – in 1939, as it was becoming inescapably clear the Nazis were determined to stage a genocide in Europe – he went with his parents to the railway station in Prague, and they waved him goodbye. “He never saw them or heard from them again,” Levy says. “He never found out what happened to them. If he had not left, he would not have lived.” For six months he lived on a boat filled with refugees, being turned away from port after port, until finally they made it to British Mandate Palestine, as it then was.
“My father was traumatised for his whole life,” he says. “He never really settled in Israel. He never really learned to speak anything but broken Hebrew. He came to Israel with his PhD and he had to make his living, so he started to work in a bakery and to sell cakes from door to door on his bicycles. It must have been a terrible humiliation to be a PhD in law and be knocking on doors offering cakes. He refused to learn to be a lawyer again. He became a minor clerk. I think this is what smashed him, y’know? He lived here sixty years, he had his family, had his happiness but he was really a stranger. A foreigner, in his own country? He was always outraged by things, small things. He couldn’t understand how people would dare to phone between two and four in the afternoon. It horrified him. He never understood what is the concept of overdraft in the bank. Every Israeli has an overdraft, but if he heard somebody was one pound overdrawn, he was horrified.”
His father “never” talked about home. “Any time I tried to encourage him to talk about it, he would close down. He never went back. There as nothing [to go back to], the whole village was destroyed. He left a whole life there. He left a fiancé, a career, everything. I am very sorry I didn’t push him harder to talk because I was young, so I didn’t have much interest. That’s the problem. When we are curious about our parents, they are gone.”
Levy’s father never saw any parallels between the fact he was turned into a refugee, and the 800,000 Palestinians who were turned into refugees by the creation of the state of Israel. “Never! People didn’t think like that. We never discussed it, ever.” Yet in the territories, Levy began to see flickers of his father everywhere – in the broken men and women never able to settle, dreaming forever of going home.
Then, slowly, Levy began to realize their tragedy seeped deeper still into his own life – into the ground beneath his feet and the very bricks of the Israeli town where he lives, Sheikh Munis. It is built on the wreckage of “one of the 416 Palestinian villages Israel wiped off the face of the earth in 1948,” he says. “The swimming pool where I swim every morning was the irrigation grove they used to water the village’s groves. My house stands on one of the groves. The land was ‘redeemed’ by force, its 2,230 inhabitants were surrounded and threatened. They fled, never to return. Somewhere, perhaps in a refugee camp in terrible poverty, lives the family of the farmer who plowed the land where my house now stands.” He adds that it is “stupid and wrong” to compare it to the Holocaust, but says that man is a traumatized refugee just as surely as Levy’s father – and even now, if he ended up in the territories, he and his children and grandchildren live under blockade, or violent military occupation.
The historian Isaac Deutscher once offered an analogy for the creation of the state of Israel. A Jewish man jumps from a burning building, and he lands on a Palestinian, horribly injuring him. Can the jumping man be blamed? Levy’s father really was running for his life: it was Palestine, or a concentration camp. Yet Levy says that the analogy is imperfect – because now the jumping man is still, sixty years later, smashing the head of the man he landed on against the ground, and beating up his children and grandchildren too. “1948 is still here. 1948 is still in the refugee camps. 1948 is still calling for a solution,” he says. “Israel is doing the very same thing now? dehumanising the Palestinians where it can, and ethnic cleansing wherever it’s possible. 1948 is not over. Not by a long way.”
II The scam of “peace talks”
Levy looks out across the hotel bar where we are sitting and across the Middle East, as if the dry sands of the Negev desert were washing towards us. Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a string of propaganda myths, he says, and perhaps the most basic is the belief that Israel is a democracy. “Today we have three kinds of people living under Israeli rule,” he explains. “We have Jewish Israelis, who have full democracy and have full civil rights. We have the Israeli Arabs, who have Israeli citizenship but are severely discriminated against. And we have the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who live without any civil rights, and without any human rights. Is that a democracy?”
He sits back and asks in a low tone, as if talking about a terminally ill friend: “How can you say it is a democracy when, in sixty two years, there was not one single Arab village established? I don’t have to tell you how many Jewish towns and villages were established. Not one Arab village. How can you say it’s a democracy when research has shown repeatedly that Jews and Arabs get different punishments for the same crime? How can you say it’s a democracy when a Palestinian student can hardly rent an apartment in Tel Aviv, because when they hear his accent or his name almost nobody will rent to him? How can you say Israel is a democracy when? Jerusalem invests 577 shekels a year in a pupil in [Palestinian] East Jerusalem and 2372 shekels a year in a pupil from [Jewish] West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity!.. Every part of our society is racist.”
“I want to be proud of my country,” he says. “I am an Israeli patriot. I want us to do the right thing.” So this requires him to point out that Palestinian violence is – in truth – much more limited than Israeli violence, and usually a reaction to it. “The first twenty years of the occupation passed quietly, and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise,” where Palestinian land is seized by Jewish religious fundamentalists who claim it was given to them by God. Only then – after a long period of theft, and after their attempts at peaceful resistance were met with brutal violence - did the Palestinians become violent themselves. “What would happen if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams [the rockets shot at Southern Israel, including civilian towns]? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda. Nobody would give any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they had not behaved violently.”
He unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Israeli civilians, but adds: “The Qassams have a context. They are almost always fired after an IDF assassination operation, and there have been many of these.” Yet the Israeli attitude is that “we are allowed to bomb anything we want but they are not allowed to launch Qassams.” It is a view summarised by Haim Ramon, the justice minister at time of Second Lebanon War: “We are allowed to destroy everything.”
Even the terms we use to discuss Operation Cast Lead are wrong, Levy argues. “That wasn’t a war. It was a brutal assault on a helpless, imprisoned population. You can call a match between Mike Tyson and a 5 year old child boxing, but the proportions, oh, the proportions.” Israel “frequently targeted medical crews, [and] shelled a UN-run school that served as a shelter for residents, who bled to death over days as the IDF prevented their evacuation by shooting and shelling? A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organisation. They say as a justification that Hamas hides among the civilian population. As if the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv is not located in the heart of a civilian population! As if there are places in Gaza that are not in the heart of a civilian population!”
He appeals to anybody who is sincerely concerned about Israel’s safety and security to join him in telling Israelis the truth in plain language. “A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict’s drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. Today, only those who speak up against Israel’s policies – who denounce the occupation, the blockade, and the war – are the nation’s true friends.” The people who defend Israel’s current course are “betraying the country” by encouraging it on “the path to disaster. A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed, and his father humiliated will not easily forgive.”
These supposed ‘friends of Israel’ are in practice friends of Islamic fundamentalism, he believes. “Why do they have to give the fundamentalists more excuses, more fury, more opportunities, more recruits? Look at Gaza. Gaza was totally secular not long ago. Now you can hardly get alcohol today in Gaza, after all the brutality. Religious fundamentalism is always the language people turn to in despair, if everything else fails. If Gaza had been a free society it would not have become like this. We gave them recruits.”
Levy believes the greatest myth – the one hanging over the Middle East like perfume sprayed onto a corpse – is the idea of the current ‘peace talks’ led by the United States. There was a time when he too believed in them. At the height of the Oslo talks in the 1990s, when Yitzhak Rabin negotiated with Yassir Arafat, “at the end of a visit I turned and, in a gesture straight out of the movies, waved Gaza farewell. Goodbye occupied Gaza, farewell! We are never to meet again, at least not in your occupied state. How foolish!”
Now, he says, he is convinced it was “a scam” from the start, doomed to fail. How does he know? “There is a very simple litmus test for any peace talks. A necessity for peace is for Israel to dismantle settlements in the West Bank. So if you are going to dismantle settlements soon, you’d stop building more now, right? They carried on building them all through Oslo. And today, Netanyahu is refusing to freeze construction, the barest of the bare minimum. It tells you all you need.”
He says Netanyahu has – like the supposedly more left-wing alternatives, Ehud Barak and Tzipip Livni – always opposed real peace talks, and even privately bragged about destroying the Oslo process. In 1997, during his first term as Israeli leader, he insisted he would only continue with the talks if a clause was added saying Israel would not have to withdraw from undefined “military locations” – and he was later caught on tape boasting: “Why is that important? Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo accords.” If he bragged about “stopping” the last peace process, why would he want this one to succeed? Levy adds: “And how can you make peace with only half the Palestinian population? How can you leave out Hamas and Gaza?”
These fake peace talks are worse than no talks at all, Levy believes. “If there are negotiations, there won’t be international pressure. Quiet, we’re in discussions, settlement can go on uninterrupted. That is why futile negotiations are dangerous negotiations. Under the cover of such talks, the chances for peace will grow even dimmer? The clear subtext is Netanyahu’s desire to get American support for bombing Iran. To do that, he thinks he needs to at least pay lip-service to Obama’s requests for talks. That’s why he’s doing this.”
After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”
III Waving Israeli flags made in China
According to the opinion polls, most Israelis support a two-state solution – yet they elect governments that expand the settlements and so make a two-state solution impossible. “You would need a psychiatrist to explain this contradiction,” Levy says. “Do they expect two states to fall from the sky? Today, the Israelis have no reason to make any changes,” he continues. “Life in Israel is wonderful. You can sit in Tel Aviv and have a great life. Nobody talks about the occupation. So why would they bother [to change]? The majority of Israelis think about the next vacation and the next jeep and all the rest doesn’t interest them any more.” They are drenched in history, and yet oblivious to it.
In Israel, the nation’s “town square has been empty for years. If there were no significant protests during Operation Cast Lead, then there is no left to speak of. The only group campaigning for anything other than their personal whims are the settlers, who are very active.” So how can change happen? He says he is “very pessimistic”, and the most likely future is a society turning to ever-more naked “apartheid.” With a shake of the head, he says: “We had now two wars, the flotilla – it doesn’t seem that Israel has learned any lesson, and it doesn’t seem that Israel is paying any price. The Israelis don’t pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative.”
It sounds like he is making the case for boycotting Israel, but his position is more complex. “Firstly, the Israeli opposition to the boycott is incredibly hypocritical. Israel itself is one of the world’s most prolific boycotters. Not only does it boycott, it preaches to others, at times even forces others, to follow in tow. Israel has imposed a cultural, academic, political, economic and military boycott on the territories. The most brutal, naked boycott is, of course, the siege on Gaza and the boycott of Hamas. At Israel's behest, nearly all Western countries signed onto the boycott with inexplicable alacrity. This is not just a siege that has left Gaza in a state of shortage for three years. It's a series of cultural, academic, humanitarian and economic boycotts. Israel is also urging the world to boycott Iran. So Israelis cannot complain if this is used against them.”
He shifts in his seat. “But I do not boycott Israel. I could have done it, I could have left Israel. But I don’t intend to leave Israel. Never. I can’t call on others to do what I will not do? There is also the question of whether it will work. I am not sure Israelis would make the connection. Look at the terror that happened in 2002 and 2003: life in Israel was really horrifying, the exploding buses, the suicide-bombers. But no Israeli made the connection between the occupation and the terror. For them, the terror was just the ‘proof’ that the Palestinians are monsters, that they were born to kill, that they are not human beings and that’s it. And if you just dare to make the connection, people will tell you ‘you justify terror ’ and you are a traitor. I suspect it would be the same with sanctions. The condemnation after Cast Lead and the flotilla only made Israel more nationalistic. If [a boycott was] seen as the judgement of the world they would be effective. But Israelis are more likely to take them as ‘proof’ the world is anti-Semitic and will always hate us.”
He believes only one kind of pressure would bring Israel back to sanity and safety: “The day the president of the United States decides to put an end to the occupation, it will cease. Because Israel was never so dependent on the United States as it is now. Never. Not only economically, not only militarily but above all politically. Israel is totally isolated today, except for America.” He was initially hopeful that Barack Obama would do this – he recalls having tears in his eyes as he delivered his victory speech in Grant Park – but he says he has only promoted “tiny steps, almost nothing, when big steps are needed.” It isn’t only bad for Israel – it is bad for America. “The occupation is the best excuse for many worldwide terror organisations. It’s not always genuine but they use it. Why do you let them use it? Why give them this fury? Why not you solve it once and for all when the, when the solution is so simple?”
For progress, “the right-wing American Jews who become orgiastic whenever Israel kills and destroys” would have to be exposed as “Israel’s enemies”, condemning the country they supposedly love to eternal war. “It is the right-wing American Jews who write the most disgusting letters. They say I am Hitler’s grandson, that they pray my children get cancer? It is because I touch a nerve with them. There is something there.” These right-wingers claim to be opposed to Iran, but Levy points out they vehemently oppose the two available steps that would immediately isolate Iran and strip Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh of his best propaganda-excuses: “peace with Syria and peace with the Palestinians, both of which are on offer, and both of which are rejected by Israel. They are the best way to undermine Iran.”
He refuses to cede Israel to people “who wave their Israeli flags made in China and dream of a Knesset cleansed of Arabs and an Israel with no [human rights organisation] B’Tselem.” He looks angry, indignant. “I will never leave. It’s my place on earth. It’s my language, it’s my culture. Even the criticism that I carry and the shame that I carry come from my deep belonging to the place. I will leave only if I be forced to leave. They would have to tear me out.”
IV A whistle in the dark
Does he think this is a real possibility – that his freedom could be taken from him, in Israel itself? “Oh, very easily,” he says. “It’s already taken from me by banning me from going to Gaza, and this is just a start. I have great freedom to write and to appear on television in Israel, and I have a very good life, but I don’t take my freedom for granted, not at all. If this current extreme nationalist atmosphere continues in Israel in one, two, three years time?” He sighs. “There may be new restrictions, Ha’aretz may close down – God forbid – I don’t take anything for granted. I will not be surprised if Israeli Palestinian parties are criminalized at the next election, for example. Already they are going after the NGOs [Non-Government Organizations that campaign for Palestinian rights]. There is already a majority in the opinion polls who want to punish people who expose wrong-doing by the military and want to restrict the human rights groups.”
There is also the danger of a freelance attack. Last year, a man with a large dog strutted up to Levy near his home and announced: “I have wanted to beat you to a pulp for a long time.” Levy only narrowly escaped, and the man was never caught. He says now: “I am scared but I don’t live on the fear. But to tell you that my night sleep is as yours?I’m not sure. Any noise, my first association is ‘maybe now, it’s coming’. But there was never any concrete case in which I really thought ‘here it comes’. But I know it might come.”
Has he ever considered not speaking the truth, and diluting his statements? He laughs – and for the only time in our interview, his eloquent torrents of words begin to sputter. “I wish I could! No way I could. I mean, this is not an option at all. Really, I can’t. How can I? No way. I feel lonely but my private, er, surrounding is supportive, part of it at least. And there are still Israelis who appreciate what I do. If you walk with me in the streets of Tel Aviv you will see all kinds of reactions but also very positive reactions. It is hard but I mean it’s?it’s?what other choice do I have?”
He says his private life is supportive “in part”. What’s the part that isn’t? For the past few years, he says, he has dated non-Israeli women – “I couldn’t be with a nationalistic person who said those things about the Palestinians” – but his two sons don’t read anything he writes, “and they have different politics from me. I think it was difficult for them, quite difficult.” Are they right-wingers? “No, no, no, nothing like that. As they get older, they are coming to my views more. But they don’t read my work. No,” he says, looking down, “they don’t read it.”
The long history of the Jewish people has a recurring beat – every few centuries, a brave Jewish figure stands up to warn his people they are have ended up on an immoral or foolish path that can only end in catastrophe, and implores them to change course. The first prophet, Amos, warned that the Kingdom of Israel would be destroyed because the Jewish people had forgotten the need for justice and generosity – and he was shunned for it. Baruch Spinoza saw beyond the Jewish fundamentalism of his day to a materialist universe that could be explained scientifically – and he was excommunicated, even as he cleared the path for the great Jewish geniuses to come. Could Levy, in time, be seen as a Jewish prophet in the unlikely wilderness of a Jewish state, calling his people back to a moral path?
He nods faintly, and smiles. “Noam Chomsky once wrote to me that I was like the early Jewish prophets. It was the greatest compliment anyone has ever paid me. But? well? My opponents would say it’s a long tradition of self-hating Jews. But I don’t take that seriously. For sure, I feel that I belong to a tradition of self-criticism. I deeply believe in self-criticism.” But it leaves him in bewildering situations: “Many times I am standing among Palestinian demonstrators, my back to the Palestinians, my face to the Israeli soldiers, and they were shooting in our direction. They are my people, and they are my army. The people I’m standing among are supposed to be the enemy. It is?” He shakes his head. There must be times, I say, when you ask: what’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a state like this?
But then, as if it has been nagging at him, he returns abruptly to an earlier question. “I am very pessimistic, sure. Outside pressure can be effective if it’s an American one but I don’t see it happening. Other pressure from other parts of the world might be not effective. The Israeli society will not change on its own, and the Palestinians are too weak to change it. But having said this, I must say, if we had been sitting here in the late 1980s and you had told me that the Berlin wall will fall within months, that the Soviet Union will fall within months, that parts of the regime in South Africa will fall within months, I would have laughed at you. Perhaps the only hope I have is that this occupation regime hopefully is already so rotten that maybe it will fall by itself one day. You have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles.”
In the meantime, Gideon Levy will carry on patiently documenting his country’s crimes, and trying to call his people back to a righteous path. He frowns a little – as if he is picturing Najawa Khalif blown to pieces in front of her school bus, or his own broken father – and says to me: “A whistle in the dark is still a whistle.
The Jewish Republic of Israel Swearing an oath to a Jewish state will decide its fate. It is liable to turn the country into a theocracy like Saudi Arabia.
By Gideon Levy
haaretz.com
10th October 2010
Remember this day. It's the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn't affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: "I don't care what country I live in." Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn't understand what it is about. It's another step that seriously harms Israel's image.
Prime Minister Netanyahu will prove today that he is actually Yisrael Beinteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman will prove he is really a loyal member of Yisrael Beiteinu. The Labor party will prove it is nothing more than a doormat. And Israel today will prove that it doesn't care about anything. Today the loyalty oath bill, soon the loyalty oath law. The dam will overflow today, threatening to drown the remnants of democracy until we are left perhaps with a Jewish state of a character that no one really understands, but it certainly won't be a democracy. Those demanding this loyalty oath are the ones misappropriating loyalty to the state.
At its next session, the Knesset is to debate close to 20 other anti-democratic bills. Over the weekend, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel issued a blacklist of legislation: a loyalty law for Knesset members; a loyalty law for film production; a loyalty law for non-profits; putting the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, beyond the scope of the law; a ban on calls for a boycott; and a bill for the revocation of citizenship. It's a dangerous McCarthyist dance on the part of ignorant legislators who haven't begun to understand what democracy is all about. It's dangerous even if only a portion of the bills become law, because our fate and our essence will change.
It's not hard to understand the Netanyahu-Lieberman duo. As sworn nationalists, they are not expected to understand that democracy doesn't only mean the rule of the majority, but rather first and foremost that minorities have rights. It's much harder to comprehend the complacency of the masses. Town squares should have been filled today with citizens who do not wish to live in a country where the minority is oppressed by draconian laws such as the one that forces them to swear a false oath to a Jewish state, but amazingly almost no one seems to feel affected.
For decades, we have futilely dealt with the question of who is a Jew. Now the question of what is Jewish will not go away. What is the "state of the Jewish nation"? Does it belong more to Jews in the Diaspora than to its Arab citizens? Will they decide its fate and will this be called a democracy? Will the ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta sect, which opposes the state's existence, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews who have avoided coming do whatever they want with it? What is Jewish? Jewish holidays? Kosher dietary laws? The increased grip of the religious establishment, as if there is not enough of it now to distort democracy? Swearing an oath to a Jewish state will decide its fate. It is liable to turn the country into a theocracy like Saudi Arabia.
True, for the time being, it's a matter of an empty, ridiculous slogan. There aren't three Jews who could agree what a Jewish state looks like, but history has taught us that empty slogans, too, can pave the path to hell. In the meantime, the new proposed legislation will only increase Israeli Arabs' alienation and ultimately result in the alienation of much wider segments of the public.
That's what happens when the fire is still smoldering under the rug, the fire of the basic lack of faith in the justice of our path. Only such a lack of confidence can produce such distorted proposed legislation as that which will be approved today, and clearly approval will be forthcoming. Canada doesn't need its citizens to swear an oath to the Canadian state, nor do other countries require similar acts. Only Israel. And it is being done either to provoke the Arab minority more and push them into a greater lack of loyalty so one day the time will come to finally get rid of them, or it is designed to scuttle the prospect of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. One way or another, in Basel at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the Jewish state was founded, as Theodor Herzl said, and today the unenlightened Jewish Republic of Israel will be founded.
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