Gideon Levy implores us to thwart Israel’s wanton destruction of Palestinian life

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. He’s won numerous awards for his writing on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Levy is known for insisting that being an Israeli patriot requires one to be critical of the occupation. When he said recently that he has never been more ashamed of his country, he was defending his country against what he sees as an increasing tendency toward fascism. It must be unbelievably difficult to stay the course and speak from his conscience about the scale of the violence Israel is perpetrating in Palestine. In fact, Levy says it feels “exasperating to write from this perspective and not have the impact he would like. He still maintains that “words are on the front line” of this struggle. How the violence is understood and what can be said has a significant impact on what sort of violence is permitted. So, too, does the form of resistance. Levy maintains that “If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear… from the agenda.” This is a people that are waged war against within an occupied territory enclosed by a wall. Why is there a boycott against the occupied rather than the occupier? His writing is incredibly useful for people that want to understand the strategies of the Israeli leadership, which often uses provocation and assassination, a kind of brinksmanship designed, he suggests, to renew the license for widespread destruction and pacification of the Palestinian people. In this sense, Levy says that Israel “the peace objector.” Israel has imprisoned Gaza for many years, blocked them off from the sea, the air and the land. It regularly uses “violence and force” to subjugate Gaza, rather than coordinating a just withdrawal. Israel should not be “amazed,” Gideon says, “by the violence and hatred that [it has] sowed with [its] own hands.” The response has not been an attempt to understand the root causes or to reflect critically on its complicity. Instead, the IDF is waging a war on the civilian population, showing “contempt for the lives of Palestinian children” in its pursuit of “vengeance.” This collective punishment is forbidden by international law, and at the current moment, and likely for several years, Israel will be on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Increasingly, the world is opposed to the Zionist regime in Israel and knows that there can be no military solution. Forcing an understanding of that into Israeli consciousness is extremely difficult, though, Levy says. In his experience, people in Israel are not bothered by the “moral aspects of the war.” This is why he has shifted toward focusing on the security and pragmatic reasons why this genocidal bombardment, this fascist fixation on punishing Gaza, is a failing strategy. He says that October 7th has created a bloodbath by opening the floodgates to a collective, vindictive military campaign that must be stopped. Given his family history, the fact that his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and the fact that he understands the specific forms that fascism has taken historically, it’s significant that he has said that Israel is slipping further into fascism. It will continue if the US, Canada, Europe all keep averting their eyes. If the blindness continues, Israel will keep killing, destroying and settling in the region. This wretched situation will be addressed by aggressive action by the peace movement, by all of us raising our voices in opposition, and given the inaction, by those in Palestine rising up where necessary to defend their lives. This is because critics like Levy have the disturbing sense that “if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth… one can assume that there would be no protest” within the settler colonial Zionist state.