{"id":177050,"date":"2018-09-30T07:07:48","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T07:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=177050"},"modified":"2018-10-02T05:21:41","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T05:21:41","slug":"heres-what-i-found-out-when-i-spent-the-day-with-israels-most-controversial-journalist-gideon-levy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=177050","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s what I found out when I spent the day with Israel\u2019s most controversial journalist, Gideon Levy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Fisk — The Independent Sept 28, 2018<\/h1>\n
\"Gideon<\/a>

Gideon Levy, the most outspoken correspondent on Israel’s most outspoken newspaper, Haaretz, holds forth in the garden of his Tel Aviv home. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Gideon Levy is a bit of a philosopher king although, sitting in his postage stamp garden in a suburb of Tel Aviv, straw hat shading mischievous\u00a0dark eyes, there\u2019s a touch of a Graham Greene character about Haaretz<\/em>\u2019s most provocative and infamous writer. Brave, subversive, sorrowful \u2013\u00a0in a harsh, uncompromising way \u2013 he\u2019s the kind of journalist you either worship or loathe. Philosopher kings of the Plato kind are necessary for our moral health, perhaps, but not good for our blood pressure. So Levy\u2019s life has been threatened by his fellow Israelis for telling the truth; and that\u2019s the best journalism award one\u00a0can get.<\/span><\/p>\n

He loves journalism but is appalled by its decline. His English is flawless\u00a0but it sometimes breaks up in fury. Here\u2019s an angry Levy on the effect of newspaper stories:\u00a0\u201cIn the year of \u201986, I wrote about a Palestinian Bedouin woman who lost her baby after giving birth at a checkpoint. She tried at three different [Israeli] checkpoints, she couldn\u2019t make it and she gave birth in the car. They [the Israelis] didn\u2019t let her bring the baby to the hospital. She carried him by foot two kilometres to the Augusta Victoria [Hospital in east Jerusalem]. The baby died. When I published this story \u2013 I don\u2019t want to say that Israel \u2018held its breath\u2019, but it was a huge scandal, the cabinet was dealing with it, two officers were brought to court\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then Levy found ten more women who had lost babies at Israeli checkpoints. \u201cAnd nobody could care less any more. Today, I can publish it and people will yawn if they read it at all. [It\u2019s] totally normalised, totally justified. We have a justification now for everything. The dehumanisation of the Palestinians has reached a stage in which we really don\u2019t care. I can tell you, really, without exaggeration, if an Israeli dog was killed by Palestinians, it will get more attention in the Israeli media than if 20 Palestinian youngsters would be shot dead by snipers on the fence \u2013 without doing anything \u2013 in Gaza. The life of Palestinians has become the cheapest thing. It\u2019s a whole system of demonisation, of de-humanisation, a whole system of justification that \u2018we\u2019 are always right and we can never be wrong.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then Levy goes for the bleeding-heart brigade. \u201cI\u2019m speaking now about liberals. There are those [Israelis] who are happy about any Palestinian death. But the liberals will give you so many arguments just to keep their conscience clean and not to be bothered \u2013 \u2018You cannot know what happened there, and you have not been there and, you know, you can only see part of the picture\u2026\u2019 And it\u2019s very hard to tell these stories any more, this is the biggest frustration. They see snipers killing a child waving. On TV\u00a0they show it, snipers killing a nurse in her uniform, a pretty nurse. They see a child of 15 slapping a soldier and going to jail for eight months. And they justify everything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

You can see why, not too\u00a0long ago, Levy was given a bodyguard. \u201cYou know,\u00a0Robert, for so many years, they told me: \u2018Try to be a little bit more moderate… Say some patriotic things. Say some good things about Israel.\u2019 You know, by the end of the day, we say and we write what we think, and we don\u2019t think about the consequences. And I must tell you, very frankly, the price that a Russian or Turkish journalist is paying today is much higher than any price. Let\u2019s not exaggerate. By the end of the day, I\u2019m still a free citizen and I still gain total freedom, and I mean it: total freedom to write whatever I want, mainly because of my newspaper \u2013 which is so supportive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, my publisher is maybe the only publisher in the world who is ready to pay millions in terms of cancellations for one article that I wrote, who would tell any subscriber who is mad at me: \u2018You know what? Maybe Haaretz<\/em> is not the newspaper for you!\u2019 Give me one publisher who would speak like this. So I gain full freedom. I say whatever I feel or think.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Which says something about Israel as well as Levy\u2019s editor. But Israel never escapes his scalpel. \u201cThe worst thing that we are fighting is indifference,\u201d he says. \u201cApathy \u2013 which we have so much of in Israel. So if I succeed even to shake them in a way, to freak them out, to be angry with me, to be angry at what I say… you know, many times I think if I make them so angry, it is a sign that somewhere in their consciousness, they know that something is burning under our feet, that something went wrong. But there are times when you are afraid, especially the night before [an article] is published. I always say: \u2018Oh, didn\u2019t I go too far this time?\u2019 And then, when I read it back, I always say: \u2018I should have been much more extreme!\u2019 I always think I didn\u2019t go far enough.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Journalism and Israel can be combined in the Levy story. His love-hate relationship with the one can get mixed up with his horror of the path down which his country \u2013 to which his parents fled from Europe when it was still Palestine \u2013 is now travelling. \u201cThe only thing that I really miss \u2013 this is very specific to me \u2013 my biggest stories were from the Gaza Strip. And I am prevented from going there for 11 years now \u2013 because Israel doesn\u2019t let any Israeli into Gaza for 11 years, even if they have dual citizenship. Even if they would open [Gaza], very, very few Israelis would bother to go there. Maybe Hamas would stop them. It\u2019s an Israeli order which Israeli journalists never protested \u2013 except me \u2013 nobody protested against it. Because they couldn\u2019t care less \u2013 they get everything from the [Israeli] army spokesperson \u2013\u00a0why would they bother to go to Gaza?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But for Levy, it\u2019s professional. \u201cIt\u2019s a very deep loss because the strongest stories were always in Gaza and are still in Gaza. And the fact that I can\u2019t be in Gaza in these days\u2026 I mean, I always ask, \u2018what is the place you would most like to go to in the world? Bali?\u2019 And I always say the truth. \u2018Gaza. Give me one week in Gaza now. And I need nothing more\u2019.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Blogs don\u2019t have the credibility of newspapers, Levy says. \u201cBut I do tell young people \u2013 still, if they ask \u2013 go ahead. [Journalism] is a great job, a wonderful profession. I didn\u2019t plan to become a journalist. I wanted to become a prime minister. My two first choices were either bus driver or prime minister. Neither worked out somehow. Yes, it\u2019s about leadership. The bus driver is the leader. I mean, you dictate to other people what to do. But I still keep on saying to young people, \u2018you will never find such a profession, with so many opportunities. You need only one thing \u2013 above all, you need to be curious.\u2019 It\u2019s quite a rare quality, much more rare than you think, because we journalists think that everyone is as curious as we are.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Pessimism is built into many Israelis, none more so than\u00a0Levy. \u201cLook, we are dealing now with 700,000 [Jewish] settlers. It is unrealistic to think that anybody will evacuate 700,000 settlers. Without their full evacuation, you don\u2019t have a viable Palestinian state. Everyone knows this and everyone continues with their old songs because it\u2019s convenient to everybody \u2013 to the Palestinian Authority, to the EU, to the United States \u2013 [saying] \u2018two states, two states\u2019, and by this you can continue the occupation for another hundred years, thinking that one day there will be a two-state solution. It will never happen any more. We missed this train and this train will never get back to the station.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And we come back to Levy on the sins of modern journalism. \u201cLet\u2019s face it \u2013 it\u2019s all about social media now. Our journalism is dying. Now it\u2019s all about a very sophisticated tweet. And for a sophisticated tweet, you don\u2019t have to go anywhere \u2013 just sitting in your room with a glass of whisky, and you can be very, very sophisticated with some kind of sense of humour, and very cynical \u2013 very cynical \u2013 because this is maybe the main problem. I mean journalists, so very few of them, really care about something \u2013 except being brilliant. I guess there are some exceptions. I don\u2019t see them in Israel. I don\u2019t see them in the West Bank. They are activists but not journalists. There are many young activists, who are adorable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Levy agrees that Amira Hass of Haaretz<\/em>, who lives in the Palestinian West Bank, is his equal, at least in years \u2013 he is 65 \u2013 and \u201cshe really brings journalism one step forward because she lives with them. I think it\u2019s really unprecedented \u2013 a journalist who \u2018lives with the enemy\u2019. She pays a big price\u00a0also, in terms of being less relevant here [in Israel] \u2013 because of her living there<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But repeatedly\u00a0journalism comes under the critical Levy microscope. \u201cWe have some young people who would go to war zones \u2013 only for the sake of showing their courage. They have been to Iraq, they\u2019ve been to Syria, they\u2019ve been to Iran. Usually, they come back with photos of themselves in the reception of the hotel, or in some kind of so-called battlefield. When I went to Sarajevo in 1993, I went also to look for the injustice there. I didn\u2019t go for just \u2018covering the story\u2019. I looked for the \u2018evilness\u2019 of a war. I think you saw a lot of evil in Sarajevo. I saw things in Sarajevo that I never saw here \u2013 old ladies digging in the ground, for roots to have to eat something. I saw it with my own eyes. Not in the [Israeli] occupied territories \u2013 you don\u2019t see it here.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Foreign correspondents fare little better. \u201cI see journalists, even now, standing by the [Gaza] fence, journalists who can<\/em> get into Gaza \u2013 in those bloody months, with almost 200 unarmed victims \u2013 and they stand by the fence, far away. To get into Gaza is not dangerous now for foreign journalists. But I see, even on BBC \u2013 and even Al-Jazeera from time to time, Al-Jazeera is much better, obviously \u2013 give even their reports from a hill in the south of Israel. And they get some footage, obviously\u00a0from social media, from local journalists. But it\u2019s not the same.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As a persistent critic of Israel and the wickedness of its colonial land theft and its vile treatment of the Palestinians, I find myself curiously at odds with Levy \u2013 not so much because of his condemnation of journalists, but of his plate-glass shattering of the Israeli window. Would Israeli readers really be more interested in the death of an Israeli dog than the slaughter of 20 Palestinians? Are they as poorly educated as Levy claims? There\u2019s a bit of the \u201cO tempora o mores\u201d element about him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael is becoming one of the most ignorant countries in the world,\u201d this 65-year old Cicero says. \u201cSomeone said it\u2019s better to keep the people ignorant \u2026 The young generation know nothing about nothing. Try to talk here with young people \u2013 they\u2019ve no idea. The most basic things \u2013 ask them who was Ben Gurion, ask them who was Moshe Dayan. Ask them what is the \u2018Green Line\u2019. Ask them where is Jenin. Nothing. Even before the brainwashing, the ignorance \u2013 part of what they know is totally wrong.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Talk to the average young Israeli\u00a0and a European waiter will speak better English, Levy claims. Knowledge of the Holocaust and foreign travel for a young Israeli \u201cwill be mainly an experience of a trip with their high school to Auschwitz, where you are being told that power is the only thing which you should possess \u2013 military power, that\u2019s the only guarantee, nothing else but military power; and that Israel has the right to do whatever it wants after the Holocaust. These are the lessons. But this is nothing to do with knowledge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, says our philosopher king, there is \u201ca narrow level of brilliant intellectuals\u201d, but a recent survey suggested half of Israeli youth receive a Third World education. We \u2013 and here I am included in Levy\u2019s generation \u2013 came into the world after \u201cvery dramatic events\u201d. The Second World War. The foundation, in his case, of the state of Israel. His parents \u201csaved themselves at the last minute\u201d, from Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere was some historical luggage on our shoulders and no Twitter and no Facebook could delete this. Today\u00a0it is more empty, finally, in terms of historical events. Even in this region. What is happening here? Nothing \u2013 more of the same. Fifty years of occupation, nothing basically changed. We are in the very same framework \u2026 sure, more settlements, sure, more brutality and\u00a0sure, less of a feeling that it\u2019s temporary. It\u2019s very clear now that it\u2019s not going to be temporary. This is part and parcel of Israel.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked Levy if the proportional representation voting system made for hopeless coalition governments in Israel. \u201cWhat we get is what we are,\u201d he replies dismally. \u201cAnd Israel is very nationalistic and very right wing and very religious \u2013 much more than you think \u2013 and the Israeli government is a very good reflection of the Israeli people. And Netanyahu\u2019s the best presenter of Israel. He is by far too educated for Israel \u2013 but in his views, this is Israel. Power, power and power \u2013 maintaining the status quo for ever, not believing in the Arabs at all. Not believing in any kind of settlement with the Arabs, ever. And living only on our sword, a total state of war.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Relations with the US are easy. \u201cI\u2019m not sure people are aware now how much Netanyahu dictates American policy. Anything that is decided now \u2013 UNRWA\u00a0[the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine], all the cuts \u2013 it comes from Israel. Trump couldn\u2019t care less. You think he knew what UNRWA was before? Racism is now politically correct.\u201d So where did it all go wrong? \u201cFirst of all, in 1967, that\u2019s the greatest sin. It all starts there. And if you want, you can say 1948 \u2013 because 1948 never stopped in 1948. We could really have opened a new chapter.\u201d There are still examples of great men, he insists, even in the world after the Second World War. Mandela, for example.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Israel\u2019s most irascible and annoying journalist also says \u201cmaybe we are too old and we are just bitter and jealous, thinking that we were the best\u2026\u201d At the height of his peroration, just behind us, a huge white cat bounds from the garden hedge in panic, pursued by an even larger grey cat with teeth snapping and hissing, stirring up leaves and dust. The smaller cat, I suspect, represents Levy\u2019s enemies. And despite his 65 years, you can guess who the larger cat reminds me of.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can see why not too long ago, writes Robert Fisk, Gideon Levy was given a bodyguard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177050"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177055,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177050\/revisions\/177055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}