Destroyed hospital in Gaza (2014) | mehmet ali poyraz / Shutterstock
Gideon Levy, an award-winning journalist for the liberal Israeli English-language daily Haaretz, has been covering the Palestinian occupied territories since the late 1980s. His column, “Twilight Zone,” published during the Oslo process, was famously unsettling to many Israelis because he established, week after week, that the celebrated peace process was not a problem-solving diplomatic exercise that might establish a durable peace but rather a deeply cynical effort to enable the Israeli military to entrench and control the expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine.
Levy has been writing for Haaretz for 42 years. Much of that time has been spent covering the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, a process that started 30 years ago, when Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza to establish the Palestinian National Authority. Although he reports from Tel Aviv, Levy has cultivated an important network of Palestinian interlocutors in Gaza, often through fixers and translators, and he gives ample space for Palestinians to speak for themselves. His new book is a collection of articles written since 2014, and focuses mostly on Gaza, in order to better understand October 7, 2023, and its aftermaths.
The power of Levy’s work resides in the dual structure of his analyses, a structure generated by his location in Tel Aviv and his deep knowledge of Palestinian life under Israeli military occupation. As a result, reading his new book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe (Verso, 2024), means performing a constant back-and-forth between the situation in Gaza and the meaning it has for both Palestinians and the citizens of Israel.
He has three audiences: ordinary Israelis who pretend not to see the occupation; fellow journalists and civil society leaders, who need to hear firsthand accounts from Palestinians under Israeli occupation; and the Israeli elite, whom he excoriates for their hypocrisy regarding Gaza. His articles alternate between reports from the front lines in Gaza and vehement critiques of fellow Israelis.
The book starts by recounting the events of October 7. That morning, Levy was jogging, as usual, in Hayarkon Park, a cozy neighborhood in Tel Aviv, when his routine was disrupted by sirens. Upon returning home, he learned from Israeli media that hundreds of Israeli civilians had been massacred in the south of Israel along the Gaza border. At first, Levy was incredulous: How could the security wall around Gaza, worth billions of Israeli shekels, have failed to prevent an armed incursion from the Gaza Strip?
Levy quickly comes to realize that the slaughter of October 7 has opened an entirely new chapter to the history of the region. Yet he also knows that this assault did not come out of the blue, and that there were deep underlying reasons for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to have attacked Israel. He remembers feeling torn: he recalls Israel’s original sin in 1948, the Palestinian Nakba; he recalls the brutality of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the six-day war of 1967, and its ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip since 2007. And he knows most of his fellow Jewish Israelis will have no interest in these facts.
And indeed, in the following weeks, Israeli media would be filled with sentiments that Levy in no way would share. “After what they did to us,” these commentators would argue, “there’s nothing forbidden to us,” “There are no innocents in Gaza,” “Everyone is Hamas,” “If there is no opposition to Hamas in Gaza, it’s evidence that everyone supports the organization,” and “Israel stands at the front line of world civilization against Islamic fundamentalism.”
The book serves as a rebuke to these statements, and Levy goes back in time, to his earlier writings, to demonstrate why and how Israeli governments have actually created conditions that led to the horrors of October 7. The first part of the book reprints articles by Levy published in Haaretz between 2014 and September 2023, detailing the effects of Israel’s long siege on Gaza. A second part collects more recent pieces written between October 7, 2023, and June 12, 2024.
These articles describe how Hamas managed to regroup in Gaza and continue its sometimes violent resistance to Israel. They demonstrate the duplicity of the various Israeli governments that have maintained this precarious modus vivendi in Gaza to justify the indefinite postponing of a peace agreement. Other pieces lambaste the silence of Israeli journalists and civil society leaders regarding the plight of Palestinians in Gaza:
When the world mocks the Putinist Russian media for their coverage of the war in Ukraine, it does so with good reason. Consumers of the media in Russia have never received a full picture of reality, as the media serve the state. But there is a type of media that is even more pathetic and dangerous than that: one that voluntarily relinquishes its objectivity. It does this without pressure or threats from the legal system, the army, the government or the secret services. Israel’s media have for the most part volunteered to serve the cause of national propaganda.
Still, some Israelis in these years would write petitions or open letters to newspapers denouncing the treatment of Gazan residents and the targeted killings of Palestinian faction leaders. Even military personnel would sometimes protest against actions in Gaza.
Indeed, in the months leading up to October 7, Israeli streets were filled with activists demonstrating against Netanyahu’s attack on the independence of the judiciary system. At one point, 180 pilots threatened not to report to training drills, in an act of civil disobedience.
All this changed after October 7.
In a January 3, 2024, article titled “No Israeli Soldiers Have Stood Up and Refused to Participate in This Evil War,” Levy asks,
Where are the 180 pilots? They’re busy bombing Gaza, flattening it, destroying it and killing its residents indiscriminately, including its thousands of children. How did it happen that bombing Salah Shehadeh’s house [in 2002], which killed 14 residents, 11 of them children, led to the “pilots’ letter,” in which 27 pilots stated they would refuse to serve on attack missions—and now, not even a postcard from a single pilot? What happened to our pilots since 2003, and what happened to the soldiers?
Since October 2023, Gideon Levy has been repeatedly vilified in the Israeli media for appearing as a defender of Hamas because he insists on recalling the inhumane Israeli policies in Gaza that predate the Hamas attack.
He underlines Israel’s disrespect for international humanitarian law in the Gaza Strip. He documents how Gaza’s economy has been strangled by the Israelis. Seven years after Hamas seized power in 2007, most of the crossing points used to export agricultural goods from Gaza were shut down by the Israelis; by 2011, only Kerem Shalom remained. Obviously, Gaza’s current humanitarian crisis has its origins in years of hostile Israeli policies.
But Levy’s aim is not to justify Hamas. Instead, he hopes to show that Israel cannot claim to be a democracy while it maintains a military occupation force that denies basic freedoms to nearly six million Palestinians living in the occupied territories. How hypocritical is it for a state that prides itself on defending its sovereignty, come what may, to refuse sovereignty to another people?
The images many journalists and human rights observers now use to describe Gaza’s situation tell the story: Gaza is a “cage,” a “roofless prison surrounded by fences,” the “biggest (cattle) pen in the world,” a place to be “flood[ed] with water until it is completely submerged.” In The Killing of Gaza, Levy shows how Israel’s routine debasement of Gazans, now intensified by its war against Hamas, has become a primary cause of violence in the region.
It’s fortunate that a few journalists in Haaretz are still able to deliver Israeli readers a powerful critique of the regime’s propaganda—one based on direct Palestinian testimony. But with what effect remains to be seen.
