By John Pickard
If you want to answer those politicians who think the history of Israel and Gaza only started on October 7 last year, you need only wave Gideon Levy’s book under their noses. It is aptly titled The Punishment of Gaza and it catalogues the horrors and brutalities faced by the population of that small sliver of land, at the hands of the Israeli Defence Force. But the point to note, is that it is all based on events years ago.
Gideon Levy is a Jewish Israeli journalist and he writes a regular column in the daily Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which has a relatively small circulation of around 72,000, and 100,000 for the weekend edition. It is possible to find Gideon Levy’s articles using any web browser, and although they are mostly behind a pay wall, from the headlines and opening paragraphs alone one gets a sense of the excoriating criticisms he makes of the Israeli government.
Levy travelled regularly into Gaza, like other journalists, until they were barred from the area by the IDF, following the first (and only) election in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel, elections that were won overall by Hamas. Levy scoffs at the idea that journalists were banned because it was deemed to be ‘unsafe’. “An Israeli journalist can travel to Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but not to Gaza. An Israeli journalist can travel to Sinai, where it is also said to be dangerous. The West Bank is still open to journalists, where it is clearly dangerous. But a complete blackout has been imposed on Gaza.” That blackout, it should be added, has never been revoked.
What is important about this book is that it was written between fifteen and eighteen years ago. It consists, therefore, of articles published over a period of several years. It is not possible to do justice to them all, but we can get a flavour of the content by quoting elements of some of the articles, such as these:
June 4, 2006. “Israel cannot claim that the boycott weapon is illegitimate, because it makes extensive use of this weapon itself…it is calling for a boycott of the Hamas government…”
In reference to the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, he writes, “Everything is tainted: the institutions of justice and law; the physicians who remain silent while medical treatment is prevented in the [occupied] territories; the teachers who do not protest against the closing of educational institutions and the prevention of free movement of their peers…the settlements and the fence, the barriers and bypass roads; and also the university lecturers, who do nothing for their imprisoned colleagues in the territories…It is easy to…attribute, as usual, any criticism to anti-Semitism.”
July 2, 2006
“It is not legitimate to cut off electricity to 750,000 people. It Is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns…Collective punishment is illegitimate and it does not have a smidgeon of intelligence…“
July 9, 2006
Mocking the official line of the Israeli government, he wrote, “Israel is causing electricity blackouts; laying sieges; bombing and shelling; assassinating and imprisoning; killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but ‘they started it’ “
On September 27, 2009, Levy wrote about the ‘Children of 5767’ that being the number of the year in the Hewbrew calendar. “It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking,” he wrote. “only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis killed.”
He documents the instances of some of the children killed by the IDF. “A few of the children also threw a rock at an armoured vehicle or touched a forbidden fence. All came under live fire…the IDF forces ‘successfully’ completed Operation Locked Kindergarten, as it was called, and withdrew from Sajiyeh in Gaza – leaving behind twenty-two dead and a neighbourhood razed.”
And what, he asks, did one of the dead children, sixteen-year old Taha al-Jawi, do to get himself killed? “The IDF claimed that he tried to sabotage the barbed-wire fence surrounding the abandoned Atarot Airport; his friends said he was just playing soccer and had gone after the ball.”
There are too many instances of these kinds of appalling atrocities by the Israeli government and the IDF, but it is worth noting Levy’s bitter comments on the official lies of the latter. In response to a comment in 2009 by the then Defence Minister that “the IDF is the most moral army in the world”, he gives a telling answer. “All these propagandistic and ridiculous responses are meant not only to deceive the public, but also to offer shameless lies. The IDF knew very well what its soldiers were doing in Gaza…” No better words can describe the role of the IDF on the West Bank and in Gaza today.
Amid the baying and the noise of the Israeli far right and in the fog of war, it is sometimes difficult to hear different voices coming out of Israel. But they are there, albeit in a minority at the moment and part of that voice is the writing of Levy. Take this, for example, an article by Levy today, (May 23, 2024) about the decision of the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants on Israeli ministers. The opening paragraphs read,
“At last, justice; the very earliest signs of the beginning of a late, partial justice, yet still a measure of justice. There is no joy in your prime minister and your country’s defense minister about to become wanted all over the world, but it is impossible not to feel some satisfaction about the beginning of some doing of justice.
“In Israelis’ wallowing and victimhood; in endless self-righteous panels on TV; in cries about an antisemitic world and the injustice of bundling Israel with Hamas, there’s one fundamental, fateful question missing: Did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza? No one dares deal with this critical, key question: Were there, or were there not, crimes?”
The final article in Levy’s book is dated July 2009, more than fourteen years before the Hamas incursion into Southern Israel on October 7. There is nothing in Levy’s book that could not be written today, except for the extremly important fact that the brutality and the slaughter of innocent Palestinians has been increased to an unimaginable scale compared to fifteen years ago.
Levy would probably be expelled from the British Labour Party for what he writes in Haaretz – he is clearly the ‘wrong kind of Jew’ for the Labour leadership. His book, nonetheless, completely and utterly refutes the idea that Hamas ‘started a war’ on that day last October. As this Israeli Jew explains so eloquently, there had been a one-side war against Gaza that has been going on for decades.
This book, and others by Gideon Levy, can be found here.
[Picture top is from Al Jazeera newsfeed, showing the city of Rafah]
