“Israel is going all the way and doing anything possible to push Hezbollah to go for an all out war,“ Israeli journalist Gideon Levy says in this interview.
By Chris Hedges
Scheerpost
It has become quite rare to hear any meaningful accountability for Israel’s actions from Israeli citizens themselves. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy is an anomaly in Israel by today’s standards, as for his entire career he has challenged the apartheid and occupation of the Israeli state.
On today’s episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Levy joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, and explain the spiritual destruction, both of Israel and Palestine, that the current genocide in Gaza is causing as well as the implications of new military operations in Lebanon.
The worst change, according to Levy, is that Israel has lost its humanity. “Everything is acceptable,” Levy tells Hedges as he describes the ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the brutal killing of prisoners, the censorship at the hands of the state and the overall indifference to it all.
“There is practically only one camp in Israel, the camp which supports apartheid and occupation,” Levy says.
There isn’t even any room left for empathy of the innocent victims in Gaza, according to Levy. Teachers have been subject to interrogation and termination because they “express[ed] empathy with the children of Gaza, with the victims of Gaza. Even this is not legitimate anymore in Israeli society 2024,” Levy contends.
Although the horrors following Oct. 7 are devastatingly unprecedented, Levy asserts that this entire catastrophe was years in the making and the meaningless gestures of advocating for a two-state solution, for example, will perpetuate it further.
In the first years following the war in 1967, the occupation of Palestinians as a way of life quickly became normalized, according to Levy. “[Palestinians] clean our streets, they build our buildings, they pave our roads and they will never have citizenship. The only people in the world without any citizenship of any state,” Levy says.
As Israeli society attempts to continue this way of living, only disruptive movements and moments, such as the First Intifada, the Yom Kippur war and now October 7, will bring meaningful attention to the Palestinian struggle most of the world is okay with ignoring.
As Levi writes in his book,
“The way of terror is the only way open to the Palestinians to fight for their future. The way of terror is the only way for them to remind Israel, the Arab states and the world, of their existence. They have no other way. Israel has taught them this. If they don’t use violence, everyone will forget about them, and then a little later, only through terrorism will they be remembered. Only through terrorism will they possibly attain something. One thing is certain, if they put down their weapons, they are doomed.”
Levy says that history has told the Palestinians and the world something crucial about Israel: “the message is, if you want to achieve anything from us, only by force. And the message for the world is the same, if you want the world to care about you, raising your voice is not enough. You have to take measures. You have to take actions, and unfortunately, many times violent ones, aggressive ones, and many times even barbarian ones, like on the seventh of October.”
Credits
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Diego Ramos
Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges: The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has spent over three decades reporting on the occupation of Palestine, asking his readers to examine the human cost of apartheid and genocide. He has paid a heavy price for his courage, for defying an Israeli media and educational system that masks and denies Israeli crimes, insists Jews are eternal victims and employs racist tropes to dehumanize Palestinians. He is a pariah in his own country. But Levy refuses to be intimidated. His reporting has long been some of the best and most important reporting on Palestine.
His new book The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe elucidates lies used to justify apartheid and genocide, excoriates Israel for its lust for violence, including against children, and condemns the cheerleading of the mass killing in Gaza.
He warns that the poison of Israel’s settler colonial project is not only an injustice for the Palestinians, but will ultimately lead to the collective suicide of the Israeli state.
The first part of his book focuses on what takes place in Palestine before Oct. 7, providing the needed context for the current genocide and the alarming increase in violence by Israeli soldiers and colonists in the West Bank. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison. Its 2.3 million people have been under siege for 18 years. The brutality inflicted by Israel during those 18 years, including the killing and maiming of thousands of Palestinians, he writes, spawned a counter brutality when Palestinians broke out of their concentration camp on Oct. 7. To understand is not to condone. But if we do not understand the cycle of violence will not be halted. Joining me to discuss his new book, The Killing of Gaza, is Gideon Levy.
So I have long, long, long, long admired your work, that of your colleague, Amira Hass. I’m going to begin with the two-state solution. You write about that early in the book, and you’re quite emphatic. You write, the two-state solution is dead. Seven hundred thousand Jewish settlers in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem killed it. That was their intention, and it was also the intention of successive governments, which did not stand in the way when settlers expropriated stolen lands. Today, there’s no place for a Palestinian state to come into existence unless it’s going to be a bantustan. The world may well know this, but if so, it’s pretending that it doesn’t. So yes, this is something that, when we talk about, when the Biden administration, for instance, speaks about proposing a ceasefire, they’re always harking back to the two-state solution. You wrote this before Oct. 7. Of course, it’s only more true now. Explain how the two-state solution was extinguished.
Gideon Levy: So first of all, Chris, thank you for having me and thank you for your introduction. We should have stopped there, because it cannot get any better after such an introduction.
In any case, getting back to your question, the two-state solution is a very just solution. Two peoples share one piece of land. Both of them won’t dream about self-determination. Both deserve self-determination. They are, by the way, at this stage of time, equal in the sizes around 7.5 million Jews, 7.5 million Palestinians between the river and the sea. And what is more just than to divide the land and to let each of them live with its own state, like many other states.
As you just quoted, the problem is that this train left the station long time ago. Nobody is going to evacuate those 700,000 settlers. They are the most powerful group in Israeli society and in Israeli politics, and without their evacuation, there is no viable state. There is a bantustan, but not a viable Palestinian state. That’s the minimum of the minimum, the ’67 borders, and it’s really a minimum, because we are talking about something around 20 percent of their original land, and even this is now populated by settlers.
So we can continue to say two-state solution like the Biden administration does, like the entire world does, like the Palestinian Authority does, like the EU does. Everyone is in favor of this two-state solution, and I can ensure you, Chris, that almost all those who support a two-state solution know very well that it’s not an achievable goal, but it’s very comfortable to stick to the old solution, just to say it is on the shelf, and one day we will use it.
And meanwhile, let the occupation get stronger and bigger, and one day we will get the time to implement this solution. Meanwhile, nobody did anything to promote it, and it’s dead. So you can continue to speak about the two-state solution, and by doing this, it strengthens the occupation. And you can, like I try, to think about an alternative, because otherwise we are stuck. And the alternative is obviously the one-state solution.
Now it might sound like a bizarre solution, but first of all, we are living in a one state for over 50 years. Now, there is a one state. You don’t have to create it. Jenin and Hebron and Gaza, in many ways, are under the same control. Like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, they are all under the Israeli control, under the Israeli government.
The prime minister of Israel can decide what’s happening in Jenin and what’s happening in Nablus. We are in one state. The only problem is that it’s not a democracy, so it’s all about changing the regime of this state.
Now I don’t want to oversimplify it and say, “Oh, it’s so simple, we’ll just change the system, and then everything will be solved.” No, because it means no Jewish state, no Palestinian state. But what is the alternative? There is none. So we have to try to get to this, at least to phrase the vision of one person, one vote, of those basic things of democracy, namely equality. Palestinians and Israelis on equal terms. Once we get to this, I think everything will look different. Right now, it looks totally far-fetched.
Chris Hedges: You said the two-state or advocating the two-state solution is, in your words, tantamount to making the occupation eternal, which is correct, of course. Is that what countries like the United States, the U.K., Germany, is that what they embrace by supporting Israel, eternal occupation?
Gideon Levy: I would say it like this. I’m not sure that it’s what they aim at, but they couldn’t care less if this will continue, that’s for sure. Why would they? I mean, and why would I guess, look at their policy. Their policy teaches us that they are in favor of the Israel occupation only because of the pure fact that they could have made a huge change, and they never bothered to make a change. You really think that if the United States and the EU and the rest of the world would have really wanted to see a Palestinian state a long time ago, the international community couldn’t do anything about creating it? Sure it could, but it’s comfortable for everybody to pay lip service to the two-state solution and to strengthen the occupation.
Chris Hedges: You write — again, this is before Oct. 7 — the two peoples are today more distant from each other than they have been at any time since the dawn of Zionism. Emotions are running high, the hatred, the fear and the mistrust have reached terrifying levels. There are those in Israel who are discussing Nazi-like solutions ranging from expulsion up to physical annihilation in the Palestinian territories.
And in growing circles around the world, there is a talk of a free Palestine between the Jordan and the sea, one that has no place for Jews.
I’ve always looked at the reporting that you did, and Amira did, as a kind of constant warning that if you keep treating people like this, what you’re doing is creating the kind of extremism, and without question, war crimes and atrocities that were committed by Hamas or other Palestinian resistance groups on Oct. 7. But you’ve been, I don’t know, decades now, but that seems to me, and I think — again, this was before Oct. 7 — that seems to me the the flashing signal that you were sending out, certainly to the Israeli public and the rest of the world community through your journalism.
Gideon Levy: First of all, I thank you for the compliment, a very serious one. And secondly, yes, I think that the evidences are on the ground, and I’m just collecting them and exposing them. It’s now 35 years that I’m covering the Israel occupation. People in Israel tend to think that what I do is covering the Palestinians. No, I’m not covering the Palestinians. I’m not an expert of the Palestinians, I don’t even speak the language. I’m covering us, Israel. I’m covering our crimes. I’m covering our policy. I’m covering our army, our secret services, and that’s my aim, also, to put this mirror to show the Israelis, look! This is on your behalf. This is what we are doing to them, not what they are suffering. It’s not about their suffering. It’s about our moral profile. And this is a very depressing one.
Chris Hedges: I think it’s depressing. You know, I lived in Jerusalem from 1988 to 1990 and the kind of political demographic, if you want to call it that, of the Israeli public, has changed because, certainly when you began, there was a peace camp. There were figures like Uri Avnery, the Women in Black, remember these groups they used to protest. And that all seems to have vanished. Talk about what’s happened within Israeli society, because when you started this kind of reporting, there was, maybe not significant, but a segment of Israeli society who heard it.
Gideon Levy: And how, and I’ll give you just a small example. I remember in the late ’80s, when I wrote about the first woman who was about to give birth and couldn’t do it and tried to get to a hospital and lost her baby in the checkpoint. And it was quite a scandal in Israel, and it got to the cabinet meeting. Ever since then, I wrote at least about another five or six cases like this, and nobody cared less. This is about the humanitarian point of view, but you refer more to the political point of view, and here we are witnessing a much more disturbing process in which Israel turns into more and more militarism, racism and nationalism.
And if this was not convincing to you or to anyone, until the seventh of October, 2023, after, what’s happening after the seventh of October kills any doubts about it, Israel really was never speaking in one voice like now. I know people think Israel is divided. Netanyahu [is facing] protest for the hostages. Very true, but by the end of the day, Israel is talking in one voice, favoring this war in Gaza, supporting, continuing in Lebanon, supporting continuing of the occupation, objecting to the two-state solution, even.
There was a vote in the Knesset a few weeks ago, and it was unbelievable. It was almost 65 or 70 members in favor of totally excluding the possibility of a two-state solution vis a vis, I don’t know, 10 members who voted differently. Israel totally changed, especially in the last year. What happens to Israel in the last year is dramatic, because the last remains of the peace camp, the last remains of those who believed in any kind of equality, of any kind of perceiving the Palestinians as human beings like us, is all gone. Most of the Israelis, if not all of them, say, after the atrocities of the seventh of October, we have the right to do whatever we want. After the seventh of October, we don’t believe anymore in any kind of peace with those people. And where does it lead us?
[See: Israeli Lawmakers Vote Against Palestinian Statehood]
Chris Hedges: Well, you write in the book about how after Oct. 7, the liberal Israelis just completely collapsed and said, well, I guess the right wing, they’re right, we were wrong.
Gideon Levy: Yeah, and other voices are not only very lonely, but became really illegitimate. You know that today, if you pay some empathy to the suffering of the children of Gaza — I can’t think about something more innocent than this, I can’t think about something more human than this — you might lose your job, you might be fired, you might be called for interrogation, and you might even go to jail. And all those things happened without any resistance in Israeli society. Now it’s focused on Israeli-Palestinians and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, but there were also some Jewish teachers and headmasters who were called for interrogation for expressing empathy with the children of Gaza, with the victims of Gaza. Even this is not legitimate anymore in Israeli society 2024.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about that change before Oct. 7, because the peace camp, if we want to call it that, atrophied significantly before these attacks. When I lived in Israel, the Knesset outlawed the Kach Party under Meir Kahane, and, in fact, denounced him. I don’t know if they used the word fascist, but it was something strong like that, and now we’ve watched, in essence, the heirs of Kahane take control of Israel and the rise of this powerful settler movement. What do you attribute that to? I’m talking about before Oct. 7.
Gideon Levy: It’s an ongoing process in which the Israeli Zionists could not deliver any goods, because there was a built-in contradiction between Zionism and being a leftist or being a peacenik or being a person of conscience.
Zionism, Chris, today means Jewish superiority… Jewish supremacy, sorry, Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea. There is no better definition for Zionism today than this. And this does not go with all the other values. So gradually, people realize that the camp who defines itself the Zionist left is totally hollow, it’s a masquerade. They are the ones who established the settlement project, not Netanyahu. They enabled it. They did nothing to end the occupation. And all of a sudden, people saw that the king is totally naked. And then came the seventh of October, because, at least the right wing, they have a plan. What is the plan of the Zionist left except of talking and talking about peace process? What is their plan? What is the end game? And then came the seventh of October and really determinated it. I mean, put an end to all the doubts. There is practically only one camp in Israel, the camp which supports apartheid and occupation.
Chris Hedges: Yeah. I mean, these little Zionists, you knew them as well better than I did, Teddy Kollek and Abba Eban. They were certainly charming in a way that these current figures like Netanyahu or Smotrich are not. How did you view [Yitzhak] Rabin? Was his intent to create a two-state solution genuine in your eyes or did he just want a colonial police force, which is basically what the PA [Palestinian Authority] is in the West Bank?
Gideon Levy: I knew Rabin in person, because at this time I was working with Shimon Peres, and I can tell you both Peres and Rabin and others, they elect one thing. They elect the deep belief that the Palestinians are human beings like us, or that they have equal rights on this piece of land, national rights. They never accepted this, and you could feel it. Rabin was a general all his life. He fought against the Palestinians. I think, genuinely, he really believed, and so did Shimon Peres, that we need to do something to ease their life, but they wouldn’t go all the way as it’s needed.
And those who think and claim, until this very moment, that Yigal Amir, the murderer of Rabin, murdered peace, as if Rabin would not have been murdered, we would have lived today in a reality of two prosperous, independent states is very cheating, because Rabin didn’t aim at this. He didn’t believe in the Palestinians. You could even see his attitude toward Arafat. I mean, the whole attitude was a colonialist attitude. It was not an attitude between two equal partners, never, not for a moment. And therefore Rabin meant well, but he was incapable of going all the way, and so did all the other Zionist leftists. They were never ready to go all the way, and you can’t, there are no shortcuts. If you want a real, just solution, you have to go all the way and give up many, many things. Yes, it is a price. Otherwise, it’s a masquerade.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about what you call Israel’s bipolar society. You say it fluctuates between mania and depression, scandal and festivities, between commemoration and suppression. One moment, the entire nation is an army at war. The next, it’s as if nothing had happened. Even the Israeli sacrifice has been forgotten. Not to mention the killing and destruction in Gaza, which were never really mentioned in the first place. Except for the direct victims, nobody seems to remember that a war went on. Talk about that peculiar, what you call, this peculiar bipolar characteristic of Israel.
Gideon Levy: I wrote it before the seventh of October, and now you can see it much more. I’ll give you just the last example. In the last three days, Israel is in euphoria. There is a feeling that the Israeli army is doing so well in Lebanon, and everyone wants more of this, more of this. And the feeling is that we are going to crush Hezbollah. And all of the sudden, everyone appreciates the Israeli army as it is really, especially after the operation of the devices of the walkie talkies and the pagers. Admiration, the Mossad, the army, everyone is in great euphoria. In a few days, it will be over, because it will be over, because we have been in this scenario so many times, including in the last year in Gaza.
It’s always like this, we start a war, there is a big euphoria. Everyone believes that here it comes, and then we get more and more complicated, more and more bloodshed, more and more prices for both sides. And then we are totally stuck. And then there is an overall depression. We are lost. Israel will not exist in 20 years. I mean, I don’t know one people in the world who even asks, would this state exist in 20 years? The only place on Earth that this question is raised is in Israel by Israelis. Those who, two days ago, were sure that we are on the top of the world because we killed five Hezbollah commanders. And then they asked themselves, will we survive? Will we exist? It’s another Holocaust. What will be? This can be analyzed only by a psychiatrist.
Chris Hedges: You’re right. … To be generous [to Israel] the last occupation of Lebanon was at best, a stalemate. And there’s a pretty strong argument that Israel [in 2006] was driven out by Hezbollah.
[See: AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Why Israel Is Afraid of Hezbollah]
Gideon Levy: Absolutely. The only thing is that you call it occupation, Israel even didn’t call it occupation, as you know. We will never say that we occupied Lebanon, and it’s almost astonishing how things are repeating themselves, stage by stage, the same development and nobody sees the similarity, and nobody draws the conclusions.
Chris Hedges: Which gets to what you write,
“Since the first Lebanon War, more than more than 30 years ago, the killing of Arabs has become Israel’s primary strategic instrument. The IDF doesn’t wage war against armies, and its main target is civilian populations. Arabs are born only to kill and to be killed, as everyone knows, they have no other goal in life, and Israel kills them. One must, of course, be outraged by the modus operandi of Hamas, not only does it aim its rockets to civilian population centers in Israel, not only does it position itself within population centers, it may not have an alternative, given the crowded conditions in the Strip, but it also leaves the Gazan civilian population vulnerable to Israel’s brutal attacks without seeing to a single siren, shelter or protected space. That is criminal, but the barrages of Israeli Air Force are no less criminal on account of both result and intent.”
So there were two issues you raised, which are, of course, extremely important at this current moment. And one is that Israel’s main target is civilians. And then in terms of Gaza, of course, the fact that Hamas is largely sheltered in tunnels, or were, I don’t know, to what extent the tunnels still exist, and left the civilian population completely vulnerable.
Gideon Levy: Yes. Look, Israel denies that its main target are civilians, but the facts are talking, and you can’t deny them. You can’t deny that in all the last wars, the main victims were civilians, and I know all the excuses and all the lies and the [inaudible].
Take, for example, this ridiculous, ridiculous argument that it’s their fault because Hamas or Hezbollah hides within civilian population. I live in one of the most peaceful neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, next to the Tel Aviv University. I guess you have been here. Around me, in a distance of less than one kilometer, there are at least three major security facilities. Where else can they be? And Israel has some space.
Where do you want the people, the armed forces of Gaza to be exactly? In this narrow, narrow, tiny piece of land, where can they exactly be? What is the alternative, if not to be within the population? There are no spaces in Gaza. And if you walk in Tel Aviv and you hear old people, they will tell you, you see this school? Here in ’48 we had our arms storage place, and you see this hospital? Here, we trained fighters. Israel did the same. So this is not real, those excuses that we are killing civilians because Hamas, because of Hamas’ fault.
But more than this, there is something much deeper than this. There is nothing cheaper in Israel today, before the seventh of October and obviously after. There’s nothing cheaper than the lives of Palestinians, nothing cheaper than this. And even if Israel might prove that he doesn’t aim at civilians, the majority of the victims are civilians, maybe not in intention, but without any intention, not to kill them. And you know, after 41,000 people killed in Gaza, with around 17,000 of them children, can you claim anything else but this?
Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about a column you wrote called, “We should be saluting the Gaza Strip.” And you write,
“were it not for the Gaza Strip, the occupation would have been long forgotten. Were it not for the Gaza Strip, Israel would have erased the Palestinian issue from its agenda and continued on blithely with its crimes and annexations, with its routine, as if 4 million people were not living under its heel. Were it not for the Gaza Strip, the world would also have forgotten. Most of it already has. This is why we must now salute the Gaza Strip, mainly the spirit of the Gaza Strip, the only one that is still breathing life into the desperate and lost cause of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.”
Well, on Oct. 7, this is the argument that Hamas made for its incursion into Israel, so that they would not be forgotten. Because at that moment, you were having all these noises about Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel and the Abraham Accords, but I thought that was a really great column. But I want you to talk about what it is that you were writing about there.
Gideon Levy: I’m quite astonished. I didn’t remember this column. I’m quite astonished that I had the guts to write it in Haaretz and they had the guts to publish it. But seriously speaking, it’s very clear when the Palestinians sat silent, were passive, didn’t resist, nobody cared about them. We had the 20 first years of the occupation, between ’67 and ’87. Things were very calm. Everyone was sure in Israel that the occupation will last forever. It became totally normalized. They clean our streets — at this stage, they were allowed to work in Israel.
They clean our streets, they build our buildings, they pave our roads and they will never have citizenship. The only people in the world without any citizenship of any state. And that’s a normal phenomenon. It took the resistance of the First Intifada, which was, relative to the other uprisings, the most innocent intifada, intifada of stones and burning tires.
But this first intifada, ’87, ’88, ’89 brought us, first to Madrid and then to Oslo. Without this, nobody would bother at all. No, there’s no problem. Why should we bother? If it’s not broken, you ain’t fix it, or how you say. Nothing is broken, nothing was broken. We taught the Palestinians that their only way to achieve some [inaudible] the Arab state, the only way to achieve something is only by force.
I don’t have to recall the example of the Yom Kippur War or the ’73 war. Sadat was there, called for a peace treaty with Israel. Golda Meir said no, and then came the war with 2,700 Israeli soldiers killed. And then Israel was ready to give up the Egyptian occupied territories. Without the war, Israel would have never done it.
So the message is, if you want to achieve anything from us, only by force. And the message for the world is the same, if you want the world to care about you, raising your voice is not enough. You have to take measures. You have to take actions, and unfortunately, many times violent ones, aggressive ones, and many times even barbaric ones, like on the seventh of October. But is there another way for them to remind [the world] of their existence and their problem? I don’t know about one.
Chris Hedges: Well, you write:
“The way of terror is the only way open to the Palestinians to fight for their future. The way of terror is the only way for them to remind Israel, the Arab states and the world, of their existence. They have no other way. Israel has taught them this. If they don’t use violence, everyone will forget about them, and then a little later, only through terrorism will they be remembered. Only through terrorism will they possibly attain something. One thing is certain, if they put down their weapons, they are doomed.”
You’re talking about terrorism.
Gideon Levy: What other tools do they have? They don’t have an army. Believe me, they would rather have F-35 or F-16, pushing the button and killing masses of Israelis. They would love to have it. They don’t have it. The terror is and was always the weapon of the weak ones and the weapons of those who struggle for the existence, including the Israeli-Jewish movement before the establishment of Israel. What was blowing up the King David Hotel? What was putting bombs in markets and in buses? This was the only means that they had then, the Zionists, the first Zionist, the first active Zionists, the underground organizations, the Stern Gang and the Etzel and Haganah. That’s the weapon, they don’t have any other one. And it sounds horrible. I know it sounds horrible, but it is horrible because once… Look at Gaza, if Gaza does not resist, has anyone talked in the last years about lifting the siege over Gaza? Anyone mentioned the siege; 2.3 million people in a cage? This would last forever. Nobody mentioned, nobody was bothered by it. Everything was silent, everything was normalized. It was normalized that 2.3 million people, that there is a legitimacy to keeping them in the cage forever. So what alternative do they have from [inaudible]?
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Oct. 7. How radically has that reconfigured the conflict? How radically has it changed Israel itself? In short, what are the consequences of Oct. 7, both within Israel, for the Palestinians and now, of course, with Lebanon regionally?
Gideon Levy: I think we are still in the middle of the happenings, and we don’t appreciate it, how deep is the change, and how dramatic is the change, and how destructive it is to everyone. It is true that for a moment, there was a hope, and some people still feel, still have the hope that out of this chaos something good can emerge. As we say in Hebrew, the darkest part of the night is the one before dawn, and then comes dawn, and there is light, and we are now, obviously, in our darkest hour. No doubt about this. But it sounds very romantic, and I’m not sure this is the case.
First of all, about Israel, Israel lost its humanity. In my view, that’s the worst. Totally lost its humanity. Everything is acceptable; 60 prisoners were killed or died in one year in these terrible Israeli camps, concentration camps it built for the people of Gaza, [inaudible] of the innocent people, 60 prisoners.
In Guantanamo in over 20 years, there were six prisoners dying and the whole world was troubled by Guantanamo, and rightly so. Sixty prisoners being dead, most of them because of starvation, diseases or violence, nothing. Israel is totally indifferent to this. And so about the killing, and so about the destruction, Israel lost its humanity. That’s the first and most dramatic change.
Then came the political changes, as I said before, no belief in any kind of solution, no belief in any kind of human attitude. How the Palestinians know, believe that there are limits to using force, that there is international law, that there is an international community, that there are some moral limits to what you do [inaudible]. We can do whatever we want after the seventh of October, and nobody will tell us how far we can go. We can go as far as we want. That’s a change which will not end or be reversible after ending this war or the two wars. It will remain with us for a long time, and it will not enable any chance of any kind of settlement when this is the attitude.
As for the Palestinians, I know less. I’m not in Gaza for 18 years now, but I guess that the levels of hatred about Israel in Gaza — very justified hatred, let’s be honest about it — reach new levels when you know who did all this to you. When you see your children being killed in masses, when you see your parents starving, what do you think will come out of it, after the war? It’s [inaudible] after the war. So I think that by the end of this war, we will be even in a worse situation than we have been before this war in terms of chances or perspectives or any kind of positive change.
Chris Hedges: So the Netanyahu government has been criticized in terms of Gaza, of not having an ultimate plan. It’s been just called a war of vengeance. I don’t know if that’s correct. It does seem, from what I’ve read in the Israeli press, they clearly want to annex the northern part of Gaza. Early on, they tried to get Secretary of State Blinken, to push the Egyptian government, Sisi, the Iraqi government, to accept Palestinian refugees, it strikes me that what they want is to, of course they’ve largely already accomplished the decimation or total destruction of Gaza, what they want is massive ethnic cleansing. Right now, they just have impediments that they need to overcome. Would you agree?
Gideon Levy: Absolutely. Nobody would admit it, and I’m not sure that Netanyahu government had a detailed plan, but I’m one of the few who believes that Netanyahu stands for a very solid ideology. It’s not all about him trying to stay in power and maintain his office. No, no. Behind this is a very dangerous ideology, mainly not believing in any kind of settlement with the Palestinians. He never believed in it, and trying to see the wars as an opportunity, an opportunity to create a new Middle East, an opportunity to annex, an opportunity to expel as many Palestinians as possible, an opportunity to kill as many Palestinians as possible.
Yes, there are limits. He cannot do everything. If it would depend on many Israelis, I don’t know if the majority or not, Israel would have been much harsher in Gaza. People call for it, mainstream people call for it, and mainstream [inaudible] is calling for starving Gaza to death. It became part of the discourse, and it is part of the overall plan of those who think, as they phrase it, it’s either us or them. And we’d rather it be us and not them, and we cannot go on forever living together here. And if we can’t live together, we will be the one who will stay here, and they will either vanish or be killed or expelled or transferred, or whatever. But there is no other solution.
Chris Hedges: Palestinians argue that if Netanyahu accomplishes his goals in Gaza, which, of course, is the depopulation of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, the West Bank is next. I think you have 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank, about 700,000 settlers. Is that the next stage?
Gideon Levy: Yes, but I’m not sure it will be possible because I’m not sure it will be possible even in Gaza. I don’t see it happening that Israel will expel 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza. Where to? The Egyptians will never let it happen. There is no way to expel them.
So it’s not that the Israeli intention have some limits. No, there are no limits there, but there are limits to the capability of Israel. And same for the West Bank. Look, they transfer the West Bank, or the ethnic cleansing started in ’67, not now. Wherever and whenever they could, they did. By the time we are talking now, they are doing it systematically in the Jordan River, in the Jordan Valley and in South Hebron, expelling shepherds. There are dozens of villages which were already left by the inhabitants because they couldn’t live anymore with the violence of the settlers. So you see it here and there, but there are limits to the capability. No more limits. Only the limits of how achievable it is.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Lebanon. I don’t think there’s any other way to read what happened with the exploding pagers and walkie talkies, Israel had to know that there would be a response. Up until now, Hezbollah, like Iran, has, I think, carefully calibrated its responses, because they don’t want a regional war. But there are just so many ways this can go wrong, including, of course, the occupation of southern Lebanon. Once again, how do you see what’s happening in Lebanon?
Gideon Levy: First of all, I’m very, very worried that he’s going for a ground operation, and a ground operation will be a game changer, and I think we are very close to it. Even if Netanyahu is not in favor, his partners don’t leave him any choice, his partner in the coalition, and you heard it just today, when there was a an idea for a ceasefire offered by the United States and France. And when he got on the plane on the way to New York, he didn’t say anything. But when he got off after he got so many objections from his partners, immediately put it off the table. So he’s quite taken hostage by the extremists in his government.
But in any case, I’m very scared that we are going for ground operation and then we are really in trouble. Everyone is in trouble then. And I think that, again, it’s all about the capabilities, not about any restraints that Israel will put on itself. I would say even something more outrageous. Until now, I’m very careful, until now, Hezbollah is more fearful than Israel, in using its force. Maybe it will change tonight, but until now, they are more fearful and more responsible. Israel is going all the way and doing anything possible to push Hezbollah to go for an all out war. It’s very clear we are doing anything possible to push them to the wall, and then they will start to launch rockets on Tel Aviv, and then we have an overall war.
Chris Hedges: And is that because they believe that they can break Hezbollah? That if they use this overwhelming violence, including, of course, they’re now bombing parts of Beirut, once again, as they decimated West Beirut. Is that what they believe? That they think that they can, that this will break Hezbollah and break Iran?
Gideon Levy: Exactly as they believe that they can break Hamas, and with Hamas, they failed, and Hamas is much weaker than Hezbollah. And they failed just months ago, and we don’t draw any lessons out of it. It’s unbelievable. It’s not history from years ago. It’s from now, they didn’t break Hamas at all. And here they go for the same strategy also with Lebanon, believing that they have to crush Hamas and Hezbollah and that it is possible. ….But we saw already that in Gaza, it didn’t work. So why would it work in Lebanon, for God’s sake? With a much stronger organization, with a much more massive Iranian commitment than to Hamas.
Chris Hedges: Paint for me the worst scenario. What worries you the most about where we could head?
Gideon Levy: For the short run, it’s a regional war. But for the long run…
Chris Hedges: When you say regional war, are you including Iran and Syria?
Gideon Levy: Yes, sure, sure. In one way or the other, sure. That’s the worst scenario, if Iran gets in. But for the long run, my concerns are much different. First of all, as an Israeli who never sought to leave Israel and will not leave Israel, it’s becoming an impossible place to live in, and that’s a major concern for me, personally.
It is also about the world normalizing it and learning to live with it. I am very afraid that what happened to the American natives might happen to the Palestinians. Many of my friends used to say, no, there is no example in the world in which people struggled over their rights and failed. Finally, justice will prevail. I look at the American natives, and this is not the case. Palestinians can turn into it. The world will, at a certain stage, will be sick and tired of this whole thing. Things will become normalized, legitimized, and it will be very clear that the world lives in peace with a clear declared apartheid state, which is the darling of the West. This might happen, we are not far from this. And then we are really living forever in an apartheid state with all the consequences. I can’t see a more probable scenario than this right now.
Chris Hedges: I mean the only thing I would add is that in order to subdue the indigenous population in the United States, they had to kill 90 percent of Native Americans by 1898, I think that was Wounded Knee; 90 percent had been killed.
Gideon Levy: This is true. But first of all, Israel is doing its job in killing not 90 percentbut in Gaza, I think we killed already, in this war, if I’m not mistaken, 5 percent.
Chris Hedges: Well, Israel’s killed a lot, more than 40,000. I mean, there’s so many, I know so many Palestinians, and they just tick off, as you must have heard, the numbers of missing, the people that are unaccounted for.
Gideon Levy: So we are doing the job. We are getting there. And secondly, we are killing the Palestinian people. The people of Gaza, after this war, will not be the same people. We broke all the solidarity there, all the social networks. I mean, we are really breaking them as a people. We don’t need necessarily to kill them physically, but we are killing their spirits. We are killing… you see that they must be broken people. It’s not clear yet, because none of us can get there and see what’s going on, what is really going on. But this is killing. My book is called Killing of Gaza. It’s not only the physical killing, it is really also the national killing, the killing of the spirit, the killing of morality, the killing of values, the killing of everything which is human. So we are on the right way.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was journalist Gideon Levy. We were discussing his book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe. I want to thank Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis], Diego [Ramos] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com,
Gideon Levy: And I would like, Chris, to thank you for this very, very challenging and interesting conversation, at least for me. Thank you for having me.
Chris Hedges: Well, I’ve long, long, long respected your work, which is real journalism in a world where there’s less and less of it.
Gideon Levy: Thank you very much.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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