Gideon Levy is an award-winning leading Israeli journalist, as well as author of opinion pieces and a weekly column for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. He is a critic of Israeli anti-Palestinian apartheid and has been writing outspokenly from the frontline of the regional crisis for decades.
Gideon Levy’s The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, translated by David B Green and published by Verso (October 2024) brings together his on-the-ground perspectives of events leading up to the Hamas attack of last autumn along with the ensuing devastation in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.
“Unafraid to rebut propaganda from mainstream Israeli and global media, Levy is a voice of dissent: a journalist from Israel who documents its colonisation policies and their disastrous impact”
These published pieces, dating from 2014 to June of this year, allow a critical look at current events, which he puts in their essential historical and political contexts.
Yet, this is not merely an old wine in a new bottle: the pieces, some dating back a decade, are as fresh now as if they were written yesterday, but he also adds an introduction (tellingly entitled “Catastrophe Report”) to the book, and an afterword, written in May 2024, which ends gloomily with the statement that “there are no more words.”
However, there were and continue to be more words as Levy regularly publishes his hard-hitting criticism of Israel. Unafraid to rebut propaganda from mainstream Israeli and global media, Levy is a voice of dissent: a journalist from Israel who documents its colonisation policies and their disastrous impact. This book represents a compelling collection of his writings at a time when their directness was most needed.
The Killing of Gaza’s harsh Israeli condemnation of Israel shows how the longstanding routine debasement of Gazans by Israelis, intensified with the war against Hamas, became a primary trigger for further regional violence.
It is important that he and others in Haaretz, the country’s oldest newspaper, still critique Israeli propaganda. Yet, this effort may now be under serious attack: the Israeli cabinet on 24 November sanctioned Haaretz, citing its critical coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The measure calls for all government staff and those of state-owned companies to end communications with the paper and stop advertising in or subscribing to it.
This all started a long time before 7 October 2023
The book’s core content is arranged chronologically, with the first part starting in 2014 and showing the roots of the conflict.
Reading these earlier pieces, the inevitability of the current violence is revealed. Not that this idea is solely Levy’s or even a new one: almost three decades ago, Sara Roy’s scholarly The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development first argued in depth and detail that Israeli policy towards the Gazans blocked economic development.
Against such de-developmental efforts, countermoves including violence came more naturally.
Her pioneering research, coming from the child of Holocaust survivors, gave the lie to pretences that Gazans’ reactions to their oppression, including violent militancy, were “anti-semitism” that suddenly arose out of thin air, and her thesis is also Levy’s.
“Based partly on direct Palestinian testimony, this exposure and criticism by Levy of daily reality in Gaza as well as elsewhere under occupation is eloquent”
Gloom for Gaza, the rest of Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere regionally
Part two of The Killing of Gaza then begins with commentary on the events of 7 October and proceeds to mid-2024.
Levy notes in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s major attack that Israel could not effectively imprison over two million Gazans without paying a catastrophic price, and that any reckoning by Israelis must be with Hamas, not directed against all in Gaza.
Yet, his focus is not merely on the Gaza Strip: he also comments extensively on the situation around the West Bank and along the Israel-Lebanon border.
He notes in one piece that while Gaza’s war rages, Israeli troops and settlers grow trigger-happy in Ramallah; and in another, he remarks that the Jenin refugee camp is now “little Gaza.”
Yet, if settler and army violence were not enough, he notes that Israel was also now depriving Jordan Valley Palestinians of water.
Based partly on direct Palestinian testimony, this exposure and criticism by Levy of daily reality in Gaza as well as elsewhere under occupation is eloquent; and he should be read by everyone who wants to better understand the conflict and see for themselves that regional and global silence are no longer possible in the face of atrocity.
However, though the book shines light on a brutal war, Levy is not really pretending to know how to resolve it.
In cases like this, I always recall the thought of the great film director, the late Stanley Kubrick, that to speak eloquently about a problem does not mean that you have solved it.
Indeed, though Levy’s sentiments and analysis are unimpeachable, he has no real solution. In fact, like everybody else on both sides of the Jordan River, Levy is a victim of imperialism, which may nevertheless be resisted in one way or another.
The real hope is that imperial dismantling is now upon us, and with it the winding down of our region’s war, which, as Levy wisely reminds us, did not by any means begin in October of last year.
Riad al Khouri is an independent Jordanian economist
Follow him on LinkedIn: Riad Al Khouri
