Reading Hell

 

Gideon Levy

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy points out that, “in Hebrew, ‘Gaza’, pronounced ‘Aza, is short for Azazel, which is associated with hell. Of the multitude of curses hurled at me these days from every street corner, ‘Go to hell/Gaza’ is among the gentler ones.” [1] Levy’s recent book The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe collects a selection of his Haaretz columns spanning the years 2014-2024 and represents the most liberal perspective tolerated in the Jewish state.

The columns present a panoramic and surprisingly frank set of vignettes illustrating the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and in Israeli prisons, as in the following passage relating the mistreatment of Hamas members:

The beatings became a daily affair. Occasionally the guards demanded of prisoners that they kiss an Israeli flag and declaim, “Am Yisrael chai” – “The people of Israel live!” They were also ordered to curse the prophet Mohammed. The usual call to prayer in the cells was prohibited. […]

On October 29, the supply of running water to the cells was halted, except between 2 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. And each cell was permitted only one bottle for storing water for an entire day. That was to be shared by 10 inmates, including for use in the toilet inside the cell. The doors of the toilet were ripped off by the guards; the inmates covered themselves with a blanket when they relieved themselves. To avoid a stench in the cell, they tried to contain themselves until water was available.

During the hour and a half when there was running water, the prisoners allocated five minutes in the toilet to each cellmate. With no cleaning supplies, they cleaned the toilet and the floor with the bit of shampoo they were given, using their bare hands. There was no electricity at all. Lunch consisted of a small cup of yogurt, two small, half-cooked sausages and seven slices of bread. In the evening they received a small bowl of rice. Sometimes the guards delivered the food by throwing it on the floor.

On October 29, the inmates of Abu Halil’s cell requested a squeegee to wash the floor. The response to that was to send the terrifying Keter unit into their cell. “Now you will be like dogs,” the guards ordered. The prisoners’ hands were cuffed behind their back. Even before they were shackled, they were ordered to move only with their upper body bent over. They were led to the kitchen, where they were stripped and forced to lie one on top of the other, a pile of 10 naked prisoners. Abu Halil was the last. There, they were beaten with clubs and spat on.

A guard then started to stuff carrots into the anus of Abu Halil and other prisoners. [2]  

Even this was not enough humiliation. “Dogs urinated on their thin mattresses, leaving an awful smell,” Levy relates, and still more horrors are detailed [3]. Page after page relates wounds, deaths, and humiliations visited on the Palestinian people, making for a rather oppressive and hopeless reading experience.

Levy frequently makes himself the star of his book, however – writing, for example, “I am thinking about the Gazans now when it seems like no one else in the world cares what happens to them anymore” [4], and impressing upon readers that he is the most moral man in the universe.

Much of Levy’s discourse is geared toward American liberal sensibilities. In a 2017 column, for instance, he despairs of the “insanity” of US and Israeli border walls [5], drawing a parallel between white nativism in the US and Israeli nationalism. In 2022, he notes that “only whites [sic] will take part in the election”, Israel being a “regime in which elections are held only for whites, namely Jews”, and he also makes the expected comparison with South African apartheid [6]. He similarly trivializes his country’s crimes when he laments that Israeli “McCarthyism and fascism reign” [7]. Mining the same rhetorical vein, he decries Giora Eiland’s “Nazi proposal” for a weaponized epidemic to beat down the resistance in Gaza [8].

Typical of Jewish entryists into the pro-Palestinian movement, Levy draws a hard line of demarcation between advocacy for Palestinian rights and Hamas apologetics. In his introduction to the book, he reminds readers that Hamas perpetrated “a vicious assault that killed without distinction civilians and soldiers, women, men, old people and babies” [9] – offering no evidence, of course, for that last claim – and he also likens Hamas to ISIS [10], an organization that for the entirety of its history has confined its activities to violence directed against geopolitical adversaries of Israel.

Hamas “cannot be absolved of criminal responsibility toward its own people” [11], he asserts, because, as he writes in a 2014 column, “Not only does it aim its rockets at civilian population centers in Israel […] it also leaves the Gazan civilian population vulnerable.” [12] Hamas is “undemocratic” and “cruel”, “hiding ammunition in schools and hospitals” [13]. “The truth is, ‘animals’ isn’t even an appropriate term for the crimes committed by the Hamas invaders on Saturday,” he reflects following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood [14]. “Hamas is a despicable organization,” he feels compelled to remind his readership [15] as he compliantly sticks the “terrorists” label on the resistance group [16], which must be abhorred for holding its captives in “unbearably harsh conditions” [17]. Returning to the baby-killers trope, he claims that a “baby in Nir Oz was murdered by Hamas scum with indescribable cruelty.” [18] Describing the beating, blindfolding, and medical neglect of prisoners, he expresses shame that “We have become like Hamas” – the unsubstantiated implication being that Hamas also subjects its prisoners to the crimes Israelis commit against Palestinian detainees [19].

Notwithstanding the sympathy he expresses for the Palestinians, Levy remains a compromised Zionist. He once favored a two-state solution [20] but acknowledges that “the two-state solution is dead. […] I would be happy to be proven wrong,” he writes, because “the two-state solution was once, indeed, the logical and implementable choice. What remains, however, is the possibility of a single state.” [21] “In the Palestinian territories, and also in growing circles around the world, there is talk of a free Palestine between the Jordan and the sea,” he worries: “One that has no place for Jews.” [22] His purpose, therefore, would seem to be to salvage what he can of the Zionist project by persuading Israelis and their American enablers that they will lose all support and everything they have built if they continue to disregard Palestinian rights.

“For 57 years, Israel has been maintaining a regime of wrongdoing and evil,” he writes [23]. That Levy limits Israel’s “regime of wrongdoing and evil” to fifty-seven years indicates that he perceives nothing fundamentally wrong with the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and that he sees no reason to rectify the dispossession of the Nakba. Most bizarrely, he refers to a “people […] dispossessed of its land […] in part by its own fault.” [24] Israel, anyway, is “not the only guilty party and does not bear full responsibility, but it has a decisive role in Gaza’s fate.” [25] “There’s no absolving Israel of responsibility, even if Hamas shares in the guilt,” he further equivocates [26], also positing an equivalence of Hamas corruption and that of Israel’s leaders [27].

Levy’s contentions, however, are inconsistent. Elsewhere, as in one of his 2014 columns, he admits Hamas’s demands are reasonable [28]. In a 2016 column, he acknowledges that the experience of the West Bank under Fatah proves Hamas right [29]. Then, in 2018, he asserts that “anyone who does not want to forever live in an evil country must respect the embers that the young people of the Gaza Strip are still trying to stoke. Were it not for the [arsonist] kites, the fires, the Qassam rockets, the Palestinians would have entirely exited the awareness of everyone in Israel.” [30] Again, he declares: “The Gaza Strip has no choice. Nor does Hamas. Any attempt to pin the blame on the organization – which I only wish was more secular, more feminist and more democratic – is an evasion of responsibility.” [31] As late as 2022, he concedes:

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 open 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. […] One thing is certain: If they put down their weapons, they are doomed.” [32]

By the end of 2023, however, Levy changes his tune. The men of Hamas “have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Is there any hope in that? No.” [33] “Now the war is killing it [i.e., Gaza] for good,” he weeps in another column [34]. Like almost all liberal advocates for Palestine, Levy prefers to see Gaza as something small and defenseless, like a wounded puppy to be coddled and pitied. It is those Palestinians who have been maimed and murdered, not the ones who engage in armed resistance, who deserve the world’s solidarity in Levy’s book. Palestinians earn sympathy as long as they are harmless corpses. Like almost all liberal advocates for Palestine, too, Levy pretends to believe in an imaginary distinction between bad Hamas and the good Palestinians, arguing that “Gazans are the hostages of both Israel and Hamas” [35]. As Palestinian academic Khaled Hroub contends, “the idea of […] eliminating Hamas” is “a very absurd, very silly one, because this is not an alien group coming to Palestine from another planet. This is produced from within the people.” [36] “Support for Hamas, it can be assumed, has skyrocketed here [in the West Bank] since the war broke out,” Levy eventually gets around to acknowledging [37], for the reason that: “The more it is hit in Gaza, the more its political strength grows among Palestinians” [38]. “Hamas has come out stronger. […] it has become the hero of the Arab world,” he writes with regret. Israel, meanwhile, is “hated across the world” [39].

Consequently, Levy dutifully makes sure to sneak moments of pathos into his book for the beleaguered Jews. “On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the image of the fire burning my grandmother and grandfather always appears before my eyes,” he confesses [40], adding: “Reporters and anchors call Hamas Nazis in a repulsive display of Holocaust trivialization and denial” [41]. More Jewish suffering comes in an anecdote about an Israeli woman who had a stroke and now lives in danger near the border with Lebanon: “When the sirens wail, her husband carries her to the dim stairwell whose floor is black with dirt; there they shelter from the rockets and hope for the best.” [42]. “The poverty and need cry out here” in the north, he adds [43]. Levy also humanizes Israelis in southern Israel, writing about a woman with cancer and her neighbor who has panic attacks [44]. He is also not above soliciting sympathy for the authorities. In Sderot, a “police sapper, who lost many comrades, tells us heroic stories.” [45] He bemoans Hamas captive Omer Wenkert’s colitis [46] and believes “Israelis deserve a moment of joy in the hell they’ve been living in for months” [47].

Levy sees “Bucha sights” at Kibbutz Be’eri, thus encouraging liberals to feel for Israel some of the same sympathy they extend to Zelensky’s Ukraine [48]. Hamas’s cruelty, he would have readers understand, even extends to innocent animals:

In the yard lies the corpse of a large, light-colored dog, shot in the head. The dog is covered with a towel and the flies swarm on the carcass. In the nearby house lies another dog’s corpse, also big and light, also shot in the head. Perhaps these two beautiful dogs were friends in their lives. [49]

Israel, Levy therefore reasons, conducts “a just war using patently unjust methods” [50]. In one episode of this “just” cause, an Israeli rescue operation that freed two captives and killed seventy-four Arabs was “moral and fully justified.” Levy only wishes Israelis would spare a thought and remembrance for the morally “justified” deaths [51]. Still, “Israel did have a choice: Don’t go to war,” he writes elsewhere, again showing inconsistency: “If these are its results, it would have been better to show restraint.” [52] He concedes that “Israel has provoked Iran constantly” [53]. Even so, the 4/1/24 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus “may have been justified”, although Levy worries about the consequences for Israel [54].

“But are there any leaders in Israel who would act in a fundamentally different way toward Gaza and the Palestinians?” he asks, answering himself: “No way.” [55]. Levy explains cynically that the Israeli left “wises up” from its liberalism once a war begins [56]. “Israel’s problem is its mainstream, not its lunatic fringes,” he can honestly acknowledge: “The incitement to the genocide of the Palestinian people may have been invented by Meir Kahane, but it’s already nearly in the public domain.” [57]

With significantly less honesty, he blames Israeli establishment media for the public’s indifference and avers in a 2020 column that “Israelis don’t have a clue about what’s happening in Gaza, not a notion of what the military is doing in their name. That’s why they’re clamoring for more, why they’re so certain of the justice of their cause.” [58] “We can assume that if more Israelis saw the pictures from Gaza, at least some of them would cry out and call for a halt to this horror,” he dreams aloud [59]. “More and more Israelis are beginning to understand, daring to speak and to sober up from their post-October 7 ‘sobering-up’,” he wants readers to believe [60]. In his imagination, the Israeli left “was once the camp of conscience and humanity” – something it might become again, presumably, if only the people could be exposed to more accurate journalism [61].

“It was not too many years ago that the same world was in love with the State of Israel, when it acted as a member of the family of nations,” he fantasizes [62]. Israel after Al-Aqsa Flood unfortunately “turned so quickly […] from a cherished country that inspired compassion into a pariah state” [63], and Levy of course would prefer to see his nation regain “cherished” status. He even gives the impression of a lost world of Jew-Arab friendships and quotes an Arab: “We grew up in Israel […] If our friends there hear what happened to my sons, they will cry.” [64]

“Israel’s dignity will indeed be damaged, Hamas will be crowned the winner of the war” if Israel releases its prisoners and the war is ended, Levy writes with resignation [65]. The world must force peace on Israel, however: “Israel’s weakness and dependence following this war must be exploited, for Israel’s benefit as well.” [66] More ridiculously, “Every Israeli patriot” should want Israel’s war criminals brought to justice, Levy contends [67]. The catch is that he no doubt also wants to see Hamas “war criminals” – the Palestinian resistance – “brought to justice”. At the end of his book, in one of many self-refuting passages, Levy profiles Sufyan Abu Zaydeh, “one of the prominent people of peace belonging to the Fatah movement during the era of the Oslo Accords”, who later lost several members of his family in a missile strike and now lives as a refugee [68]. If this is how Israel treats “people of peace”, then what motivation do the “terrorist” “scum” of Hamas have not to violently resist Zionist occupation?

Levy lodges against Hamas leadership the serious criticism that they failed to provide for the adequate defense of Gaza’s people in advance of Al-Aqsa Flood, given the inevitability of disproportionate Israeli retaliation. Khaled Hroub suggests that “what was planned was a small-scale operation aiming to kidnap a group of soldiers, not civilians, and then take them back to Gaza Strip in a very swift operation and then do a prisoner’s swap” and that the “success of the operation […] surprised the in-field leaders” who “expanded the operation” but were unprepared for the blowback [69]. Jeroen Gunning, a scholar in the field of critical terrorism studies, offers that it is “possible that Hamas expected the Israeli response to be more diluted than it actually was” and that Hamas leadership counted on more extensive Axis of Resistance activity on multiple fronts and that Gaza therefore would not bear the full brunt of the response [70]. “It’s also possible that Hamas expected the international community to put more pressure on Israel sooner,” he adds [71].

Levy does much to publicize and dramatize the horrendous plight of the Gazans, and for that, perhaps, he deserves some credit. In perpetuating the meme of Hamas baby-killers, however, Levy undermines the empathy he ostensibly seeks to generate for Palestine. He admittedly stops short of repeating the yarn about the “forty beheaded babies”, but, as Hroub explains, “claims like the one that the Qassam fighters […] beheaded 40 babies were central to Israel’s strategy of depicting Hamas – and by extension Gazans who had voted for Hamas – as subhuman and therefore not worthy of human rights” [72] – and Levy at no point in his book bothers to refute the outrageous lies Israeli and US media spread about crimes perpetrated by Qassam fighters in Al-Aqsa Flood. Such atrocity narratives serve to justify Israel’s war to destroy Hamas; but, as Hroub explains, “eradicating Hamas would require a full genocide because the majority of Palestinians would support Hamas actions in spite of Israel’s genocidal response.” [73] In the end, The Killing of Gaza is about as good a book as one could expect a Zionist Jew to write on the subject – which is to say, not good enough.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Levy, Gideon. The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe. New York, NY: Verso, 2024, p. 33.

[2] Ibid., pp. 270-271.

[3] Ibid., p. 272.

[4] Ibid., p. 129.

[5] Ibid., p. 54.

[6] Ibid., p. 112.

[7] Ibid., p. 137.

[8] Ibid., p. 156.

[9] Ibid., p. 17.

[10] Ibid., p. 130.

[11] Ibid., p. 18.

[12] Ibid., p. 28.

[13] Ibid., p. 29.

[14] Ibid., p. 127.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., p. 147.

[17] Ibid., p. 196.

[18] Ibid., p. 148.

[19] Ibid., p. 254.

[20] Ibid., p. 18.

[21] Ibid., p. 19.

[22] Ibid., p. 20.

[23] Ibid., p. 281.

[24] Ibid., p. 31.

[25] Ibid., p. 255.

[26] Ibid., p. 21.

[27] Ibid., p. 32.

[28] Ibid., pp. 30-32.

[29] Ibid., pp. 45-46.

[30] Ibid., p. 73.

[31] Ibid., p. 74.

[32] Ibid., p. 105.

[33] Ibid., p. 126.

[34] Ibid., p. 216.

[35] Ibid., p. 212.

[36] Cobban, Helena, et al. Understanding Hamas: And Why That Matters. New York, NY: OR Books, 2024, pp. 59-60.

[37] Levy, Gideon. The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe. New York, NY: Verso, 2024, p. 158.

[38] Ibid., p. 149.

[39] Ibid., p. 245.

[40] Ibid., p. 116.

[41] Ibid., p. 138.

[42] Ibid., p. 139.

[43] Ibid., p. 141.

[44] Ibid., pp. 131-132.

[45] Ibid., p. 133.

[46] Ibid., p. 211.

[47] Ibid., p. 289.

[48] Ibid., p. 135.

[49] Ibid., p. 134.

[50] Ibid., p. 171.

[51] Ibid., p. 229.

[52] Ibid., p. 261.

[53] Ibid., p. 264.

[54] Ibid. 263.

[55] Ibid., p. 187.

[56] Ibid., pp. 137-138.

[57] Ibid., p. 218.

[58] Ibid., p. 95.

[59] Ibid., p. 96.

[60] Ibid., p. 262.

[61] Ibid., p. 255.

[62] Ibid., p. 239.

[63] Ibid., p. 276.

[64] Ibid., p. 251.

[65] Ibid., pp. 220-221.

[66] Ibid., p. 236.

[67] Ibid., p. 276.

[68] Ibid., pp. 288-289.

[69] Cobban, Helena, et al. Understanding Hamas: And Why That Matters. New York, NY: OR Books, 2024, pp. 54-55.

[70] Ibid., pp. 77-78.

[71] Ibid., p. 78.

[72] Ibid., p. 66.

[73] Ibid., p. 67.