Gideon Levy Quotes

People who make use of all their senses in trying times are no less patriotic than those whose restraint is lost, whose senses are dimmed and whose brains are washed. This is also the time for the patriot to say: Enough.

We started it. We started it with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it—a real and complete ending. We started the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture.

Thanks to the media and the politicians—two of the worst agents for dumbing down and blinding Israeli society—we learned that the Arabs were born to kill, the whole world is against us, anti-Semitism determines how Israel is dealt with and there is no connection between our actions and the price we pay.

Here and now, it is my war, our war, the war of us all, for which we all bear responsibility, of which we are all guilty. And therefore it is incumbent on us to make our voice heard, a different voice, a ‘hallucinatory’ voice to the ears of the desensitized, a voice that is ‘traitorous,’ ‘base,’ ‘Jew-hating,’ ‘contemptible’—and different. This is not only our right, it is our supreme duty toward the state to which we are so bound, we patriotic scoundrels.

Even Netanyahu’s most scathing critics acknowledged that he deserved credit for doing something that no other world leader had been able to do. Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, credited Netanyahu with playing “a decisive role in obtaining vaccines” and wrote that the prime minister’s opponents “need to put in a kind word—even Satan occasionally does something that’s praiseworthy, and he must be told so.