I don’t get to feel proud as a Jew very often these days, when 300 Jewish communal leaders are beating the drums on Iran, and Jewish organizations support the settlements. But here is an amazing interview with the great Gideon Levy, by Robert Hirschfeld at In These Times. James North, who passed it along, asks: If the New York Times published such astonishing criticisms made by a dissident journalist in the country’s leading publication, it would be the most emailed piece of the day. But the Times won’t tell you this! Read the whole thing. Here are excerpts.
Note the second to last question. It is about the Israel lobby, the power of the lobby. Don’t blame George Bush. don’t blame Netanyahu. Don’t blame the Christian Zionists. Start at home, brother Democrat; blame the lobby.
How did you get from there to where you are now: a journalist famous for ferociously speaking out for Palestinian human rights and a Palestinian state totally free of Israeli occupation?
It was a gradual process. There was no single incident involved. I didn’t suddenly see the light. When I first started covering the West Bank for Haaretz, I was young and brainwashed.
My “journalism school” was the Israeli Army Radio Station, which was not the kind of place to learn the truth about the occupation. I would see settlers cutting down olive trees and soldiers mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, and I would think, “These are exceptions, not part of government policy.” It took me a long time to see that these were not exceptions—they were the substance of government policy. I had failed to make that connection.
Why do Israeli journalists shy away from writing about the day-to-day repression that is an inextricable part of the occupation?
It’s all about self-censorship. Journalists do not want to write critically of the occupation because readers do not want to read about it, and publishers and editors want to keep their readers happy. Since no one is really that interested in the abuses, they don’t get written about. Journalists are also part of the whole machinery of denial and justification and the closing of eyes that includes telling lies and collaborating with lies….
I think today the media is playing an almost criminal role by cooperating with the occupation. If it hadn’t, the occupation probably wouldn’t have lasted this long.
Some Israelis criticize you for writing the same kinds of stories about abuses over and over again.
That’s right. They don’t ask why the abuses continue to happen, they ask why I continue to write about them.
…It is clear from your article that you consider Obama’a [Cairo] speech highly significant.
Absolutely. He gave a new direction. He put things on the table, like the settlements being illegal, that hadn’t been on the table before.
Does the Israeli public believe that if the United States applied enough pressure, the settlements would be dismantled?
I think so. Israel depends on the U.S. in so many ways that saying no would not be an option if pressure was really applied…
When you are on the West Bank working, do you have run-ins with soldiers?
All the time. Once, soldiers raked my car with bullets. If it wasn’t a bulletproof car, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. It happened in 2003. They didn’t know who was in the car, but they shot like crazy. It was a big story at the time. There are still many incidents. Soldiers still aim their weapons at me.
