In response to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, Amiram Levin, a former Labor Party hopeful, retired Major General, and former deputy head of Mossad, has called to “flatten” whole neighborhoods in Gaza.
In a tweet on April 11, Levin wrote:
“Allow them a port, an airport and a beach riviera.
But also, flatten every neighborhood from which rockets are fired towards our towns, [rockets] which are meant to kill tens and hundreds of peaceful citizens.
Four years, four operations, same results, it’s time to change the equation.”
Levin is suggesting a wild “carrot and stick” approach. Gaza has been under strict blockade since 2007, which includes the sea off its coast. Gaza also can’t use its former airport which operated from 1998 to 2001, because Israel destroyed it. So Levin says Israel should allow loosening the siege in some respects while also promising to “flatten every neighborhood,” This is Levin’s supposed balance – offer a carrot, and commit a genocidal war crime with no hesitation.
Actually, another tweet by Levin two days earlier in April 9 confirms that he is very much bent on bloody revenge – it was on the day of the first recent Israeli assault:
“Justified revenge.
Sometimes you can’t suffice with merely blocking a “ticking bomb,” the state is permitted to take revenge without blinking and apologizing.
Chapeau to [Prime Minister] Netanyahu, [Defense Minister] Galant, the army chief of staff and the security establishment for righteous revenge upon those responsible for despicable murders against innocents.”
So, there you have it – revenge, three times in that short tweet.
Reminiscent of Smotrich
Levin is an influential figure on the Israeli left, but this is far from the first time he has uttered such an outrageous call to genocide. In 2017, he threatened to “tear the Palestinians apart” and “toss them across the Jordan” – he said that the Palestinians “deserved the occupation” and that “next time we’ll fight here, they will not remain, we will toss them across the Jordan.”
Levin is also on record for saying that “most of these [Palestinian] people are born to die anyway, we just need to help them to it.”
Astonishingly, Amnesty International Israel and a coalition other Israeli NGOs last year considered Levin as a “security expert” for its “Initiative for Security and Human Rights.” That effort was meant “to share knowledge accumulated by security experts and human rights activists in order to promote the understanding that human rights and security do not contradict each other, and in fact, in many cases the two even contribute to each other.” Fortunately, this initiative did not take off.
Levin’s call to flatten neighborhoods is reminiscent of Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s calls to “wipe out” the Palestinian village of Huwwara just over a month ago in revenge for a shooting against two settlers that occurred there. Someone on Levin’s Twitter thread actually noticed that similarity, and asked:
“Is this the ‘wipe out Huwwara’ of the left?”
To which Levin responded:
“Absolutely not.”
But the comment of the responder was on point. It’s precisely the same, and it wasn’t shared in a vacuum – he made the suggestion in the midst of a campaign that, judging by history, could well end up doing what Levin suggests.
“Wipe out Huwwara”, “Flatten every [Gazan] neighborhood” – it really is the same thing.
Representative of the Israeli left
Like the veteran centrist journalist Ron Ben Yishai, who has recently defended the killing of children and continuation of extrajudicial assassinations, Levin has also recently warned of Apartheid and against the current government’s judicial reform/overhaul plans. In an interview for Israel’s Channel 12 news in February, Levin said: “We are in an Apartheid, if the [judicial] reform passes there will be bloodshed and the army will be defeated.”
This is the maddening duality of the Israeli left – the militarism is so dominant they just can’t perceive a liberalism that is not soaked in it. It was pretty much the same with the late, celebrated author Amos Oz, who opined that “you need a big stick in order to inhibit and subdue aggressiveness.”
It’s the same equation with Benny Gantz, who came into politics in 2019 as a supposed liberal antidote to Netanyahu, but boasting of having “returned Gaza to the stone age” in 2014, when he was army chief of staff. His campaign featured drone videos of flattened Gazan neighborhoods, as well as videos of a targeted assassination of a Hamas official – which he promised more of if he was elected.
These people are the liberal heroes in Israel. It’s almost unbelievable.
Finally, one might think that with the numbers that Israelis have recently managed to muster against the judicial reform/overhaul, they might also be able to protest the Gaza massacres. But no, it has just been reported that Saturday’s demonstration this week will be postponed precisely because of sensitivity to the onslaught. Haaretz reports:
‘The organizers behind the weekly protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul have announced they are postponing Saturday night’s demonstration in Tel Aviv in light of the government’s campaign in Gaza. “We continue to have our fingers on the pulse,” they warned. “Don’t let the Israeli government mistake our intentions, we are defending democracy and will make sure that Israel remains democratic.”
This is the first weekly protest to be canceled since the demonstrations against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plan began 19 weeks ago.’
H/t Ofer Neiman, Tom Pessah
Since Israelis are the terrorists, e.g.
“Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won”
https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2017/01/terrorism-israeli-state
if we apply Amiram Levin’s logic from an objective perspective, the Israeli leadership would be assassinated and the Knesset flattened.
Levin likely assumes that 30 centuries ago God gave Palestine to the Jews unconditionally and in perpetuity. Most people however, including many Jews, do not accept this premise. Without this premise his logic falls apart.
This is yet another example of the Israelis’ arrogant impunity.
This is someone who supports genocide. Hell is too kind a place for such monsters.
Israeli leaders have openly called for Palestinians/Arabs to be put in extermination camps, entire villages to be “erased”, have Gaza bombed to the middle ages, or in this case, razed.
They have called Arabs, snakes, beasts, and that “One Million Arabs Are Not Worth One Jewish fingernail”. Jewish supremacy at its worst any way you look at it.
These are vile and anti Arab statements, and yet they have been able to convince Americans that it is the Palestinians who are “antisemitc” and want to wipe out Israel “off the map”, while in reality it is this apartheid nation that is systematically stealing more disputed lands, building illegal settlements, and massacring unarmed civilians, especially women and children, in large numbers. Palestinians, their lands, and resources, are being “wiped out” off the maps, and they have lost lives and property far more than they should, and the maps (including the shrinking map of Palestine) shows they are left with nothing now.
If ONE Arab called for Tel Aviv to be bombed to the stone age, or have the city razed, the Israeli lobbies here, including AIPAC and even the ADL, will be howling like wolves, playing victim, and raising funds.
America has constantly shown that Palestinian/Arab lives are cheap, irrelevant, and not worth saving, unlike the Israeli/Jewish lives we keep defending with every resource we can.
……… not the first Zionist Supremacist to call for the obliteration of Gaza!