Gideon Levy

Gideon Levy (Hebrew: גדעון לוי, pronounced [ɡidˈʔon leˈvi]; born 1953) is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Levy has won prizes for his articles on human rights in the Israeli-occupied territories. In 2021, he won Israel's top award for journalism, the Sokolov Award. Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv. His father, Heinz (Zvi) Loewy, was born in the town of Saaz in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, and earned a law degree from the University of Prague. He fled the Nazis in 1939 on a flight organized by two Slovakian Jews, together with 800 others. He spent six months on an illegal immigrant boat, the Frossoula, registered under a Panamanian flag, which was denied entry into Turkey and Palestine, and was permitted only temporary anchorage at Tripoli. He was then imprisoned in a detention camp at Beirut for six weeks. The group was then allowed to leave. During its journey, the ship was strafed by Royal Air Force planes, killing two passengers, after which the group was transferred to another ship, the Tiger Hill, which reached Mandate Palestine, where it ran aground at Tel-Aviv's Frischman Beach. His mother, Thea, from Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, was brought to Palestine in a rescue operation for children in 1939, and was placed in a kibbutz. His grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. His father initially opened a bakery in Herzliya with his sister and worked as a newspaper deliveryman, but later found a job as an office clerk.

The family initially lived in poverty, but their lives became relatively comfortable when the German Holocaust reparations arrived. Levy attended Tel Aviv's Ironi Aleph High School. He and his younger brother Rafi often sang together, notably songs by Haim Hefer. During the Six-Day War in 1967, the street adjacent to his home was hit by Arab artillery. In 2007, Levy described his political views while a teenager as mainstream: "I was a full member of the nationalistic religious orgy. We all were under the feeling that the whole project [of Israel] is in an existentialistic danger. We all felt that another holocaust is around the corner."