Mordechai Vanunu and Gideon Levy are two Israelis whose courage and humanity should be remembered and honoured.

Mordechai Vanunu blew the whistle in 1986 on Israel’s illegal nuclear enrichment program. In the 1950’s the secret Negev Nuclear Facility was hidden in the desert near Dimona far from the prying eyes of UN inspectors, making Israel the first rogue nuclear state in the Middle East. For his efforts to save the world from nuclear weapons proliferation, Vanunu was declared a traitor, lured out of England and illegally abducted from Italy by Mossad agents, and jailed for 18 years. He is still under house arrest in Israel.

Gideon Levy is a reporter for Haaretz, the longest running daily newspaper in Israel. He is also the author of two non-fiction books, The Punishment of Gaza, 2010, and The Killing of Gaza, Reports on a Catastrophe, 2024. While most of the western press is hobbled by holocaust guilt and the fear that criticizing Israel’s actions in Palestine will lead to charges of antisemitism, Levy bears no such burden. The Israelis and the Palestinians are both Semitic races and Levy is Jewish, “an Israeli dedicated to saving his country’s honour,” as noted by Guardian literary critic Nicholas Lezard.

Levy is also a truth-telling journalist. He had been covering Gaza for many years, and when he left in the 1990’s, he thought that the Israeli occupation had ended. He bid Gaza a loving farewell. But when Israeli forces later returned to Gaza, Levy reported that, “The occupation did not end. On the contrary, it is more cruel, criminal, and inhuman today than ever before. Ten years later, in 2005, when Israel disengaged from Gaza, we were much wiser: this time we knew that the occupation had simply changed form. The jailer pulled out of the jail and was now holding its prisoners captive from without. Yes, Gaza was, and still is, the largest prison on Earth, a gruesome experiment performed on living human beings.”

The Punishment of Gaza is a series of articles beginning June 1, 2006, with a simple report about the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Force) cavalier attitude to collateral damage – blow up one Jihadist, kill an entire family in a nearby vehicle. It is preceded by a story of moral double standards: it’s legitimate for Israel to boycott the Palestinian Authority, but illegitimate for anyone to boycott Israel’s government or institutions.

Then the horror begins – one chapter is titled “Making Monsters of Our Finest Young Men” and describes how young pilots go on indiscriminate bombing run training flights:

“In four days they killed 375 people. They did not, and could not, distinguish between a Hamas official and his children, between a traffic cop and a Qassam launch operator, between a weapons cache and a health clinic, between the first and second floors of a densely populated apartment building with dozens of children inside.”

The book continues every month from June 2006 through to the summer of 2009, with each report being more devastating and horrendous than the one before. He concludes his first book with this reflection:

“The Israelis don’t pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before the Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative, and why should they?

Even the cruelest terrorist attacks to befall the country haven’t instilled an understanding among the Israelis about the connection between cause and effect, between occupation and terrorism. Thanks to the media and politicians – two of the worst agents for dumbing down and blinding Israeli society – we learned that 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.”

Gaza and the West Bank were powder kegs primed to explode since 1948. And then came Saturday, October 7, 2023.

As the sun was rising that morning, Gideon Levy was jogging through a park near his home in northern Tel Aviv. Suddenly the missile alert sirens began wailing. He had been about to release an editorial that morning, recalling the fall of the Berlin Wall and writing hopefully that the walls around the world’s largest ghetto would soon be crumbling before their very eyes. But when he arrived home his editor called him “with the news of horrifying actions being reported from the south, including mass murder and the abduction of hundreds of Israeli citizens to Gaza.”

In response, he wrote the following editorial: “Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed. We’ll arrest, kill , harass, dispossess, and we’ll protect the settlers busy with their pogroms. We’ll visit Joseph’s Tomb, Othniel’s Tomb, and Joshua’s Altar in the Palestinian territories, and, of course, the Temple Mount – over 5,000 Jews on Sukkot alone.

We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes, smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right.”

Gideon Levy wrote “The Killing of Gaza, Reports on a Catastrophe” in 2024. Part 1 documents the horrors of each year from 2017 to 2022. In Part 2, each chapter documents the vengeful brutality of every month from October 2023 until June 2024. He concluded his novel with a reflection on the Israeli reaction to the news that four hostages had just been rescued.

“Obviously the moving rescue should have been celebrated. Israelis deserve a moment of joy for the hell they’ve been living in for months, which isn’t over yet. But one cannot ignore the price paid by Palestinians, even if there are people who believe that the price was unavoidable or even entirely justified.

A society that ignores so blatantly the price paid by tens of thousands of people, with their lives, bodies, souls and property, for the rescue of four of its hostages and for a moment of joy for its members, is a society that is missing something vital. It is a society that has lost its conscience.”

We are bearing witness to some of the greatest atrocities we have seen since the horrors of World War 2 were revealed to the world. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, deliberate targeting of aid centres, denying aid to the point of starving the survivors of endless missile, drone, tank, and sniper attacks with total disregard for collateral damage to non-combatant  innocent men, women, and children.

In our silence, we are also a society that has lost its conscience. The way I see it.

***

Footnote:

Since Israel’s punishment of Palestine began in 1948, over 65,00 Palestinians and 17,000 Israelis have died, with over 102,000 Palestinians and 30,000 Israelis injured or missing. In the recent conflict since October 7, 2023, an estimated 2000 Israelis and 36,000 Palestinians have died. That is not a biblical “eye for an eye” revenge. That is a kill ratio of 1:18.

*data averaged from: Jewish Virtual Library, Wikipedia, VOX.com, Quora, Britannica