Praise and Criticism
Levy's writing has earned him numerous awards, including the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award in 1996 by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Anna Lindh foundation journalism award in 2008 for an article he wrote about Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces, and the Peace Through Media Award in 2012. He has been described as "a powerful liberal voice" by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and praised by Johann Hari of The Independent as "the heroic Israeli journalist". Journalist and literary critic Nicholas Lezard in his review of Levy's book The Punishment of Gaza described him as "an Israeli dedicated to saving his country's honour," although "there is much of the story he leaves out." He has been profiled in Le Monde and Der Spiegel. "He has a global name. He may be the most famous and the most invited journalists in Israel", wrote Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini.
On the other hand, he has been criticized for being anti-Israeli and supporting Palestinian radicalism. "Is it wrong to ask of reporters in a country that is in the midst of a difficult war to show a little more empathy for their people and their country?" asked Amnon Dankner of the Maariv newspaper. Ben Dror Yemini, the editor of the opinion page of Maariv, called Levy one of the "propagandists for the Hamas". Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, wrote " the current Israeli heroes, from whom the Palestinians garner support for their ways, Gideon Levy ..." In 2008, Arutz Sheva reported that Levy's article about the Jerusalem bulldozer attack was translated into Arabic for a Hamas website. In 2006, Gideon Ezra, Israel's former deputy Minister of Internal Security, suggested that the General Security Services should monitor Levy as a borderline security risk.
Israeli novelist Irit Linur set off a wave of subscription cancellations to Haaretz in 2002, when she wrote an open letter to the paper cancelling her own subscription. "It is a person's right to be a radical leftist, and publish a newspaper in accordance with his world view... However Haaretz has reached the point where its anti-Zionism has become stupid and evil," she wrote. She also accused Levy of amateurism because he does not speak Arabic.
Other public figures also cancelled their subscriptions, including Roni Daniel, the military and security correspondent for Israeli Channel 2. Levy himself joked that there is a thick file of anti-Levy cancellations in the Haaretz newsroom.
In an open letter to Levy in 2009, Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua, formerly a supporter of Levy, described his comparison of Gazan-Israeli death tolls as absurd and questioned his motives.
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“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
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