"So what's the point of a peace movement if it refuses to condemn a war like this?"
Gideon Levy doesn't want to meet in a coffee bar in Tel Aviv. He is
fed up with being hassled in public and spat at, with people not willing
to share the table next to him in restaurants. And now he is fed up
with the constant presence of his bodyguards, not least because they too
have started giving him a hard time about his political views. So he
doesn't go out much any more and we sit in the calm of his living room, a
few hundred yards from the Yitzhak Rabin Centre. Rabin's assassination
by a rightwing Orthodox Jew in 1995 is itself a sobering reminder of the
personal cost of peacemaking in Israel.
In
his column in Haaretz, Levy has long since banged the drum for greater
Israeli empathy towards the suffering of the Palestinians. He is a
well-known commentator on the left, and one of the few prepared to stick
his head above the parapet. Consequently, he is no stranger to
opposition from the right. But this time it is different. Yariv Levin,
coalition chairman of the Likud-Beytenu faction in the Knesset, recently
called for him to be put on trial for treason – a crime which, during
wartime, is punishable by death.
Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv to protest against attacks on Gaza, 26 July 2014. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty
