Sydney Ideas - Gideon Levy

Wednesday 29 November 2017
6:30 pm 8:00 pm

Abercrombie Business School, The University of Sydney City Road Camperdown, NSW Australia (map)

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Lecture title: The Israelis and the occupation: A story of denial

Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist and commentator

Co-presented with the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney and the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine (CJPP)

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist, writing opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz often focusing on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv. In 1974, Levy was drafted into the IDF, where he served as a reporter for Israel Army Radio. From 1978 to 1982 he worked as an aide to Shimon Peres, then leader of the Israeli Labor Party. In 1982, he began to write for the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In 2004, Levy published a compilation of articles entitled Twilight Zone – Life and Death under the Israeli Occupation (2004). His weekly talk show, A Personal meeting with Gideon Levy, was broadcast on Israeli cable TV.

Levy defines himself as a "patriotic Israeli". He criticises what he sees as Israeli society's moral blindness to the effects of its acts of war and occupation.

He has referred to the construction of settlements on private Palestinian land as "the most criminal enterprise in [Israel's] history".

Response by Antony Loewenstein, an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question, The Blogging Revolution and Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe.

Hosted by Professor Dirk Moses, Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.