Full Text | 'Is Israel's War Justified?' Gideon Levy Answers

Karan Thapar recently interviewed Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy, who said that Israel’s war on Iran is ineffective, unjustified, and strategically flawed. Levy criticised widespread Israeli support for war, targeted killings, media self-censorship, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, warning the conflict may strengthen Iran and isolate Israel globally. 

The full text of their conversation, transcribed by Hajara Najeeb, is as follows.

Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to a special interview for the Wire. My guest today is often called the conscience of Israel. The truth is, there are very few others who have the strength of conviction and courage to criticize their country, particularly when it's embroiled in war. So what does he think of Israel's attack on Iran? Does he believe it's justified or the wrong response to the Iranian threat? Was the killing of the Ayatollah the right thing to do? How does he view Benjamin Netanyahu's policies and the Israeli people's support for the war? Those are some of the issues I should raise today with the international award-winning Haaretz columnist and author Gideon Levy. 

Mr. Levy, for decades, Iran has been chanting death to Israel and calls Israel little Satan compared to America's great Satan. In your eyes, does that make Iran an existential threat to Israel?

Gideon Levy: First of all, Karan, let me thank you for being interviewed again. It's always a pleasure to be interviewed by you. 

Words are not enough to make an existential threat. This does not mean that the threats of Iran shouldn't have been taken seriously and they were taken seriously. But as long as Iran did not possess nuclear capabilities, and it doesn't, there was not a real immediate existential threat. No one can claim that Israel (Iran) was an existential threat even though I repeat myself their threats shouldn't be ignored.

KT: Then tell me, to many people it seems that war is Benjamin Netanyahu's first and automatic response to the threat from Iran. But is it in your eyes the right or optimal response?

GL: First of all, I wouldn't relate it only to Netanyahu. I think that's Israel's strategy for many years that war is the first option. The diplomacy is always the less favorite option. You see, throughout the years, you see it also when you come and ask the people in all kind of surveys. The last survey showed that 93% of the Israelis supported launching this war with Iran, 93%. This is a North Korean figure. Where in democracies you have such a figure of 93% of support, no matter in what. So the Israeli instinct, the Israeli mindset always favours war over compromises, over diplomacy, over agreements, that's a matter of fact. Now, in this case, I have no doubts we are now one month in this war, the achievements are very limited, the goals, none of the goals was really achieved, none of them and above all, we don't know where we are aiming. Are we aiming to more months of war and destruction and killings, are we aiming at an agreement which Israel will not be part of? Nobody knows.

KT: Just before the war started, Steve Witkoff famously said that Iran was just two weeks away from making a nuclear bomb. I take it you don't believe that.

GL: It's not a question of belief. All the experts, except Steve Witkoff who is serving a certain purpose and a certain actor, a major actor in this scene, but nobody say it's two weeks, it's ridiculous and if it is two weeks, what happened in June? In June, we were told that Iran was taking decades backwards with its capabilities, so from June to now, they are two weeks away from a bomb. You know everyone can say whatever they want but there are certain things which must be taken as a fact and the fact is that it was not two weeks. I don't know how long it was but all the experts don't see it as two weeks but yes the uranium is still there. Enriched uranium is still there and the danger is still there and it should have been handled in a better way than again a terrible war without achieving anything.

KT: So the war in your eyes is not justified. The problem should have been handled through diplomacy and compromise.

GL: It's not, this time unlike Gaza, this time it's not about justification. It's about a realistic judgment if this war is the best option and in my view this war is not the best option because you see how poor are the achievements and how heavy is the price and we don't know yet how heavy it will be because we might be only in the beginning, I don't know, we might be by the end of this war, we might also face more months of war of attrition which Israel United States and Iran cannot handle. Maybe Iran can but Israel for sure not.

KT: Let me ask you about the targeted assassinations of Ayatollah Khamanei, Ali Larijani, the defence minister, the army chief, the IRGC chief. Were those targeted killings justified, or in your eyes do they raise moral questions that your countrymen do not want to address and answer? 

GL: Again, more than moral question, they raise practical questions. Are they clever? Are they moral? No. I don't believe in any moral murders. Let's call it by its name. Those are murders. Those are murders. If it would have been by an organised crime family, you would have called it murders, ordered murders, planned murders. You call it, the world calls it assassination. But let's remember by the end of the day those are acts of murder and by definition I cannot be enthusiastic about it. Israel made it as a strategy. Israel in the last two years killed half of the leadership in the Middle East. I don't want to be part of this. I mean that's not a strategy. Here and there in a war you might find it inevitable but to make it as a strategy and to be proud about it? Israel is proud about it. I mean only because the fact that Israeli leadership is not exposed, not yet exposed to murders like this, Israel can allow itself to go on and you know to shoot wherever it can. I wonder what would have happened if the other side would have been capable to do the same things. What would Israel think about assassinations in such a mass quantity? Look, it's dozens and dozens throughout the years. It starts back in 1972 when Israel assassinated a Palestinian poet in Beirut. Was this justified? Did this promote any of Israel's interest? And I'm not sure that now it is the case because you see that always but always the successor is more radical and more fundamentalistic than the victim of the assassination. So what did you achieve by this?

KT: But you know, as you pointed out, polls show that 93% of Israelis not only support the war but they support the assassinations what you call murder. Does such a high level of support justify the war and the killings or are the two unconnected?

GL: They are totally unconnected because there are certain things which should be judged not according to their popularity. The fact that there is some kind of eagerness in Israel to kill all the enemies and to kill maybe all the Arabs and all their leaders is not very nice. It has nothing to do with, first of all clever judgment and secondly moral judgment. It has nothing to do. The masses in this case are not deciding what is moral and what is not, what is legal and what is not. And in many cases also what is clever and what is not. You don't go to a referendum to ask the people shall we murder this leader or this leader or this leader. Hopefully, we will never get to it.

KT: But tell me, let me ask you a direct question about the Israeli people. Does the Jewish belief that they are the chosen people, special and unique, lead the majority of Israelis to believe that whatever they do is correct and that criticism of Israel or of their policies is anti-semitism?

GL: You said it all. That's the Israeli mindset. It does not mean that all Israelis think so. But if you look at the Israeli people as a collective entity, you realise that there are certain values, certain beliefs which unite us all. And we are talking only about the Jewish Israelis obviously, because 20% of the Israelis are Palestinian, as you know, Palestinian citizens of Israel, but we are talking only about the Jewish Israelis. And those beliefs, those values are under the skin of almost every Israeli that I know. Yes, we are the chosen people and therefore we have the right to do things that other peoples don't have the right. Yes, we are the chosen people and therefore the international law is a very very important institution but it doesn't apply to Israel because we are a special case. We are also the biggest victims in history and therefore it gives us special rights as well and special privileges. All those values we get from childhood and most of us believe in them, chosen by God or chosen by anything else. We are better than anyone else. You can feel it in the Israeli mindset, in the Israeli discourse. this notion that always, in anything, we know better. 

KT: And I take it this makes Israelis immune to criticism from the rest of the world.

GL: No, but it makes the rest of the world anti-semite if it dares to criticise us. That's another way to protect ourselves by blaming the critics. The problem is not what we do. The problem is the critics, all the critics who dare to criticize Jews or Israel, because immediately we will label them as anti-Semites. And you know what? It's very effective. At least it was effective until recent years. Many, many people in the West, mainly in Europe, didn't dare to criticise Israel because they were scared to be labeled as anti-Semites. Nobody wants to be labeled as an anti-Semite.

KT: But that's changing, Mr. Levy, isn't it? Increasingly since October 2023, protests against Israel have become common in the West, particularly amongst the young. And I suppose this must suggest that support for Israel is changing. Maybe even it's diminishing in the West and perhaps particularly in America.

GL: No doubt about it. I think one of the biggest price that Israel is going to pay for this war will be the day after, when the United States will blame Israel. And you hear those voices already by now. There will be more and more voices by the way in both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. There will be accusations of Israel as the one who pushed the United States into this war, which apparently will be appreciated by most of the Americans as an unnecessary war which didn't serve any of Americans interest and then the blame game will start and Israel will be blamed for pushing the United States into this war. And I can't think about a more destructive scenario than this because if we lose America, and it seems that Israel is going to lose America, by the way, again in both parties. If we lose America, Israel will be, the first time in its history in a real existential threat and not only in an imaginative existential threat.

KT: Do you believe the view that perhaps Netanyahu pushed, cajoled and coerced the American president into going into war? When Netanyahu was asked that question at a press conference, his reply was, "Oh, come on." But a lot of people seem to believe that he's manipulated the American president. Do you believe that? Do you think he could have? Do you think he tried?

GL: It is irrelevant what really happened and what I believe. It is very clear that this will be the notion. It is already in the United States. I can ensure that most of the Americans believe that this is the truth. Is it the truth or not? I don't know because I never attended the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu. One can believe in it after witnessing the fact that in the last year, Netanyahu went seven times to Washington, more than any other statesman by far in the world. You might believe that those seven visits were dedicated to convince, to persuade Donald Trump to join the war and it doesn't matter if Donald Trump pushed Netanyahu or Netanyahu pushed Donald Trump; America will believe and the world is already believing that Israel pushed the United States into this war and once this war will be perceived as a failure Israel is going to pay the price.

KT: I know that for four decades Benjamin Netanyahu has been, in a sense, personally committed to eradicating the Iranian regime. But does he also have personal reasons for going to war with Iran? Is it fair to argue that this is a way of deflecting attention from his court cases, or is it a way of securing elections due later this year in Israel? Or maybe it's a way of securing his personal legacy.

GL: I would like to give him more credit than this, even though there is very little credit left, at least with me toward him, but still, I truly believe that Iran was his life project for decades, and he truly and genuinely believed that this threat should be removed in one way or the other. Netanyahu never believed in diplomacy or in agreements, neither with the Palestinians nor with the Iranians. And therefore, for him the only way was doing it by force, by war. And here he had this rare opportunity when the first American president who was ready to go to war together with Israel. No American president until now was ready to do so and maybe rightly so. So he saw the opportunity. The fact that it serves many of his personal interests is very true. But I wouldn't think that he does all this only in the sake of breaking away from his trial or to win the elections. I give him more credit than this.

KT: Tell me how will Israeli history remember Netanyahu and this war? Whenever history is written, will it see him as a hero or will it see him as a man who dragged Israel into an unnecessary war, creating a regional crisis?

GL: I think it will be much worse than this. He will be remembered as destroying all the good parts of Israel much before the wars. He will be remembered as the one who tried to change the regime in Israel and to turn it from a democracy, at least for its Jewish citizens, into a populist half-democracy, half-tyranny. He broke all the rules. He is trying to break all the safeguards of the regime, all the gatekeepers of the regime, the legal system. He breaks it into pieces. He really creates a certain anarchy. And above all, he legitimised the most fascist, racist elements in Israeli society. He brought them into his government. No one else would have done it except for him. This will be remembered to him. The wars, I guess, will be less remembered because he did much deeper things than launching wars. And he did it for the bad of Israel. And I think history will judge him as someone who spread destruction not only in Gaza and in Tehran, but first of all in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv.

KT: Let's come to the media in Israel. I believe there's a measure of censorship in the way the media is permitted to report the damage Iranian drones and missiles are doing. As a result, do Israeli people know the full truth of what their country is suffering at the moment?

GL: So, first of all, the censorship, the military censorship, is really limited. If you don't know exactly the location of where exactly the missile or the bomb fall, you know that it falls somewhere and you know there are casualties and you know there are damages. I wouldn't overestimate the military censorship, even though Israel is the only democracy in the world with censorship; it doesn't exist in any other place. But the problem is not and I think I told you this once also in our conversations, the problem of Israeli media is not the military censorship. The problem of Israeli media is self-censorship, which is so much more destructive. The mainstream media does not want to tell the Israelis what they don't want to hear and know and listen and view. And this is dangerous because they think that journalism is a way of entertaining the people. It's a way of pleasing them, not bothering them. And Israel didn't show anything of the war in Gaza, which is much worse than a location of a missile which fall in Tel Aviv. And we don't know exactly which street it fall. The entire war of Gaza was hidden from Israelis. Israelis didn't see anything of the catastrophe of Gaza. Anything. And this is unforgivable. That's a betrayal of the Israeli media. That's a betrayal of its mission, its obligation toward our viewers and readers and toward the democracy. So that's the big betrayal, that's the big risk and danger to freedom of speech in Israel, the self-censorship which has no resistance because everybody is happy about it. The readers don't want to read. The viewers don't want to see. The government don't want you to know. And the commercial department is very happy because people continue to consume our products which are not journalistic products. They are propaganda products.

KT:  So I take it there is no view in Israel that in the media questions the war, questions the thinking behind the war, questions the strategy behind the war. This is simply not there.

GL: It is there but only in outlets like Haaretz or only maybe in Haaretz. On Israeli TV, day and night, you will not hear one critic about the war, one doubtful opinion, one question. Are we doing the right thing? All this is totally silenced not by the government, not by the secret services, by the editors and the publishers of those outlets because they know that Israelis in time of war want to hear only praising the war and that's very dangerous.

KT:  Mr. Levy the war is now over a month old. I believe today is the 33rd day. Where do you think it's heading? What do you think will be the end result?

GL: The problem Karan, is not where do I think it's heading. The problem is that nobody knows where it's heading, including decision makers. You think Netanyahu knows? You think that Donald Trump knows where is it heading? They have no plan and they didn't have a plan from the beginning. Yes, they had those vague goals of disarming its nuclear capabilities and maybe changing the regime there. Very nice but unachievable and if not, they have no answer. Where will we stop? When will we stop? How long can we go on with this? What about the price that the Israeli people is paying? Obviously, also the Iranian people, but as Israeli decision maker, you should first of all ask what is the price of your people and is it worth it? And my answer is no with a capital N. 

KT: You know, if the Iranian regime survives and certainly if Trump is negotiating with them, that looks likely, what sort of attitude will that regime have to Israel? Will it look for revenge? Will it go to any extent to build those nuclear bombs, ignoring the fatwa that Ayatollah Khamenei had issued 40 years ago, 30 years ago?

GL: The first ambition and the strongest ambition of Iran after the war of this regime will be to get nuclear capabilities in any possible way because this war had proven to them how much they needed to protect their regime. Nobody would have dared to launch a war against North Korea. Nobody would have dared to launch a war against Pakistan. Because of their nuclear capabilities. Israel, US  the war showed that, for Iran, the best insurance is nuclear weapons and therefore they'll do anything possible to get them. Revenge on Israel, if they could, they would have taken revenge on Israel already. Now their capabilities, their military capabilities, relatively to the American capabilities and the Israeli capabilities, are rather poor. You see, they have no air force. Their navy is destroyed. They have only those ballistic missiles that are very painful but are a very very limited weapon.

KT: So tell me this, if the regime survives, and that looks increasingly as if it could happen, has this war made Israel more secure? And if the answer is no, then what was the point of the war?

GL: Neither this war nor the war in Gaza. Let's not forget two years in Gaza with 70,000 people of Gaza being killed, including 1,000 babies, 20,000 girls. All this was for nothing. And now it is for nothing here. You see, we went to this war in Gaza in order to get rid of Hamas. Hamas is alive and kicking in Gaza. Maybe, not maybe, I'm sure that its military capabilities were destroyed but this can be rehabilitated within months or few years. Hamas is still there and Hamas is the only sovereign in Gaza today and the same in Iran. If the regime remains and it must be really something extremely unusual which will bring the fall of this regime. I believe the regime is now stronger than it was before the war because the Iranian people under such attacks will get united behind this regime. People do like this when they are attacked. Nobody wants his country to be attacked. Nobody wants his country to be destroyed. Nobody's ready to accept it for any good. And therefore the thought that those attacks will bring the end of the regime, I think are false. It's exactly the opposite. So they will do whatever they can. I guess their capabilities will continue to be limited. But if they could, they would have taken revenge right now.

KT: So if the threat or danger from Iran continues, isn't it looking increasingly likely that one year, two years, or three years from now, Israel will be fighting another war with Iran? The same danger would lead to the same outcome.

GL: I can't see any other scenario.

KT: So it's a particularly bleak situation we face. We fought a war, devastated a country, killed thousands and nothing has been gained. 

GL: Say the same about the war in Gaza and soon you will say the same about the war in Lebanon. You gain one, two, three years and here you are back. History taught us this. I mean, history should have taught us this, but Israel doesn't learn and the United States doesn't learn.

KT: The only people that can make Israel learn are the Israeli people. Do you think they will wake up to the reality? Do you think they will change their attitude or will the chosen people remain the way they've always been?

GL: No, it's getting worse because of demography also. All the polls show that the young generation in Israel is much more nationalistic, much more religious and many times much more ignorant than the older generation. And this is not much of a promise for the future of Israel.

KT: So the future is not bright. It looks dark and bleak and unhappy. 

GL: I wish so much to be wrong, but I cannot portray any hopeful scenario neither for Israel nor for the Middle East. Unless, you know, we always say that one should be realistic enough to believe in miracles. Unless one of those miracles will happen, but right now a rational analysis will not lead us to any optimistic conclusions. No way. 

KT: Mr. Levy, on that sad and somber, disquieting note, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you very much for sharing with the audience in India how you view the war and how you view your government and your people. Take care. Stay safe.

GL:  Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. All the best.

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