Gideon Levy

Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy, 2011
Born	1953 (age 63–64) Tel Aviv, Israel
Nationality	Israeli
Education	M.A. Political Science, Tel Aviv University
Occupation	Journalist, author

Gideon Levy (Hebrew: גדעון לוי‎‎; born 1953) is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Levy has won prizes for his articles on human rights in the Israeli occupied territories, and has been hailed as an "heroic journalist". His critics characterize him as left wing and accuse him of being a propagandist for Hamas.

Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv.

Levy's father, Heinz (Zvi) Loewy, was born in the town of Saaz in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, and earned a law degree from the University of Prague. He fled the Nazis in 1939 on a flight organized by two Slovakian Jews, together with 800 others. He spent six months on an illegal immigrant boat, the Frossoula, registered under a Panamanian flag, which was denied entry into Turkey and Palestine, and was permitted only temporary anchorage at Tripoli. He was then imprisoned in a detention camp at Beirut for six weeks. The group was then allowed to leave. During its journey, the ship was strafed by Royal Air Force planes, killing two passengers, after which the group was transferred to another ship, the Tiger Hill, which reached Mandate Palestine, where it ran aground at Tel-Aviv's Frischman Beach. His mother, Thea, from Ostrava, Czechoslovakia was brought to Palestine in a rescue operation for children in 1939, and was placed in a kibbutz. His father initially opened a bakery in Herzliya with his sister and worked as a newspaper deliveryman, but later found a job as an office clerk.