Left-wing journalist and activist Gideon Levy lashed out at Israeli society and its security forces in an interview with British journalist Owen Jones.
“If one attack pushes so many Israelis to become inhuman, there's no other word but inhuman, imagine what it does to Palestinians who live under those attacks for decades, and we always wonder how come they hate us and how come they became those monsters and how come they are so violent and how come that they are not human,” he said.
“From my point of view nothing changed. That's an outcome of a reality, of people living in cages for 16 years. Israelis can be mad at me as much as they want. This does not justify the attack but it might explain the attack and the attack has a context, and ignoring the context is really ignoring reality,” stated Levy.
Later in the interview, he said, “In many cases I think the Palestinians are maybe much more tolerant than they should have been, because they are going through this hell for so many years…until the seventh of October there was never such a violent explosion by them. There were the exploding buses, the suicide bombers, I don't underestimate this, but by the end of the day they could have done much worse to Israel because of what Israel is doing to them now for 100 years.”
“Israel always used the Holocaust to its own purposes, domestically and internationally, until this very moment. Which does not mean that the Holocaust is not a national trauma. My parents fled away from Europe, my whole family was exterminated in Europe…I don't obviously don't underestimate the horror, but when you start to use it for your own purposes it is exaggerated, and it is also exaggerated here. For example, to call Hamas a Nazi organization is a pure cheap manipulation. They are a fundamentalistic terrible organization. They are not Nazis and you can't compare them to the Nazis.”
Levy also mentioned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, calling him “a settler with a criminal background…really a gangster. He's the Minister of National Security and he is also in charge of the prisons in Israel, and what they do now to the prisoners is unbelievable. I can almost say in certainty, even though I'm not sure, but that the Palestinian prisoners in Israel get much worse human conditions than the hostages in Gaza.”
“They hold hundreds of Palestinians, handcuffed for weeks and months with their eyes and even this is accepted by Israeli society because they are all Hamas and they all participated in the raping and the killing on the seventh and therefore we have the right to do whatever we want,” claimed Levy.