Hawara Checkpoint Abandoned; Gideon Levy Can't Give Up

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
20 February '11

Gideon Levy may be the most prominent of Israel's radical lefties, because he's a regular columnist at Haaretz, which gives him a wide and international audience. He's also so antagonistic to his country that even most left-leaning Israelis wouldn't get anywhere near him.

Among other things, he writes a weekly column called "The Twilight Zone", in which he wanders around the Palestinian territories and repeats the stories he hears through translators (he doesn't speak Arabic). His trustworthiness is mooted: he claims no-one has ever refuted any of his facts, but there actually have been quite a number of such refutations; in a spat with Ben Dror Yemini last year, Yemini posted a list of alleged untruths Levy had published.

This week's Twilight Zone column told of the IDF checkpoints around Nablus, which have been fully open since 2009, and now are being dismantled. In the days when these checkpoints were operative, however, they saved many lives, including of course Palestinians lives. As recently as October 2008 the soldiers manning the checkpoint apprehended a teenager carrying a bomb. Back in 2004 a number of Palestinian teenagers were apprehended at the checkpoint wearing suicide bombs; one was shot. Here's a CBS report, and here are some YouTube videos:

( See videos and read full "Hawara Checkpoint Abandoned; Gideon Levy Can't Give Up")

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