In a conversation with Chris Hedges, Gideon Levy says Israel’s deep-rooted militarism – reinforced by media silence – is driving an endless cycle of war.
As the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran intensifies, the justifications for its outbreak grow increasingly murky, shifting between nuclear fears, regime change, and regional security concerns. In this interview, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy joins Chris Hedges to cut through the official narratives and examine the deeper ideological forces driving Israel’s long-standing push toward confrontation with Iran under Benjamin Netanyahu.
Levy argues that the war cannot be understood purely through strategy or geopolitics, but instead through a deeply embedded national mindset. “War is always the first option, not the last one in Israel,” he explains, pointing to a political culture that consistently defaults to military solutions while sidelining diplomacy. This helps explain why lessons from past conflicts – from Gaza to Lebanon – have failed to meaningfully alter Israeli policy, even when those campaigns produced questionable results.
At the same time, the human consequences have been dire. As the region destabilises further, Levy emphasises the sheer scale of displacement caused by Israeli military actions, noting that “six million human beings…were expelled, uprooted, displaced from their homes.” In other words, the war’s impact extends far beyond its stated objectives, raising urgent moral and strategic questions.
Levy goes on to discuss Israeli society itself. He delivers a scathing critique of the country’s media landscape, arguing that self-censorship has infected Israeli “open” society. Levy says the press voluntarily “made Israel totally ignorant about what’s going on on our behalf in Gaza,” insulating the public from the realities of its own military actions.
As the conflict with Iran threatens to spiral into a wider regional war, Levy remains deeply pessimistic. Without a fundamental shift away from militarism, he suggests, Israel risks entrenching itself in an endless cycle of violence – one whose consequences will ultimately extend far beyond the Middle East.
Republished from The Chris Hedges Report, 26 March 2026
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.