When Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy appeared on the podcast of notorious antisemite Jackson Hinkle, the fallout was swift—but entirely predictable.
In one clip, Levy casually speculated, “Were there some rapes [on October 7]? I guess there were. I have no proof.” The host, Hinkle, smiled—because that was exactly the narrative he wanted to push: denial of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Levy later apologized for appearing on the podcast, claiming he had “never heard of Hinkle before.” But how is that possible? Hinkle is widely known for his hatred of Israel and his support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
This wasn’t a harmless mistake by Levy. Hinkle knew exactly who he was featuring—a fringe voice in Israel, often critical of the state and sympathetic to its enemies—and saw him as the perfect tool for legitimizing his hatred in front of his audience.
Levy’s history backs that up. In 2010, he spoke at an event hosted by the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign—an organization known for platforming antisemites. In 2012, he was caught misrepresenting polling data to suggest Israeli Jews supported apartheid, a claim he later retracted. More recently, he referred to Palestinian terrorists as “hostages” on CNN, drawing a false moral equivalence with innocent Israeli captives.
So even if Levy didn’t know of Hinkle, his pattern of minimizing terror and feeding anti-Israel narratives made him the ideal “useful idiot.”
And despite all this, Levy remains a columnist at Haaretz, still framed by the media as a voice of the Israeli mainstream. But he isn’t. He represents the fringe—and he just handed one of Israel’s most vocal enemies exactly what he wanted
