Johann Hari

This summer I debated the philosophical implications and ethics of global warming with Frank Furedi from Spiked Online at the excellent How The Light Gets In Festival at Hay on Wye. It was chaired by my Independent colleague Mary-Ann Seighart.

Here's a partial transcript, typed up by the lovely Keith Farnish:

MAS: We’re going to start with Johann Hari who is a columnist for the Independent newspaper, and he’s also an art critic on BBC’s Newsnight Review. He’s won the Orwell Prize which is the best prize for political journalism and he’s gone all round the world as well, reporting on the world’s trouble spots. Johann.

JH: I think an interesting question is to try to imagine a moral system that didn’t see it as immoral and abhorrent to trash your own habitat. One of the things I’ve been doing over the past few years is reporting from various places where global warming is already being felt dramatically – so, for example, I went to the Arctic which since the year I was born, 1979, has lost 40% of its sea cover: an area bigger than France and Germany and Texas combined. And I’ve been Bangladesh, the world’s lowest lying country, where you can go to the coast and people are dying because the sea water has risen; they can’t grow any rice, they can’t grow any food, so you’ve got these villages that are full of people who don’t understand why, but are in terrible trouble.

There’s an amazing man called Mohammed Rezwan who was like the Richard Rogers of Bangladesh, he was their leading architect...for rich people – until about 10 years ago he suddenly had this epiphany. He’d read a lot about global warming and he suddenly thought: “Why am I building this stuff? It ain’t gonna be here in 10 years, it’s not going to be here in 20 years.” And he was right: some of the areas he was building in, like the island of Bhola are already half gone; and so he is persuading people to move onto boats. And he’s moved schools onto boats, hospitals onto boats, moving whole villages onto boats – so I think of him as Bangladesh’s Noah.

And there was this really interesting philosophical moment – I was talking to loads of different kids, and this was so good I almost wondered if they had set it up I think they could have, because I asked this kid randomly – I was talking to one boy, he was 15, he was on this boat and I said to him: “What are you reading?” He said: “I’m reading about global warming.” It was the first time anyone had spontaneously raised global warming in Bangladesh, and I was quite surprised; I said: “Can you tell me what that is?” He explained it to me, and I said: “Do you know who’s causing that?” And he did this very polite Bangladeshi nod, and didn’t quite say it, but indicated towards me. And I thought, “There’s a real ethical...we’re doing this to them; we are refusing to change to way we live, and we are doing this.”

Now, that is as clear a causal relationship, and as knowing a causal relationship as if we were sending troops into Bangladesh. And I think that’s something that’s really important to think about ethically; and my personal ethics are humanist, utilitarian ethics, but actually I can’t think of a single moral system that doesn’t see that as immoral – that doesn’t see taking those risks with that many lives and indeed, over time, with our own lives as unethical. So I’d be interested if anyone can come up with a moral system where that’s not something to be condemned, and something where we must immediately change our behaviour to prevent it.

MAS: Johann, can I ask you, if it were only 50% likely that climate change was man-made would the ethics remain the same?

JH: I think it’s a really interesting question. I don’t use the term “sceptic” because all science is built on scepticism. [Scientists] critically evaluate the evidence, and they kick it to see if it falls apart – but the people who call themselves “sceptics” say: “Oh, you know it might not happen, so let’s do nothing.” But the analogy I always use is, imagine you’re about to get on a plane and you were told by all the world’s airplane engineers: “Look, this plane is going to crash.” And then a group of people who were journalists, and plumbers, and teachers came up to you and said: “Oh no, we’re looked at the science and it’s a load of rubbish. It’s perfectly safe.” You wouldn’t get on the plane.

But let’s...I think...but let’s make a huge and unwarranted concession for the sake of argument: let’s imagine it was only a 50% risk; it seems to me if you’re taking a 50% risk with a catastrophe for hundreds of millions, and indeed possibly billions of people, the moral case of pretty obvious. I mean, how do we judge construction engineers who know there’s a 50% risk their building will collapse? We would try them for corporate manslaughter, and I think this is a really similar case.

MAS: Frank Furedi is a wonderful contrarian, so I hope he’ll disagree with some of what’s been said so far. He’s the author of, “The Politics of Fear” and “Therapy Culture”, he was the founder and chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and he’s currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He’s writing a book on tolerance.

FF: It’s interesting, I’ve been involved in about 15 debates like this and what I find particularly confusing about these debates is that we never talk about ethics – ethics becomes a bit of an afterthought because almost immediately people talk about policy: which energy strategy is better; others talk about how horrible things are and they’re getting even worse and, you know, discussions about the situation being terrible and, of course, if you strategise and instead of this scenario...[microphone noise]...be worried about it, but that’s all a falsehood.

But, what we’re not doing is taking a step back and asking a very simple question – and Marek began to do that – “Why is it that in the 21st century, late 20th century, we become almost entirely obsessed with the environment and environmentalism dominates popular culture, the way we behave, the way we interact as human beings, political life, business, everybody else – why does that occur?” It seems to me that unless we have a very banal view of the world it couldn’t just simply be because one morning we woke up and discovered a problem that we never knew about beforehand; it couldn’t be just simply because the problem all of a sudden got greater than ever before; it’s got to do with the way we are as human beings and the way we think. And, I think it’s useful to take a step backwards; I think, in a sense, when Marek talks about transcendence I think that’s absolutely right, but if we are going to talk about religion and something bigger than ourselves then we should say so, and let’s forget about science and let’s forget about all the other stuff to do with evidence and all the rest of that – I’m quite happy, because I too, I’m a mountain climber and a skier, and I love Nature*; I (actually) get this incredible spiritual sort of excitement as soon as I get near a hill. I cannot help myself. But, it’s not science, it’s not even genetics: it’s (a) fundamental part of my humanity and my relationship with that.

And I just want to say a couple of things about what I think is a humanist ethical position that’s been forgotten as a result of our turn towards Nature as...and I think that one of the unfortunate things, history has shown us is that from time to time when we go through a period of historical malaise, when we don’t believe in ourselves, we begin to forget about human subjectivity and problems that used to be explained as caused by society and social causation and by culture, all of a sudden are seen as problems with Nature: we naturalise everything. And in the most extreme excursion of the way we naturalise our lives is the way that every politician you bump into talks about brain research, and these days whether you’re a Gay, you know, how you do in school, everything is determined by your brains and your biology. It’s no longer to do with culture and society, and we find it very difficult to understand that human beings create problems and find solutions to them.

And one of the basic principles of Humanism, and that’s why I signed up for it, and something that I find really very exciting, is that human beings are actually defined by their history rather than by their instincts and biology. It’s through the way we change the world that we make history: that we begin to get a glimmer of what our humanity is all about. And not only are we defined by our history, human beings – whether we like it or not, and sometimes we find it very difficult to accept – is that we (walk) through a struggle to detach ourselves from Nature; and there’s nothing more unnatural than to be a human being. That’s one of the most unnatural things, because one of the things that we’ve done as a human [sic] culture is to have no nature. I think the exciting thing about the human experience is we try not to have nature but to posses the capacity not to be bound by any code, any limits on the human potential.
And that’s what the Renaissance began to experiment with; it was really put there more systematically in the Enlightenment; today I think we find that very difficult to accept. The reason why we find it very difficult to accept is because human beings are always – and that’s what’s so nice about people, they’re very ambivalent; they’re ambivalent between trying to control their world and control their Nature, and also between being, in a sense worried about the fact that they’re being cut off from Nature. Now, we don’t like to be cut off from Nature, whilst at the same time we’re trying to control it and...you find, you know, last 300 years romantic movements emerging, and all kinds of creative movements trying to, you know, hold on to Nature in some shape or form, whilst at the same time others are going round and transforming Nature: socialising Nature in a very fundamental sense.

And I want to suggest that what happened today is that ambivalence...that kind of tension between wanting to be with Nature and controlling it ruptured. The two have become detached from each other and we lost so much faith in our human capacity to do good, that we really see everything in a very naturalistic way by trying to hold on to Nature; because Nature has become the only focus where we can see anything that is morally good. [unclear] All you’ve got to say these days is, if you’ve got children who go to school then environmentalism is what you get in geography, it’s what you get in mathematics, it’s what you get in li...you cannot, sort of, get away from environmentalism – it’s Citizenship education, of course; what it really says is: “Are you for or against?” Now, how many children do you know who would say: “I want to destroy the environment; I think that’s a really cool thing to do”? Do all this...nobody will say that, and therefore because their moral value around which you can get everybody moving. It’s like old-fashioned religion in that sense.

And I think that it’s really said because that ambivalence, that healthy ambivalence, because it’s become ruptured now means that our desire to be with Nature has fused with a new misanthropy where we continually put people down; where we think that human beings are defined by their destructiveness rather than constructiveness; where our carbon footprints defines who we are, we use the language of human impact...human impact in my days, when I was a kid, used to mean something good, transforming the world into something positive. Human impact today always means “destruction”; more problems that you (are) creating on the environment. In Australia there are people proposing to put a carbon tax on babies, because the pitter-patter of carbon footprints is not something that you really want to have. So, when you get to this misanthropic extreme, where you are so worried what’s going to happen, then this very extremist, unsubtle, banal, you know, sort of discourses that you are so irresponsible: “Don’t you see that in 10 years time, those trees will not be there.” It seems to me that it’s not all that different from the beginning of the 17th century when we had a major, the first major crisis if consciousness: in a very similar debate, and when witch craft really took off because witches were the ones that were blamed for what were seen as changing environment; it seems to me that we’re back to those kinds of discussions where it’s a very black and white, un-nuanced way of seeing destroys the possibility of having any literate ethical conversation.

MAS: Thank you.

JH: Mary-Ann, can I answer some of those? Before global warming is an event in intellectual history, it’s an event in physical history; so there are all sorts of things that will come out that are ugly in the way we react to it, and all sorts of things I’m uncomfortable with, but the fact there may be uncomfortable intellectual implications stop global warming being an actual physical event that’s happening and that we are doing to the world.

But I think there are several points Frank made that I strongly disagree with. One is the idea that opposition to man-made global warming is some kind of religion. I think it’s the antithesis of religion: the reason why I’m concerned about global warming is because of empirical observation of reality. If you dispassionately and rationally look at the evidence it is very clear that releasing huge amounts of warming gases into the world makes the world warmer, and leads to disastrous effects for human beings. That to me is the antithesis of religion which is about faith; which is about deciding things in the absence of evidence.

Also, I would say it’s the opposite of misanthropy: the reason why I’m worried about global warming is not because I like “nature”. I personally don’t get any aesthetic pleasure from Nature: this is the first time I’ve been outside central London in 6 months; I don’t like trees; I think rainforests are disgusting places. The reason why I’m worried about it is ‘cause I love cities and people and I don’t want them to be flooded...it’s not about imbuing some moral value in something other than human beings, it’s precisely because I care about human beings, and don’t want them to be drowned, and don’t want them to go hungry, that I oppose global warming. So to say this is the abandonment of humanism the antithesis of truth. I think there’s a real danger in what Frank says and does in arguing against straw men, or to take freakish outliers in the environmental movement and present them as paradigmatic. So, you know, yes there are some lunatics in the environmental movement like the lunatic in the 1980s who said AIDS was a good thing because get rid of people - yeah, there are some misanthropes in the environmental movement but they are a negligibly tiny minority.

The vast majority of people who are concerned about global warming are concerned about human beings – to present it as misanthropic, I think, is just an inversion of the truth. It’s precisely because we want to protect human beings, and because we believe in the potential of human endeavour – you know, we could meet all the energy needs of Europe, all of it, by laying one fiftieth of the Sahara Desert with solar panels. That’s everything, all our cars and all our societies; and that’s not just 10 years, that’s forever if we build it and maintain it. Now, that’s a sign of how amazing human beings are; that’s not a misanthropic point, that’s the opposite. I’m in awe of our species: we are amazing. It’s precisely because we’re amazing that we have the capacity to do such unbelievably terrible things, and such great things.
MAS: But, Johann, let’s go back to first principles, as Frank said - [to Frank] I can ask you as well – about the ethics of environmentalism. You focus on humans; do you believe we have any duty to animals, to species [sic], to plants?

JH: The reason why I haven’t taken it beyond that is because while I think that’s an interesting debate, and I have some sympathy with Peter Singer’s argument…

MS: I know you don’t like trees….

JH: I wish them well, I just don’t want to see them... (Audience laughs) I have some sympathy with expanding the circle of our moral consideration to other creatures who can feel pain, but in a way I think it’s a distraction from this argument, because the bare minimum is, you only have to care about human beings – you don’t have to care about anything else to believe this is an urgent issue.

MAS: What about virgin rainforest, then? Does that not matter if there are no humans in it?

JH: It’s a false distinction. If those rainforests are cut down humans suffer. Indeed, 20% of all carbon emissions are caused by cutting down rainforest, so sure. Because trees store carbon.

MAS: But if species [sic] die out then that’s not a problem?

JH: No, I wouldn’t say it’s not a problem; I’d say, in a sense, it’s an argument you don’t need to have in order to believe global warming is an urgent matter. If you’re building consensus I think you have to be a very odd human being to not believe human beings matter – there are some, but they’re nutters – then, the, so in terms of building consensus for action: care about humans? You’re with us.

MAS: Yes, Frank.

FF: I agree with the last point you had, I think those kinds of issues about particular forest – I don’t think there’s any black and white answer; the only answer you can give is the one Marek gave which was that, for him, this is something that’s quite important and therefore we [unclear] in terms of individual aesthetics, and everything else. But the important question – the one you raised earlier on – is about intergenerational relations. Cause it seems to me that that’s the only area where environmentalism has made an attempt to go beyond the routine banality it is, and deal with some kind of wider, more potentially quite interesting things.

I would just make one point, and I’m really interested in peoples’ view on this: as somebody who believes in the human potential, I’ve always been disturbed by intergenerational arguments, because historically the argument about generation was used by most reactionary of conservatism [sic] as a way of preventing human actions.

That’s something I feel very strongly about, because I do think that there’s a very powerful anti-democratic impulse within the environmental movement. And I know that when I write or talk one-to-one with – and I’m not talking about the outliers now, but ordinary environmentalists – within a couple of pints of beer they will tell me about how ordinary people merely care about their consumer goods and their brands; they tell me that they will never vote for anything that will demand real sacrifice...

JH: This is just nonsense. You’re arguing against a straw man.

FF: Well, you might be sort of surprised by that

JH: This is not mainstream environmentalism. You know that.

FF: Why do you interrupt me? I mean – that’s, by the way, anti-democratic impulse [audience laughs] – it seems to me there’s this sense that those white trash there who feed their children all this junk food and McDonalds – they care about cheap food, can you imagine that, these working class people actually care about cheap food rather than brown rice and organic food that we can eat in different situations; so, there’s a real sense of contempt that we have. And (other) people say that it would be far better if the experts could decide the policy on global warming, and it would be far better if these complicated, difficult decisions were taken by the very sensitive, very nuanced scientific clericy or intelligencia rather than by ordinary folk.

And, you know, if you want to go back, this is what humanism is all about: do you believe in people? Do people have the capacity to make rational judgements? I mean, go back to Ancient Greece and the Agora, do the people have...are they just a mob, or are they capable of rationally thinking? And perhaps we should take a reality check: it may well be possible that our white trash, eating McDonalds hamburgers and cheeseburgers actually intuitively knows more about the world than all these experts and scientists who, you know, (?) understand all the facts but about behaviour, and how we should behave, and about the meaning they give to facts – and that’s a very big difference; so, I do think that “democracy first, everything second”. If you lose that, then we are no longer a tolerant society: we do become a yelling match, a shouting match for the experts, you know, sort of can decide everything for us….

JH: As you can tell from looking at me, I am one of those “white trash” people who were fed McDonald’s as a child, and still eat it now. The idea I’m arguing in some snobbish way against them is obviously false and obviously a straw man. I'm arguing for human potential, not against it...

 ...and why I think we need to own up to it more often. You can listen here. The article we were discussing is here.

Ed Miliband is being hit by a tsunami of lies and smears that is going to try to wash him away every day he leads the Labour Party. It happens to anybody who tries – however mildly and modestly, as he does – to take on the vested interests of the super-rich in defence of the rest of the population. If his message succeeds with the public, it will only get worse.

An hour after he was elected, I saw a neat metaphor for the sudden transition from a (literally) fraternal Labour leadership election to the aggression of national politics. Miliband walked out of the Midland Hotel and tried to stride to a meeting of his celebrating campaign team. Suddenly a swarm of camera crews kettled him in the street, yelling questions and making it impossible for him to move. His sweet young press team looked a little thrown, and asked the camera crews to let him pass. The camera crews shoved them aside and spat: "Fuck you." Those two words summarize his press coverage so far.

Ed Miliband's analysis of where Labour went wrong, and how to put it right, is broadly correct. The right-wing press, and many Blairites, keep claiming he will "abandon the middle class". This is the polar opposite of the truth. His politics are about understanding who Britain's real middle class are, and what they need. The median wage in Britain last year was £20,800. If you take home more than £40,000 a year, you are in the richest 10 per cent.

This, the real middle of British society, is stressed and close to panic. They can't get bank loans for their small businesses. They are worried they'll be made redundant, or their employer will go bust. They are working twice as hard just to stand still, so they hardly see their kids. They know when they grow up their children won't get mortgages, and won't get a university education without crippling debt. They are in debt themselves. They are incredibly vulnerable to the double-dip recession the Coalition's policies are making more likely, and to the looming hammer-blow to public services they can't afford to opt out of. The polls show the people they blame most for doing all this to them are the bankers and the super-rich. They're right.

The idea that Labour's response to all this should have been to continue to enthusiastically cosset the interests of the rich, and ignore the public rage, is bizarre. Yet this is the position of the defeated Blairites. I went to the Progress rally, which had morphed into a wake for David Miliband and a Madame Tussauds of unmodern "modernisers". More than a dozen speakers stood up and directed their anger solely in one direction – towards welfare recipients and immigrants. Now, I too believe welfare recipients should be required to work (and we should create jobs for them if there are none). I too believe that when immigration is too high, it depresses the wages of people at the bottom of society. These are real issues. But they are literally all the Blairites have left to talk about, in the nastiest possible tone.

Not a single other policy area, or thought, or philosophy, was mentioned. Not one. The idea of agreeing with the public and directing anger upwards to the people who actually caused this crisis was mentioned only to warn that this would be "irresponsible" and "threatening".

David Miliband's snapping at Harriet Harman underscored why the party made the right choice. He was furious at her for clapping a repudiation of the Iraq war, because she voted for it at the time. Think about what that reveals.

He thinks once you have taken a public position, it is disgusting to change it – no matter how catastrophic it turned out to be. (A million deaths in the name of Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn't exist is a catastrophe by any standard.) Imagine if he had been leading Labour with that view for the next four years. And, please, spare me the weepy political obituaries. This is a man who, as Foreign Secretary, fought hard to cover up MI5's role in the torture of British residents abroad. I'll save my tears for the people who were attacked with drills and electric cattle prods, while he scrambled to keep it classified.

Ed is right to judge that the mood of Middle England is much more receptive to populist proposals than to Blairite sucking-up to the super-rich or Cameroon whipping of the poor. He's already proposed some good ideas. He wants to pressure companies through the tax system to pay a living wage, a third higher than the minimum wage. He wants to abolish student debt and replace it with a graduate tax paid only when you are wealthy enough to do it.

Some other excellent proposals are bubbling up from the people around him. The Labour MP David Lammy has proposed a Land Tax as a way of making the wealthy pay a much fairer share. Land inequality is vastly higher even than income inequality. Today, 0.6 per cent of the British population owns 69 per cent of the land – and they are mostly the same families who owned it in the 19th century. Just 103 people own 30 per cent of the country.

This isn't productive wealth: it's overwhelmingly unearned and useless, so there is no reduction in economic activity if we go after it. And it can't be moved abroad. A rich Brit can flit to Monaco for long enough to avoid taxes, but he can't take the great lumps of the English countryside that he owns with him. Here's a popular way to pay to protect the universal welfare state so badly needed by Middle England.But if Miliband is serious about reducing inequality, he will incur the wrath of the super-rich and their winged monkeys who dominate our media. This isn't going to be a seminar: it's going to be a knife fight. They won't fight him on the issues, where his positions are broadly popular. They will simply try to make him look ridiculous or malign through distortion. Yet the print media in particular – by far the most biased source of news – isn't the force it was, and it's easier than ever to communicate over their heads. He will, however, have to show much stricter discipline in communicating a clear message about the "squeezed middle" than he has in his rambling interviews over the past week.

On the deficit, he needs to be Ballsy – in both senses. The right claims that in order to be "credible", he needs to commit to a strict programme of deficit-slashing. But everything we have learned from the last Great Depression tells us that, if things get worse, the only way out of mass unemployment will be a big fiscal jump-start to the economy, funded by taking out more government debt in the short term. He mustn't rule out being Franklin Roosevelt and instead commit to being Herbert Hoover, just to appease the very people whose macho platitudes caused this funk in the first place.

Ed Miliband is going to face an extremely difficult fight against the vested interests – and to get through it, he should think back to a figure from his childhood. No, not his father, the revolutionary Ralph Miliband. Ed used to skive off from dinners with him and other socialist thinkers to watch Dallas. He's going to need some of the granite spirit of J R Ewing. When his control of Ewing Oil was threatened, J R growled to his wife Sue Ellen: "Anything worth having is worth fighting for – all the way." Miliband's policies are worth having. But he is going to have to fight for them – all the way.

In the Western world today, there is a group of people who live in a haze of unreality, and are prone at any moment to break into paranoia, hallucinations, and screaming. If you try to get between them and their addiction, they will become angry and aggressive and lash out. They need our help. I am talking, of course, about the Drug Prohibitionists: the gaggle of politicians, bishops and journalists who still insist that the only way to deal with the very widespread drug use in our societies is for it to be criminalized, where it is untaxed, unregulated, controlled by armed criminal gangs, and horribly adulterated.

An addict can only really begin to grapple with his problem when he hits rock bottom. This year, the prohibitionists hit theirs, as they unleashed the destruction of Mexico. But in Britain, there was a smaller story that serves as a perfect parable for how fact-free their cause now is.

In March, two young men called Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith died in a nightclub in the English town of Scunthorpe. We now know what happened: they drank massive amounts of alcohol along with sedatives. But the prohibitionists embarked on a sudden, violent hallucination. They immediately announced - with no evidence, long before the autopsy - that these young men were the first victims of the party drug Mephedrone. The Drug Warriors had been nervously eyeing this a snort-or-swallow amphetamine since it started growing in popularity in 2008, and had swelled to be as popular as ecstasy. Surely it was evil! Surely it would kill! Now, they said, it had - and it must be banned.

From the moment the story broke, it became filled with fictions and fantasies. Even the name of the drug was a fake. Somebody had randomly entered into Wikipedia two days before the deaths that the drug was called 'Meow-Meow'. Nobody I have ever met called it that. The term doesn't appear in online discussions of it anywhere. But the Sun slapped it on the front page, and the rest of the media followed. Me-ow. The drug had been used by millions of people across the world with no recorded fatalities at that point, but here's a selection of headlines from the conservative newspaper Daily Mail alone: "They're playing Russian Roulette with their lives!" "The Death Drug." "Legal But Lethal." "It triggers fits, psychosis, and death." Illustrated with pictures of Wainwright and Smith, even though the autopsies have proven they never touched the drug.

On the back of this drug-induced hysteria, the government announced it would ditch the rest of its pre-election parliamentary programme and immediately criminalize Mephedrone. They were enthusiastically backed by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Only a few brave politicians, like the Lib Dem Dr Evan Harris and the UK Independence Party's Nigel Farage, politely asked for evidence, and were rudely shouted down. Don't you know! Children are DYING! When it was proven that Mephedrone was framed, and had become the Birmingham Six of drugs, no politician apologised. Nobody suggested repealing the ban. Everybody has carried on straight-faced. It is the surest sign of a harmful addiction when you can't even acknowledge what you did the night before.

To be fair, though, one group of people has hugely benefitted from the ban, and have every reason to be grateful. They are Britain's armed criminal gangs. Until this spasm, Mephedrone was sold by bespectacled chemists, who manufactured a clinically pure product, and had recourse to the law if their property rights were infringed. Not now. The trade has been transferred to the Mafia. Their product is regulated by nobody and so filled with deadly filth. The right to sell it on a particular patch will be established by shoot-outs, in which innocent people are often caught up by accident.

The ban on mepehedrone is a perfect parable about the prohibitionists' habits of mind. They waved fictitious victims under a fictitious name and said they were fighting for sobriety. In truth, they have been trying to suppress any sober discussion of risk for years. In 2009, Professor David Nutt, the chairman of the British government's scientific advisory panel on drugs, pointed out a simple fact: taking ecstasy is about as dangerous as horse-riding, which kills 10 people a year there, and causes 100 traffic accidents. Everybody who checked agreed the facts were true. He was immediately fired. Since then, seven other members of the panel have resigned, because the government can't handle the truth. The best evidence we have suggests taking Mephedrone is less dangerous than eating peanuts, an activity that also kills ten people a year. Should we send the police in to bust anybody spotted with a handful of dry roasted?

But prohibition is not about really reducing danger. If it was, we would start with by far the two deadliest drugs in the world: alcohol, which kills 40,000 a year, and tobacco, who kills 80,000. If the law is about "sending a signal" that it is a "bad idea" to kids to risk your health with a drug, surely we need to immediately prohibit them? Yet virtually everyone is grown up enough to know that a ban on them wouldn't stop people using. In the US in the 1920s, banning alcohol simply created a vicious criminal class selling a vastly more deadly product, and deprived the government of any tax revenue on it. The ban became more harmful than the drug itself. Why do we think it is any different with cannabis, or ecstasy, or cocaine?

The prohibitionists sometimes say that if alcohol was invented now, they would want to ban it, before its use became widespread. But the use of prohibited drugs is already buttered thickly across British society: some 34 percent of us have used an illegal drug, including our Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and the last three visiting Presidents of the United States. We can't even stop drugs from being freely available in prison, and we have the inmates there under armed guard.

There is a way out of this, and a new reason to do it urgently. In the early 1930s, the US ended alcohol prohibition partly because it had mid-wifed the criminal career of Al Capone and a thousand other goons, but primarily because they needed the taxes as the Depression struck. This November, California is having a referendum on whether to legalize cannabis and slap an alcohol-sized tax on it. At the moment, the legalizers are ahead in the polls. People are being persuaded the evidence from a 2005 study by Harvard University economist Professor Jeffrey Miron, showing that legalization would raise $7bn a year in taxes, and saved $13bn on wasted police, court, and prison time. The stoners, it turns out, will save us from ruin.

Perhaps the most startling international comparison, though, comes from Portugal. They decriminalized person possession of all drugs in 2001, and the prohibitionists screamed that children would soon be rolling in the gutters with needles jutting out of every available vein. What really happened? A detailed study by the Cato Institute has found that drug use has stayed the same, and slightly fallen among young people. Now, they treat addicts as ill people who need help, not criminals who should be banged up.

I know it will be hard for the prohibitionists to kick their habit. We will all need to support them as they finally leave behind their hallucinogens. I am happy to set up Prohibitionists' Anonymous, where they can confess the fears that have led them to this dark place. But the Mepehedrone madness was the equivalent of stealing your mother's jewelry and selling it for your next fix. Drug Warriors, it's time to sober up.

This article appeared as Johann's monthly column for GQ magazine in Britain. If you'd like to read these columns a month early, subscribe to GQ here.

To support the fight for Yes to Prop 19 in California - donate, or volunteer - go to http://yeson19.com/
For updates on drug legalization and other causes, follow Johann on www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most heroic. This “good Tel Aviv boy” – a sober, serious child of the Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defence Force, been threatened with being “beaten to a pulp” on the country’s streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be tightly monitored as “a security risk.” This is because he has done something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda. “My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many people want him silenced.

The story of Gideon Levy – and the attempt to deride, suppress or deny his words – is the story of Israel distilled. If he loses, Israel itself is lost.

I meet him in a hotel bar in Scotland, as part of his European tour to promote his new book, ‘The Punishment of Gaza’. The 57 year-old looks like an Eastern European intellectual on a day off – tall and broad and dressed in black, speaking accented English in a lyrical baritone. He seems so at home in the world of book festivals and black coffee that it is hard, at first, to picture him on the last occasion he was in Gaza – in November, 2006, before the Israeli government changed the law to stop him going.

He reported that day on a killing, another of the hundreds he has documented over the years. As twenty little children pulled up in their school bus at the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, their 20 year-old teacher, Najawa Khalif, waved to them – and an Israel shell hit her and she was blasted to pieces in front of them. He arrived a day later, to find the shaking children drawing pictures of the chunks of her corpse. The children were “astonished to see a Jew without weapons. All they had ever seen were soldiers and settlers.”

“My biggest struggle,” he says, “is to rehumanize the Palestinians. There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us? So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard.”

So he describes the lives of ordinary Palestinians like Najawa and her pupils in the pages of Ha’aretz, Israel’s establishment newspaper. The tales read like Chekovian short stories of trapped people, in which nothing happens, and everything happens, and the only escape is death. One article was entitled “The last meal of the Wahbas family.” He wrote: “They’d all sat down to have lunch at home: the mother Fatma, three months pregnant; her daughter Farah, two; her son Khaled, one; Fatma’s brother, Dr Zakariya Ahmed; his daughter in law Shayma, nine months pregnant; and the seventy-eight year old grandmother. A Wahba family gathering in Khan Yunis in honour of Dr Ahmed, who’d arrived home six days earlier from Saudi Arabia. A big boom is heard outside. Fatma hurriedly scoops up the littlest one and tries to escape to an inner room, but another boom follows immediately. This time is a direct hit.”

In small biographical details, he recovers their humanity from the blankness of an ever-growing death toll. The Wahbas had tried for years to have a child before she finally became pregnant at the age of 36. The grandmother tried to lift little Khaled off the floor: that’s when she realised her son and daughter were dead.

Levy uses a simple technique. He asks his fellow Israelis: how would we feel, if this was done to us by a vastly superior military power? Once, in Jenin, his car was stuck behind an ambulance at a checkpoint for an hour. He saw there was a sick woman in the back and asked the driver what was going on, and he was told the ambulances were always made to wait this long. Furious, he asked the Israeli soldiers how they would feel if it was their mother in the ambulance – and they looked bemused at first, then angry, pointing their guns at him and telling him to shut up.

“I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what’s going on fifteen minutes away from their homes,” he says. “The brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is] almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people so full of ignorance and cruelty.” He gives an example. During Operation Cast Lead, the Israel bombing of blockaded Gaza in 2008-9, “a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and it on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.”

At times, the occupation seems to him less tragic than absurd. In 2009, Spain’s most famous clown, Ivan Prado, agreed to attend a clowning festival on Ramallah in the West Bank. He was detained at the airport in Israel, and then deported “for security reasons.” Levy leans forward and asks: “Was the clown considering transferring Spain’s vast stockpiles of laughter to hostile elements? Joke bombs to the jihadists? A devastating punch line to Hamas?”

Yet the absurdity nearly killed him. In the summer of 2003, he was travelling in a clearly marked Israeli taxi on the West Bank. He explains: “At a certain stage the army stopped us and asked what we were doing there. We showed them our papers, which were all in order. They sent us up a road – and when we went onto this road, they shot us. They directed their fire to the centre of the front window. Straight at the head. No shooting in the air, no megaphone calling to stop, no shooting at the wheels. Shoot to kill immediately. If it hadn’t been bullet-proof, I wouldn’t be here now. I don’t think they knew who we were. They shot us like they would shoot anyone else. They were trigger-happy, as they always are. It was like having a cigarette. They didn’t shoot just one bullet. The whole car was full of bullets. Do they know who they are going to kill? No. They don’t know and don’t care.”

He shakes his head with a hardened bewilderment. “They shoot at the Palestinians like this on a daily basis. You have only heard about this because, for once, they shot at an Israeli.”

I “Who lived in this house? Where is he now?”

How did Gideon Levy become so different to his countrymen? Why does he offer empathy to the Palestinians while so many others offer only bullets and bombs? At first, he was just like them: his argument with other Israelis is an argument with his younger self. He was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv and as a young man “I was totally nationalistic, like everyone else. I thought – we are the best, and the Arabs just want to kill. I didn’t question.”

He was fourteen during the Six Day War, and soon after his parents took him to see the newly conquered Occupied Territories. “We were so proud going to see Rachel’s Tomb [in Bethlehem] and we just didn’t see the Palestinians. We looked right through them, like they were invisible,” he says. “It had always been like that. We were passing as children so many ruins [of Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed in 1948]. We never asked: ‘Who lived in this house? Where is he now? He must be alive. He must be somewhere.’ It was part of the landscape, like a tree, like a river.” Long into his twenties, “I would see settlers cutting down olive trees and soldiers mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, and I would think, ‘These are exceptions, not part of government policy.’”

Levy says he became different due to “an accident.” He carried out his military service with Israeli Army Radio and then continued working as a journalist, “so I started going to the Occupied Territories a lot, which most Israelis don’t do. And after a while, gradually, I came to see them as they really are.”

But can that be all? Plenty of Israelis go to the territories – not least the occupying troops and settlers – without recoiling. “I think it was also – you see, my parents were refugees. I saw what it had done to them. So I suppose... I saw these people and thought of my parents.” Levy’s father was a German Jewish lawyer from the Sudetenland. At the age of 26 – in 1939, as it was becoming inescapably clear the Nazis were determined to stage a genocide in Europe – he went with his parents to the railway station in Prague, and they waved him goodbye. “He never saw them or heard from them again,” Levy says. “He never found out what happened to them. If he had not left, he would not have lived.” For six months he lived on a boat filled with refugees, being turned away from port after port, until finally they made it to British Mandate Palestine, as it then was.

“My father was traumatised for his whole life,” he says. “He never really settled in Israel. He never really learned to speak anything but broken Hebrew. He came to Israel with his PhD and he had to make his living, so he started to work in a bakery and to sell cakes from door to door on his bicycle. It must have been a terrible humiliation to be a PhD in law and be knocking on doors offering cakes. He refused to learn to be a lawyer again. He became a minor clerk. I think this is what smashed him, y’know? He lived here sixty years, he had his family, had his happiness but he was really a stranger. A foreigner, in his own country? He was always outraged by things, small things. He couldn’t understand how people would dare to phone between two and four in the afternoon. It horrified him. He never understood what is the concept of overdraft in the bank. Every Israeli has an overdraft, but if he heard somebody was one pound overdrawn, he was horrified.”

His father “never” talked about home. “Any time I tried to encourage him to talk about it, he would close down. He never went back. There was nothing [to go back to], the whole village was destroyed. He left a whole life there. He left a fiancé, a career, everything. I am very sorry I didn’t push him harder to talk because I was young, so I didn’t have much interest. That’s the problem. When we are curious about our parents, they are gone.”

Levy’s father never saw any parallels between the fact he was turned into a refugee, and the 800,000 Palestinians who were turned into refugees by the creation of the state of Israel. “Never! People didn’t think like that. We never discussed it, ever.” Yet in the territories, Levy began to see flickers of his father everywhere – in the broken men and women never able to settle, dreaming forever of going home.

Then, slowly, Levy began to realise their tragedy seeped deeper still into his own life – into the ground beneath his feet and the very bricks of the Israeli town where he lives, Sheikh Munis. It is built on the wreckage of “one of the 416 Palestinian villages Israel wiped off the face of the earth in 1948,” he says. “The swimming pool where I swim every morning was the irrigation grove they used to water the village’s groves. My house stands on one of the groves. The land was ‘redeemed’ by force, its 2,230 inhabitants were surrounded and threatened. They fled, never to return. Somewhere, perhaps in a refugee camp in terrible poverty, lives the family of the farmer who plowed the land where my house now stands.” He adds that it is “stupid and wrong” to compare it to the Holocaust, but says that man is a traumatized refugee just as surely as Levy’s father – and even now, if he ended up in the territories, he and his children and grandchildren live under blockade, or violent military occupation.

The historian Isaac Deutscher once offered an analogy for the creation of the state of Israel. A Jewish man jumps from a burning building, and he lands on a Palestinian, horribly injuring him. Can the jumping man be blamed? Levy’s father really was running for his life: it was Palestine, or a concentration camp. Yet Levy says that the analogy is imperfect – because now the jumping man is still, sixty years later, smashing the head of the man he landed on against the ground, and beating up his children and grandchildren too. “1948 is still here. 1948 is still in the refugee camps. 1948 is still calling for a solution,” he says. “Israel is doing the very same thing now... dehumanising the Palestinians where it can, and ethnic cleansing wherever it’s possible. 1948 is not over. Not by a long way.”

II The scam of “peace talks”

Levy looks out across the hotel bar where we are sitting and across the Middle East, as if the dry sands of the Negev desert were washing towards us. Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a string of propaganda myths, he says, and perhaps the most basic is the belief that Israel is a democracy. “Today we have three kinds of people living under Israeli rule,” he explains. “We have Jewish Israelis, who have full democracy and have full civil rights. We have the Israeli Arabs, who have Israeli citizenship but are severely discriminated against. And we have the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who live without any civil rights, and without any human rights. Is that a democracy?”

He sits back and asks in a low tone, as if talking about a terminally ill friend: “How can you say it is a democracy when, in 62 years, there was not one single Arab village established? I don’t have to tell you how many Jewish towns and villages were established. Not one Arab village. How can you say it’s a democracy when research has shown repeatedly that Jews and Arabs get different punishments for the same crime? How can you say it’s a democracy when a Palestinian student can hardly rent an apartment in Tel Aviv, because when they hear his accent or his name almost nobody will rent to him? How can you say Israel is a democracy when? Jerusalem invests 577 shekels a year in a pupil in [Palestinian] East Jerusalem and 2372 shekels a year in a pupil from [Jewish] West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity! Every part of our society is racist.”

“I want to be proud of my country,” he says. “I am an Israeli patriot. I want us to do the right thing.” So this requires him to point out that Palestinian violence is – in truth – much more limited than Israeli violence, and usually a reaction to it. “The first twenty years of the occupation passed quietly, and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise,” where Palestinian land is seized by Jewish religious fundamentalists who claim it was given to them by God. Only then – after a long period of theft, and after their attempts at peaceful resistance were met with brutal violence - did the Palestinians become violent themselves. “What would happen if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams [the rockets shot at Southern Israel, including civilian towns]? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda. Nobody would give any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they had not behaved violently.”

He unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Israeli civilians, but adds: “The Qassams have a context. They are almost always fired after an IDF assassination operation, and there have been many of these.” Yet the Israeli attitude is that “we are allowed to bomb anything we want but they are not allowed to launch Qassams.” It is a view summarised by Haim Ramon, the justice minister at time of Second Lebanon War: “We are allowed to destroy everything.”

Even the terms we use to discuss Operation Cast Lead are wrong, Levy argues. “That wasn’t a war. It was a brutal assault on a helpless, imprisoned population. You can call a match between Mike Tyson and a 5 year old child boxing, but the proportions, oh, the proportions.” Israel “frequently targeted medical crews, [and] shelled a UN-run school that served as a shelter for residents, who bled to death over days as the IDF prevented their evacuation by shooting and shelling... A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organisation. They say as a justification that Hamas hides among the civilian population. As if the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv is not located in the heart of a civilian population! As if there are places in Gaza that are not in the heart of a civilian population!”

He appeals to anybody who is sincerely concerned about Israel’s safety and security to join him in telling Israelis the truth in plain language. “A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict’s drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. Today, only those who speak up against Israel’s policies – who denounce the occupation, the blockade, and the war – are the nation’s true friends.” The people who defend Israel’s current course are “betraying the country” by encouraging it on “the path to disaster. A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed, and his father humiliated will not easily forgive.”

These supposed ‘friends of Israel’ are in practice friends of Islamic fundamentalism, he believes. “Why do they have to give the fundamentalists more excuses, more fury, more opportunities, more recruits? Look at Gaza. Gaza was totally secular not long ago. Now you can hardly get alcohol today in Gaza, after all the brutality. Religious fundamentalism is always the language people turn to in despair, if everything else fails. If Gaza had been a free society it would not have become like this. We gave them recruits.”

Levy believes the greatest myth – the one hanging over the Middle East like perfume sprayed onto a corpse – is the idea of the current ‘peace talks’ led by the United States. There was a time when he too believed in them. At the height of the Oslo talks in the 1990s, when Yitzhak Rabin negotiated with Yassir Arafat, “at the end of a visit I turned and, in a gesture straight out of the movies, waved Gaza farewell. Goodbye occupied Gaza, farewell! We are never to meet again, at least not in your occupied state. How foolish!”

Now, he says, he is convinced it was “a scam” from the start, doomed to fail. How does he know? “There is a very simple litmus test for any peace talks. A necessity for peace is for Israel to dismantle settlements in the West Bank. So if you are going to dismantle settlements soon, you’d stop building more now, right? They carried on building them all through Oslo. And today, Netanyahu is refusing to freeze construction, the barest of the bare minimum. It tells you all you need.”

He says Netanyahu has – like the supposedly more left-wing alternatives, Ehud Barak and Tzipip Livni – always opposed real peace talks, and even privately bragged about destroying the Oslo process. In 1997, during his first term as Israeli leader, he insisted he would only continue with the talks if a clause was added saying Israel would not have to withdraw from undefined “military locations” – and he was later caught on tape boasting: “Why is that important? Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo accords.” If he bragged about “stopping” the last peace process, why would he want this one to succeed? Levy adds: “And how can you make peace with only half the Palestinian population? How can you leave out Hamas and Gaza?”

These fake peace talks are worse than no talks at all, Levy believes. “If there are negotiations, there won’t be international pressure. Quiet, we’re in discussions, settlement can go on uninterrupted. That is why futile negotiations are dangerous negotiations. Under the cover of such talks, the chances for peace will grow even dimmer... The clear subtext is Netanyahu’s desire to get American support for bombing Iran. To do that, he thinks he needs to at least pay lip-service to Obama’s requests for talks. That’s why he’s doing this.”

After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”

III Waving Israeli flags made in China

According to the opinion polls, most Israelis support a two-state solution – yet they elect governments that expand the settlements and so make a two-state solution impossible. “You would need a psychiatrist to explain this contradiction,” Levy says. “Do they expect two states to fall from the sky? Today, the Israelis have no reason to make any changes,” he continues. “Life in Israel is wonderful. You can sit in Tel Aviv and have a great life. Nobody talks about the occupation. So why would they bother [to change]? The majority of Israelis think about the next vacation and the next jeep and all the rest doesn’t interest them any more.” They are drenched in history, and yet oblivious to it.

In Israel, the nation’s “town square has been empty for years. If there were no significant protests during Operation Cast Lead, then there is no left to speak of. The only group campaigning for anything other than their personal whims are the settlers, who are very active.” So how can change happen? He says he is “very pessimistic”, and the most likely future is a society turning to ever-more naked “apartheid.” With a shake of the head, he says: “We had now two wars, the flotilla – it doesn’t seem that Israel has learned any lesson, and it doesn’t seem that Israel is paying any price. The Israelis don’t pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative.”

It sounds like he is making the case for boycotting Israel, but his position is more complex. “Firstly, the Israeli opposition to the boycott is incredibly hypocritical. Israel itself is one of the world’s most prolific boycotters. Not only does it boycott, it preaches to others, at times even forces others, to follow in tow. Israel has imposed a cultural, academic, political, economic and military boycott on the territories. The most brutal, naked boycott is, of course, the siege on Gaza and the boycott of Hamas. At Israel's behest, nearly all Western countries signed onto the boycott with inexplicable alacrity. This is not just a siege that has left Gaza in a state of shortage for three years. It's a series of cultural, academic, humanitarian and economic boycotts. Israel is also urging the world to boycott Iran. So Israelis cannot complain if this is used against them.”

He shifts in his seat. “But I do not boycott Israel. I could have done it, I could have left Israel. But I don’t intend to leave Israel. Never. I can’t call on others to do what I will not do... There is also the question of whether it will work. I am not sure Israelis would make the connection. Look at the terror that happened in 2002 and 2003: life in Israel was really horrifying, the exploding buses, the suicide-bombers. But no Israeli made the connection between the occupation and the terror. For them, the terror was just the ‘proof’ that the Palestinians are monsters, that they were born to kill, that they are not human beings and that’s it. And if you just dare to make the connection, people will tell you ‘you justify terror ’ and you are a traitor. I suspect it would be the same with sanctions. The condemnation after Cast Lead and the flotilla only made Israel more nationalistic. If [a boycott was] seen as the judgement of the world they would be effective. But Israelis are more likely to take them as ‘proof’ the world is anti-Semitic and will always hate us.”

He believes only one kind of pressure would bring Israel back to sanity and safety: “The day the president of the United States decides to put an end to the occupation, it will cease. Because Israel was never so dependent on the United States as it is now. Never. Not only economically, not only militarily but above all politically. Israel is totally isolated today, except for America.” He was initially hopeful that Barack Obama would do this – he recalls having tears in his eyes as he delivered his victory speech in Grant Park – but he says he has only promoted “tiny steps, almost nothing, when big steps are needed.” It isn’t only bad for Israel – it is bad for America. “The occupation is the best excuse for many worldwide terror organisations. It’s not always genuine but they use it. Why do you let them use it? Why give them this fury? Why not you solve it once and for all when the, when the solution is so simple?”

For progress, “the right-wing American Jews who become orgiastic whenever Israel kills and destroys” would have to be exposed as “Israel’s enemies”, condemning the country they supposedly love to eternal war. “It is the right-wing American Jews who write the most disgusting letters. They say I am Hitler’s grandson, that they pray my children get cancer? It is because I touch a nerve with them. There is something there.” These right-wingers claim to be opposed to Iran, but Levy points out they vehemently oppose the two available steps that would immediately isolate Iran and strip Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh of his best propaganda-excuses: “peace with Syria and peace with the Palestinians, both of which are on offer, and both of which are rejected by Israel. They are the best way to undermine Iran.”

He refuses to cede Israel to people “who wave their Israeli flags made in China and dream of a Knesset cleansed of Arabs and an Israel with no [human rights organisation] B’Tselem.” He looks angry, indignant. “I will never leave. It’s my place on earth. It’s my language, it’s my culture. Even the criticism that I carry and the shame that I carry come from my deep belonging to the place. I will leave only if I be forced to leave. They would have to tear me out.”

IV A whistle in the dark

Does he think this is a real possibility – that his freedom could be taken from him, in Israel itself? “Oh, very easily,” he says. “It’s already taken from me by banning me from going to Gaza, and this is just a start. I have great freedom to write and to appear on television in Israel, and I have a very good life, but I don’t take my freedom for granted, not at all. If this current extreme nationalist atmosphere continues in Israel in one, two, three years time?” He sighs. “There may be new restrictions, Ha’aretz may close down – God forbid – I don’t take anything for granted. I will not be surprised if Israeli Palestinian parties are criminalized at the next election, for example. Already they are going after the NGOs [Non-Government Organizations that campaign for Palestinian rights]. There is already a majority in the opinion polls who want to punish people who expose wrong-doing by the military and want to restrict the human rights groups.”

There is also the danger of a freelance attack. Last year, a man with a large dog strutted up to Levy near his home and announced: “I have wanted to beat you to a pulp for a long time.” Levy only narrowly escaped, and the man was never caught. He says now: “I am scared but I don’t live on the fear. But to tell you that my night sleep is as yours... I’m not sure. Any noise, my first association is ‘maybe now, it’s coming’. But there was never any concrete case in which I really thought ‘here it comes’. But I know it might come.”

Has he ever considered not speaking the truth, and diluting his statements? He laughs – and for the only time in our interview, his eloquent torrents of words begin to sputter. “I wish I could! No way I could. I mean, this is not an option at all. Really, I can’t. How can I? No way. I feel lonely but my private, er, surrounding is supportive, part of it at least. And there are still Israelis who appreciate what I do. If you walk with me in the streets of Tel Aviv you will see all kinds of reactions but also very positive reactions. It is hard but I mean it’s?it’s?what other choice do I have?”

He says his private life is supportive “in part”. What’s the part that isn’t? For the past few years, he says, he has dated non-Israeli women – “I couldn’t be with a nationalistic person who said those things about the Palestinians” – but his two sons don’t read anything he writes, “and they have different politics from me. I think it was difficult for them, quite difficult.” Are they right-wingers? “No, no, no, nothing like that. As they get older, they are coming to my views more. But they don’t read my work. No,” he says, looking down, “they don’t read it.”

The long history of the Jewish people has a recurring beat – every few centuries, a brave Jewish figure stands up to warn his people they are have ended up on an immoral or foolish path that can only end in catastrophe, and implores them to change course. The first prophet, Amos, warned that the Kingdom of Israel would be destroyed because the Jewish people had forgotten the need for justice and generosity – and he was shunned for it. Baruch Spinoza saw beyond the Jewish fundamentalism of his day to a materialist universe that could be explained scientifically – and he was excommunicated, even as he cleared the path for the great Jewish geniuses to come. Could Levy, in time, be seen as a Jewish prophet in the unlikely wilderness of a Jewish state, calling his people back to a moral path?

He nods faintly, and smiles. “Noam Chomsky once wrote to me that I was like the early Jewish prophets. It was the greatest compliment anyone has ever paid me. But... well... My opponents would say it’s a long tradition of self-hating Jews. But I don’t take that seriously. For sure, I feel that I belong to a tradition of self-criticism. I deeply believe in self-criticism.” But it leaves him in bewildering situations: “Many times I am standing among Palestinian demonstrators, my back to the Palestinians, my face to the Israeli soldiers, and they were shooting in our direction. They are my people, and they are my army. The people I’m standing among are supposed to be the enemy. It is...” He shakes his head. There must be times, I say, when you ask: what’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a state like this?

But then, as if it has been nagging at him, he returns abruptly to an earlier question. “I am very pessimistic, sure. Outside pressure can be effective if it’s an American one but I don’t see it happening. Other pressure from other parts of the world might be not effective. The Israeli society will not change on its own, and the Palestinians are too weak to change it. But having said this, I must say, if we had been sitting here in the late 1980s and you had told me that the Berlin wall will fall within months, that the Soviet Union will fall within months, that parts of the regime in South Africa will fall within months, I would have laughed at you. Perhaps the only hope I have is that this occupation regime hopefully is already so rotten that maybe it will fall by itself one day. You have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles.”

In the meantime, Gideon Levy will carry on patiently documenting his country’s crimes, and trying to call his people back to a righteous path. He frowns a little – as if he is picturing Najawa Khalif blown to pieces in front of her school bus, or his own broken father – and says to me: “A whistle in the dark is still a whistle."

You can buy Gideon Levy's book 'The Punishment of Gaza' from verso Books.

The clips of senior Liberal Democrats on the news defending David Cameron’s imminent deeper-than-Thatcher slash-back are starting to look like hostage videos from Iraq. Slightly dazed, poor Simon Hughes or Menzies Campbell or Charles Kennedy will glance somewhere off camera with a nervous twitch and mumble a few supportive platitudes. Yes, we know that before the election Nick Clegg said “there isn’t a serious economist in the world who agrees with the Conservatives… [that] we should pull the rug out from under the economy with immediate spending cuts.” We know he said the people pushing this argument were “fake” and “a con”. But… um… things have changed… and… er… cut… yes… cut… now please tell my family I love them and I’ll be home soon and don’t hurt me please no no.

Sidney Blumenthal, one of Bill Clinton’s closest aides, once said: “All politicians lie, but the Clintons do it with such ease it’s frightening.” The Liberal Democrats are the polar opposite. It’s to their credit that they are finding lying so difficult, and do it so badly: Vince Cable’s protestations of agreement with George Osborne caused all polygraph machines within a thousand mile radius of Liverpool to ping into action.

So why is this party composed primarily of nice centre-left people of good conscience providing the enabling votes for the biggest and most regressive program of retrenchment in generations? How long can it last?

The Liberal Democrats have an air of stunned confusion. The coalition government with the Conservatives happened suddenly, came entirely from Nick Clegg and a tiny team at the top, and was sealed without any of them having time to think it through. Their first reaction is excitement, like suddenly finding your football team has leapt from the bottom of the league to the top. They want Nick Clegg to be right. They want to trust him.

They point to the good things he has wrung out of the Conservatives with justified pride. It looks like Labour’s disastrous jail-them-all, stack-them-high prisons policy, that worsens criminals and endangers us all, is going to end. Schools will soon receive significantly more cash – a “pupil premium” – if they take in a child from a poor family, a move that will help steadily unpick the ugly covert selection that scars our education system. They have secured a proper inquiry into our security services’ complicity with torture under Labour. They made Cameron abandon his pledge to give a massive inheritance tax cut to the richest one percent of Brits. These are real achievements and they deserve real credit.

But in their guts, ordinary Liberal Democrats fear that any piece of progress they achieve is going to disappear into a whirlpool of recession and unemployment and soaring poverty caused by the coalition’s economic policies. George Osborne is explicitly following the economic policies pioneered by Ireland over the past two years: “Look and learn from across the Irish Sea,” he said. Prioritize paying your debt above everything else. Be an anti-Roosevelt. Scorn stimulus. We can see the results. It means Ireland is facing one of the worst economic collapses in the world, and had to spend this entire week denying it was about to by bailed out by the IMF. By contrast, the countries that have pursued an aggressive, debt-funded Keynesian stimulus – like South Korea – have pulled out of this recession fastest of all.

Yet the Liberal Democrat leadership has unequivocally nailed itself to the cut-your-way-out-of-a-recession strategy, with no way out. Clegg ridiculed the arguments from John Maynard Keynes, the greatest Liberal of the twentieth century. He has even said it would be immoral to pursue an economic stimulus – an argument which would present Roosevelt as the great villain of the 1930s, and Herbert Hoover and the Republicans as the heroes. Why would Clegg do this? When he is quizzed by his colleagues, he keeps using the old line Blair used on Iraq: “It’s worse than you think. I really believe in it.”

This hawkishness has spread so rapidly that the party’s election song in 2015 could be the 1980s Sinita hit ‘So Macho’. The conference podium was filled with chest-beating talk about “staying the course” and “holding our nerve” – but if the course you are on is wrong, you should abandon it at once. The former MP Lembit Opik tried to reassure the activists by saying that the government would last five years so “there will be time for the scars” caused by all this “to heal.” But if the economic wound is getting deeper and more infected – as it will, with these policies – then there will be only worsening. It’s why Tim Farron, another Lib Dem MP, told a fringe meeting: “We mustn’t panic. We mustn’t panic!” in a very panicked voice.

Yet while the Liberal Democrat grassroots suspect all this, they are reluctant to truly peer into this chasm. Their revolts centred on the Tories’ education and health policies. They’re bad enough, for sure, but they are secondary to the horrendous social problems that will come from slashing 40 percent from the budgets of most departments, trigger a much worse recession, and harm schools and hospitals much more.

How long will they follow an unworldly and naïve leadership over an economic cliff? Remember, Clegg is so out-of-touch that he said in 2008 that the state pension was £30 a week – a third of the actual amount, and a level that would kill most pensioners. No wonder he thinks key services can lose 40 percent and survive. Danny Alexander said last month that “no-one would say they came into politics to cut public spending.” No-one? Has he met the Conservatives he sits in cabinet with? Does he know anything about their intellectual traditions?

The party’s members are anxiously aware of the political consequences for their party. A ComRes poll this weekend found that 52 percent of Liberal Democrat voters believe Clegg has “sold out”, and the party’s support has nearly halved. This is before the cuts hit. In Australia, the once-popular Democratic Party propped up a right-wing government – and was killed dead by the electorate. Remember the “Cleggmania” after the debates? It seems now like one of those mad Christmas Number Ones that everybody bought and nobody can remember why – the political equivalent of Mr Blobby’s hit single.

The referendum on electoral reform may determine the timing of when – and if - the party turns on Clegg. If it is won, we will be much more likely to have hung parliaments in future, with the Lib Dems retaining the balance of power, even when their numbers are radically diminished. This could keep them with the coalition, even as the economic storm worsens. If the referendum is lost, though, the party will be furious they got so little – and know they are very likely to return to the wilderness in diminished form anyway.

Some Lib Dems are already speaking out. Professor Richard Grayson, their excellent parliamentary candidate for Hemel Hempstead, says: “The support I got would’ve disappeared if they’d know we were going to sign up to the Conservative agenda on cuts…. How as a party are we going to survive this?” At the moment, he says, the opposition within the party is “like the French Resistance in 1940 – random acts of sabotage, but nothing co-ordinated. Next year we may get to 1941, where it was be organized and systematic.”

Clegg ended his speech with a rousing cry to “imagine how different our country will be” in 2015, after five years of ConDem rule. Oh, but we can, Nick. That’s precisely the reason why we – and your party – are getting so nervous.