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Eylon Levy, Israel’s savvy English-language spokesman, is earning admirers — and reportedly one very significant enemy
(JTA) — Roughly twice as many people have viewed a single instance of Eylon Levy raising his eyebrows as there are citizens of the country he was defending when he did it.
“Does Israel not think that Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?” Sky News journalist Kay Burley asked Levy, a spokesperson for the Israeli government, on live TV in late November, as Israel was in the process of releasing three Palestinian prisoners for each Israeli hostage freed from Gaza.
“That is an astonishing accusation,” Levy responded, his expressive eyebrows shooting up in disbelief. “If we could release one prisoner for every one hostage we would obviously do that,” he retorted.
He shared the clip in a tweet that went viral and has now been seen more than 16 million times. It was, he wrote, “the first question that left me speechless (but only for a second).”
It was also a breakout moment for the British-accented Oxbridge graduate who has been called “Israel’s prince of public diplomacy,” known in Hebrew as hasbara. Tens of thousands of people flooded to watch him on social media, increasing his follower count on X, formerly Twitter, by more than sevenfold, to 175,000; he has another 178,000 on Instagram. He began to draw attention on the street. And his social media antics gave Israel a powerful weapon in the bruising social media battles that have become ever more intense since Oct. 7.
Now, in a sign of how Israel’s wartime unity is fraying, Levy is finding himself embattled — by Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly holds it against Levy that he criticized her husband’s leadership before Oct. 7. An initial report that he would be pushed out of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate has been batted back, but rumors are still swirling that he could face consequences because of Sara Netanyahu’s famous ire.
Levy’s exit, if it comes, would strip the prime minister’s office of one of its savviest public defenders at a time when international opinion is turning more strongly against the Israeli war effort.
“He’s a very smart guy and well spoken and it was something that was incredibly lacking in the beginning of the war,” Israeli policy analyst and pro-Israel influencer Eli Kowaz said about Levy. “He was able to talk to all these international news outlets and make a lot of important points.”
Israeli Government Spokesman Eylon Levy speaks with journalists near a tunnel in Northern Gaza that Hamas reportedly used on Oct. 7 to attack Israel, Jan. 7, 2024. (Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Levy declined to comment on Monday, instead referring questions to the prime minister’s office. The office denied reports that he could be penalized for his politics, saying, “The directorate works according to professional standards.”
Levy’s biography and import are well established at this point, as he has become a familiar face for anyone consuming news or social media about Israel.
Born in London to Israeli parents, Levy studied first at Oxford University, where he was involved in debate. (A far-left member of Parliament famously walked out rather than debate Levy, saying he did not debate Israelis.) He then earned a graduate degree in international relations from Cambridge, researching the impact of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, including his own grandparents, on Israel’s development.
From there, he moved to Israel, arriving at the end of the 2014 Gaza War. Enlisting in the Israeli Defense Forces, he was assigned to the unit responsible for implementing Israeli civil policy in the West Bank and Gaza in coordination with the Palestinian Authority and other international groups. After his service, he spent several years as a news anchor on Israeli television before joining the office of Israeli President Isaac Herzog as its international media advisor. (On the side, he translated Israeli books into English, including a 2021 memoir that made him a finalist for a prestigious translation prize.)
In the middle of 2023, Levy quit his job in Herzog’s office. The country had been torn apart by a proposal from Netanyahu’s right-wing government to overhaul Israel’s judiciary. Proponents of the changes said they were necessary to bring the judiciary more in line with the will of the people. Critics — including a wide array of international legal scholars — said they would erode Israeli democracy. Weekly protests had come to define the country.
As Herzog sought to broker a compromise, Levy sided with the critics, becoming an even more outspoken pro-democracy protester after leaving his government post, regularly appearing at rallies and passionately expressing his opposition to the current government on social media.
“The government’s plan to effectively abolish judicial review and give the executive the power to appoint all judges would eliminate any separation of powers, remove a major check and balance, and effectively deny judicial independence,” he tweeted on July 1, as the first elements of the plan neared a vote.
Thousands of Israeli protesters wave flags during a rally against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bills in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Gili Yaari/Flash90)
His personal criticism of Netanyahu continued into the first days of the war. “This will be Netanyahu’s legacy,” he tweeted on Oct. 8, the day after the attack. “Not the COVID vaccines. Not the Abraham Accords. Not the judicial reform or the protests. The history books will open with one of the deadliest terror attacks in world history, on his watch, after nearly 15 years in charge of our security.”
But he soon drafted himself to the government’s defense, joining the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who set aside their objections to the government in favor of a unified, powerful response to Hamas’ attack, which left about 1,200 dead and 240 in captivity.
Levy explained his decision to join the government he once excoriated in an interview with Globes, an Israeli magazine. “Like many, I participated in the protests against the reform. It’s no secret,” he said. “There was Israel before October 7 and there is Israel after. Nothing will return to what it was before. There is now only one task: to win the war, and for that we must put the wars of the Jews aside and unite.”
Levy’s addition to the government’s public advocacy team came at a crucial time, with the National Public Diplomacy Directorate in a state of disarray. Its leader, Likud Knesset member Galit Distel Atbaryan, resigned on Oct. 13 after being criticized for speaking English poorly.
In contrast, Levy’s flawless native English made him a successful sparring partner on news programs around the world. In another sharp viral exchange, Levy took aim at Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Nov. 26.
Varadkar had tweeted about the release from captivity of a 9-year-old Israeli girl whose father is Irish. “This is a day of enormous joy and relief for Emily Hand and her family,” he wrote. “An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned, and we breathe a massive sigh of relief. Our prayers have been answered.”
Levy tore into Varadkar, a longtime critic of Israel. “Emily Hand wasn’t ‘lost,’” he wrote, his disdain dripping from the screen. “She was brutally abducted by the death squads that massacred her neighbors. She wasn’t ‘found.’ Hamas knew where she was all along and cynically held her as a hostage. And Hamas didn’t answer your prayers. It answered Israel’s military pressure.”
Not all of Levy’s viral moments have reflected in-the-moment anger. On TikTok, where he posts videos with the help of a social media team, he has tapped into trends, joking about what’s out for 2024 (“Calling to globalize the intifada and a ceasefire at the same time; the math isn’t mathing,” he said) and producing a riff on a famous scene from the movie “Love Actually” for Christmas.
Surrender, actually #israel #israeligovernment #israelhamaswarupdate #eylonlevy #loveactually
♬ original sound – Eylon A Levy
His posts — and eyebrows — have won him admirers. A Reddit post from last week titled “Eylon Levy appreciation post” has more than 100 comments, including from both men and women expressing romantic interest in him. “He[‘s] super hot and super smart. He’s also really brave and resilient, and has a very Jewish ethos,” one wrote. “He’s total fantasy crush material.”
Levy has fans in the Knesset, too. On Sunday, after the report first emerged that he could be pushed out, Zeev Elkin, the National Unity Party member who heads the subcommittee of external affairs and advocacy, addressed a letter to the head of the public diplomacy office.
“The importance of hasbara for the State of Israel in light of the war is self-evident. In our subcommittee meetings, the name of Eylon Levy was raised, a spokesperson for the National Public Diplomacy Directorate, several times in positive contexts,” Elkin wrote before asking for clarification on Levy’s future employment and if “pressure from outside forces” was being used to end his government tenure.
Sara Netanyahu looms large in Israeli politics, where she is seen as taking extreme measures behind the scenes to protect her husband, sometimes in seeming oppposition to his interests. She recently made headlines for reportedly accusing hostages’ families of bolstering Hamas by pressuring Netanyahu to seek an immediate hostage-for-prisoner deal no matter the cost. She is also famous for holding grudges.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and wife Sara thank Likud supporters at a Tel Aviv celebration of the party’s election victory, March 3, 2020. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
While Levy’s role appears to be safe for now, the controversy and the fact that it surprised no one remains meaningful, Kowaz said.
“What is most problematic is the entire functioning of the government being driven by the political and personal interests of Netanyahu,” he said. A damning survey by Israel’s Channel 13 found this week that 53% of respondents believe the prime minister’s wartime decision-making is primarily motivated by personal interest, while 33% said he is acting for the good of the country.
As for Levy, he returned this week from a quick trip to England where he helped mark 100 days since Oct. 7 by speaking in Trafalgar Square. He has continued posting without interruption — or acknowledgment of the tumult reported about his role. And on Tuesday morning, he was in front of the TV cameras for the Israeli government’s daily English-language press briefing for the first time in a week.
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As Gaza War Continues, Hamas Calls for Global Protests While Israel Marks Breakthroughs in Medical Innovation
A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
As the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas calls for global protests amid stalled Gaza ceasefire talks, Israel has broken new ground despite the ongoing conflict, achieving a major medical breakthrough in synthetic human kidney development.
The contrast illustrates a stark contrast between the priorities of Hamas, an international designated terrorist group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, and Israel, the lone democracy in the Middle East that has long been a leader in tech and medical innovation.
On Wednesday, Hamas urged worldwide protests in support of Palestinians, calling on the international community “to denounce Israel’s genocidal war and starvation policy in Gaza.”
“We call for continuing and escalating the popular pressure in all cities and squares on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday … through rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins outside the embassies of the Israeli regime and its allies, particularly in the US,” the statement read.
The Palestinian terrorist group also called to expose what it described as “the terrorism of the Zio-Nazi occupation against defenseless civilians.”
Hamas’s latest move against Israel comes amid stalled indirect negotiations over a proposed 60-day ceasefire and hostage release deal, which collapsed last month after the group vowed it would not disarm unless an independent Palestinian state is established — rejecting a key Israeli demand to end the war in Gaza.
In its statement, Hamas demanded the opening of all border crossings to allow immediate aid into the war-torn enclave and urged a global condemnation of “the international community’s inaction on the Israeli crimes.”
Amid mounting international pressure to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel announced new measures to facilitate the delivery of aid, including temporary pauses in fighting in certain areas and the creation of protected routes for aid convoys.
Israeli officials have previously accused Hamas of diverting aid for terrorist activities and selling supplies at inflated prices to civilians, while also blaming the United Nations and other foreign organizations for enabling this diversion.
Hamas’s statement also emphasized that the “global resistance movement must continue until Israeli aggression on Gaza ends and the siege on the coastal strip is lifted.”
Meanwhile, as Israel faces escalating hostilities and the heavy toll of war, the Jewish state continues to push the boundaries of innovation and resilience, achieving new medical breakthroughs while confronting ongoing challenges.
In a major medical breakthrough, scientists at Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University have successfully grown a synthetic 3D miniature human kidney in a lab using specialized stem cells derived from kidney tissue — one of the most promising advances in regenerative medicine.
Dr. Dror Harats, chairman of Sheba’s Research Authority, described this achievement as a reflection of Israel’s leading role in global medical innovation.
“Despite growing efforts to isolate Israel from international science, breakthroughs like this prove our impact is both lasting and essential,” he said.
In a landmark study, a team from Sheba’s Safra Children’s Hospital and Tel Aviv University’s Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine created synthetic kidney organs that matured and remained stable for 34 weeks — the longest-lasting and most refined kidney organoids developed to date.
Nearly a decade ago, the research team became the first to successfully isolate human kidney tissue stem cells — the cells responsible for the organ’s development and growth.
Previous attempts to grow kidneys in a lab using general-purpose stem cells were short-lived, typically lasting only a few weeks and often producing unwanted cell types that compromised research accuracy.
However, this Israeli research team used stem cells taken directly from kidney tissue — cells that naturally develop into kidney parts — allowing them to create a much purer and more stable model with key features found in real kidneys.
This medical breakthrough could have far-reaching implications, redefining the current understanding of kidney diseases and advancing the development of innovative treatments.
Researchers believe the model could help assess how medications impact fetal kidneys during pregnancy and move science closer to repairing or replacing damaged kidney tissue with lab-grown cells.
The discovery came days after researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and international partners discovered a way to boost the immune system’s cancer-fighting ability by reprogramming how T cells, which are white blood cells critical to the immune system, produce energy.
The researchers explained in a study published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications that disabling a protein known as Ant2 in T cells greatly enhances their effectiveness against tumors.
“By disabling Ant2, we triggered a complete shift in how T cells produce and use energy,” Prof. Michael Berger of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine, who co-led the study with doctorate student Omri Yosef, told the Tazpit Press Service. “This reprogramming made them significantly better at recognizing and killing cancer cells.”
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Netherlands to Push EU to Suspend Israel Trade Deal but Won’t Recognize Palestinian State ‘At This Time’
Netherlands Foreign Affairs Minister Caspar Veldkamp addresses a press conference, in New Delhi on April 1, 2025. Photo: ANI Photo/Sanjay Sharma via Reuters Connect
The Netherlands is spearheading efforts to suspend the European Union-Israel trade agreement amid rising EU criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, while simultaneously refusing to recognize a Palestinian state, contrasting with other member states as international pressure mounts.
On Thursday, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp announced that the Netherlands will push the EU to suspend the trade component of the EU-Israel Association Agreement — a pact governing the EU’s political and economic ties with the Jewish state.
This latest anti-Israel initiative follows a recent EU-commissioned report accusing Israel of committing “indiscriminate attacks … starvation … torture … [and] apartheid” against Palestinians in Gaza during its military campaign against Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
Following calls from a majority of EU member states for a formal investigation, this report built on Belgium’s recent decision to review Israel’s compliance with the trade agreement, a process initiated by the Netherlands and led by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas.
According to the report, “there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations” under the 25-year-old EU-Israel Association Agreement.
While the document acknowledges the reality of violence by Hamas, it states that this issue lies outside its scope — failing to address the Palestinian terrorist group’s role in sparking the current war with its bloody rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israeli officials have slammed the report as factually incorrect and morally flawed, noting that Hamas embeds its military infrastructure within civilian targets and Israel’s army takes extensive precautions to try and avoid civilian casualties.
In a Dutch parliamentary debate on Gaza on Thursday, Veldkamp also announced that the government would not recognize a Palestinian state for now — a position that stands in sharp contrast to the recent moves by several other EU member states to extend recognition.
“The Netherlands is not planning to recognize a Palestinian state at this time,” the Dutch diplomat said.
“This war has ceased to be a just war and is now leading to the erosion of Israel’s own security and identity,” he continued.
This latest decision goes against the position of several EU member states, including France, which has committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood in September.
The United Kingdom has likewise indicated it will do so unless Israel acts to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and agrees to a ceasefire.
For its part, Germany said it was not planning to recognize a Palestinian state in the short term, and Italy argued that recognition must occur simultaneously with the recognition of Israel by the new entity.
Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia all recognized a Palestinian state last year.
Israel has been facing growing pressure from several EU member states seeking to undermine its defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
On Thursday, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera strongly condemned Israel’s actions in the war-torn enclave, describing the situation as a “grave violation of human dignity.”
“What we are seeing is a concrete population being targeted, killed and condemned to starve to death,” Ribera told Politico. “If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning.”
Until now, the European Commission has refrained from accusing Israel of genocide, but Ribera’s comments mark one of the strongest European condemnations since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
She also called on the EU to take decisive action by considering the suspension of its trade agreement with Israel and the implementation of sanctions, while emphasizing that such measures would require unanimous approval from all member states.
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Graduate Student Unions Promoting Antisemitism, Reform Group Says
Students listen to a speech at a protest encampment at Stanford University in Stanford, California US, on April 26, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
Higher-education-based unions controlled by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) are rife with antisemitism and anti-Zionist discrimination, according to a new letter imploring the US Congress’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce to address the matter.
“Tracing its roots to communism in the 1930s, the UE is a radical, pro-Hamas labor union that has a long history of antisemitism,” the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), one of the US’s leading labor reform groups, wrote on July 30 in a message obtained by The Algemeiner. “The UE openly supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is designed to cripple and destroy Israel economically. Today, the UE furthers its antisemitic agenda by unionizing graduate students on college campuses and using its exclusive representation powers to create a hostile environment for Jewish students. The hostile environment includes demanding compulsory dues to fund the UE’s abhorrent activities.”
NRTW went on to describe a litany of alleged injustices to which UE members subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University. At MIT, the letter said, “union officers” aided a riotous group which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the BDS movement. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
The situation requires federal oversight and intervention, NRTW said, including Congress’s possibly clarifying that student-employees are not traditional employees and are therefore afforded protections under sections of the Civil Rights Act which apply to the campus.
“These continuing patterns of antisemitism are illegal, immoral, and must be stopped,” the letter continued. “We encourage you to do all that is in your power to investigate and help bring an end to the UE and its affiliates’ nonstop harassment and intimidation of Jewish students … The Trump administration can also use tools available to it under Title VI and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against colleges who work with unions to create a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
July’s letter is not the first time NRTW has publicized alleged antisemitic abuse in unions representing higher education employees.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.