According to Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy (“The Good Guys," August 17), only two kinds of worldviews are worthy of esteem: the “damned” one (as he puts it) of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the settler right, and the moral, right one (he implies) of Levy himself. Why? Because only those who hold the latter view is prepared to pay a personal and political price for his opinions. All the rest, especially the Zionist left wing, are collaborators of the occupation. The tongue-cluckers – like Chemi Shalev and like me, representatives of the "peace-talkers" whom Levy’s article targets – have “never done anything to end the occupation,” he claims.

The real subtext of myself and of Chemi Shalev, says Levy, is “that deep down, Netanyahu is one of them,” a “highly educated Ashkenazi who grew up in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood and graduated from MIT,” who "simply sold his soul to the right-wing devil for a fistful of votes” and then went on to “connect with these untamed Mizrahi Likudniks." We are "Mapainiks at heart" who "think that Netanyahu too should have been a Zionist leftist, advocating a two-state solution and holding neverending peace talks like the revered Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin." We "cannot conceive the inconceivable, that Netanyahu decided to pay a personal price by dispensing with the admiration of Barkai, Shalev and their ilk, who are like him in their origins, in order to realize his beliefs.”

This isn’t the first time that Levy descended to the level of right-wing columnist Daniella Weiss. He is familiar with using verbal acrobatics of the sort; anything goes when it comes to lambasting at his true pet peeve, the left, or the "Mapainiks" as he puts it, a word he hisses with the same contempt as the right does when it sneers, “lefties.”

He tries over and over to wash off the stain that's been stuck to him (in his eyes, not mine) since he faithfully served his master Peres. But as the devil would have it, the stain stays. The people who are not prepared to pay a price for their opinions advocate “a two-state solution and holding neverending peace talks like the revered Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin,” he said, and his hand did not tremble as he wrote this despicable thesis. To Levy, everything begins and ends with the occupation. (Incidentally, which occupation? The one of 1967 or of 1948?) If we end it, everything will be hunky-dory.

For many Israelis and for myself – unfortunately there are too few of us – the occupation is a disaster, a real blemish on the Zionist enterprise, but while its end is necessary, it is not sufficient for ending the conflict. Or as yet another Zionist left-winger, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, wrote, we must leave the occupied territories tomorrow, but there still won't be peace. Because aside from the occupation, there are genuine security issues, there is Islamic incitement and there is the right of return that no Palestinian leader is willing to forgo.

Levy is correct. The delusional right and delusional left have the same worldview: a state of all its citizens. But the one side means an apartheid state and the other means a binational state where the horse and driver have simply changed places.

But let’s not get carried away. There is no symmetry between the two viewpoints. There is a gaping chasm between the actions that each view's adherents would take. I assume the so-called radical left loathes Netanyahu but admires his determination, just as the radical right loathed Rabin but admired his determination. The difference is that no left-winger, however extreme, would buy a gun. If he bought one, he wouldn’t use it. And if he did use it, he’d have to miss.

Three years ago Levy and I found ourselves in a surreal situation. David Grossman's play, “Falling out of Time,” was playing at Tel Aviv's Gesher Theater. It was right in the middle of the Gaza war. The siren sounded, the actors stopped in their tracks and everybody ran to take shelter.

I wondered what was going through the head of the man who just a day earlier had written that the pilots of the Israel Air Forces were flying in “death squadrons,” (“Lowest Deeds from Loftiest Heights,” July 15, 2014) and if he hoped, in his heart of hearts, that one of our “bad boys” would destroy the missile launcher targeting Tel Aviv. As far as I was concerned, that article was Levy’s divorce certificate from his Israeliness.