In addition to his work at Haaretz, Levy has published a book, hosted a television show, and edited or written documentaries and other programs.

Levy was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv, the eldest of two sons of Holocaust survivors. He lived through the 1967 Six-Day War, when a shell fired by an Arab army exploded in a street adjacent to his home. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Levy's political views were typically mainstream. "I was a full member of the nationalistic religious orgy," said Levy of his childhood. "We all were under the feeling that the whole project [of Israel] is in an existentialistic danger. We all felt that another holocaust is around the corner."

Levy began his journalism career in 1974, when he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a writer and editor for the Israel Army Radio, until his discharge in 1978. From 1978 to 1982 he served, together with left-wing politician Yossi Beilin, as an aide to Shimon Peres, then leader of the Israel Labor party. In 1982 he began working for the Israeli daily Haaretz and in the years 1983–1987 he worked as the vice editor-in-chief. He has been writing the "Twilight Zone" column since 1988.

In addition to his work for Haaretz, Levy published a compilation of his articles in 2004, entitled Twilight Zone – Life and Death under the Israeli Occupation. He coedited, with Haim Yavin, a documentary series, Whispering Embers (Hebrew: גחלת לוחשת‎), on Russian Jewry after the fall of communism, hosted A Personal meeting with Gideon Levy, a weekly talk show that was broadcast on Israeli cable TV on channel 3., and has appeared periodically on other television talk shows.

Levy has said that his dissident views on Israel's policies toward the Palestinians developed only after he began working for Haaretz. "When I first started covering the West Bank for Haaretz, I was young and brainwashed," he said in an interview. "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.' It took me a long time to see that these were not exceptions—they were the substance of government policy."

Levy resides in Tel Aviv and is a divorced father of two.

"My modest mission is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, 'We didn't know'," said Levy in an interview. He often criticizes what he describes as Israeli society's "moral blindness" to the effects of its acts of war and occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. He has referred to the construction of settlements on private Palestinian land as "the most criminal enterprise in [Israel's] history". He opposed the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, and the popular view that civilian casualties in that war were both inevitable and acceptable. He said in 2007 that the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, which was under a strict blockade by Israel, made him ashamed to be an Israeli.

Levy supports unilateral withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories without demanding concessions. "Israel is not being asked 'to give' anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return - to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity."

Levy wrote that the Gaza War was a complete failure for Israel, and that none of the objectives of the war was achieved. "The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law," he wrote in an editorial.

Levy's writing has raised considerable controversy. He won the Anna Lindh journalism prize in 2008, for promoting cultural dialogue, for an article he wrote about Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel awarded him the the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award in 1996 for promoting human rights, and he has won numerous other awards for his writing. He has been praised by Johann Hari of The Independent as "the heroic Israeli journalist", and his columns are cited often in the New York Times and other newspapers. The French newspaper Le Monde praised him as a 'thorn in Israel's flank' and Der Spiegel characterized him as "[Israel's] most radical commentator".-[a]