Bernard-Henri Lévi's Case for Israel

Bernard-Henri Lévy wears a lot of hats. He is a journalist, philosopher, documentarian, activist, and even occasional diplomat. A common thread unites these disparate vocations: Lévi’s firm commitment to human rights and democracy and his conviction that civilization and the Enlightenment project are identical endeavors. Lévi often acts like a modern gadfly to keep the civilized world civilized, pestering Western nations to live up to their ideals in the face of barbarism. Few were as vocal proponents for intervening in Syria, Libya, Nigeria, and any corner of the world where tyrants and fanatics trample upon human rights. His work has, accordingly, garnered widespread praise and enmity. For better or worse, he has become France’s most recognizable intellectual and, in some ways, the world’s most recognizable cosmopolitan.

Lévi acts the gadfly again in his new book, Israel Alone, only this time, a greater, more personal urgency animates his writing. A Jew himself, Lévi sees the Western condemnation of Israel following October 7 and the war in Gaza as not just a betrayal of an ally but a betrayal of civilization itself. A slim but ambitious volume, his book is a welcome defense of Israel and an appeal to Westerners to rekindle their faith in the once great promise of liberalism. But in the course of his arguments, Lévi provides an unwitting example of a type of moralism, at once both hopeful and vengeful, that today jeopardizes both the Zionist and liberal projects. It is a reckless moralism that heroes of each would do well to avoid.  

Alone

Israel Alone is, in some ways, two books. The first is an interpretative analysis of the historical significance of October 7. For Lévi, the attack was a world-changing event that placed Israel at the center of the global contest between Enlightenment civilization and its illiberal challengers. The second, more polemical book is Lévi’s attempt to counter Western critics' various charges lodged at Israel. The conclusion of both is aptly captured in the volume’s title: Israel today is more alone than ever.

According to Lévi, October 7 was an “Event” in the proper sense of the word. Akin to critical junctures in social scientific literature, events are unprecedented, unpredictable breaks from the past that yield a new social trajectory for those involved or implicated. The massacre that took place in Israel was a “lynching a thousand times greater” than anything the country had seen in the past. The mass hostage-taking alone was “without precedent since the rape of the Sabine women.” 10/7 was also unpredictable, though in a paradoxical sense. Analysts of Hamas had all the data they needed to suspect there could be a massive attack. There were large-scale training sessions, increased contact with IRGC officials, and plenty of primary sources to suggest Hamas’s evil intentions. And yet, according to Lévi, intelligence agencies in the West lacked the mental framework to assemble the troubling signs into a coherent warning. It was unpredictable because our imaginations refused to let us see its possibility.

The defining characteristic of an event, however, is more its effect than its origin. October 7, the traumatizing event it was, has already changed “the parameters of the world’s cartography” by triggering three global “upheavals.” First, Jews now feel that there is “nowhere in the world” where they are safe; the piercing of Israel’s armor robbed diaspora Jews of their “insurance policy.” Second, the sheer ruthlessness of October 7 awakened the West to the “reality of evil,” a reality to which we have been criminally blind for a generation. Finally, and perhaps most important, the event confirmed and consolidated the coordination of nations eager to weaken the West: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and unspecified Arab states “prone to jihadism.” These “Five Kings,” so named after the kings Abraham defeats in the Book of Genesis, actively seek to undermine the Western liberal “empire” to revive their respective nations' glories. To this end, Lévi maintains, they used Hamas, through direct or indirect support, to attack Israel as part of their global contest with liberalism: “Hamas is no longer Hamas but, instead, the sword and toy of a counter-empire wherein the protagonists of the preceding wars have come together permanently.”

For Lévi, such upheavals ought to have shaken the core of the Western conscience and prompted uncompromising, united support for Israel in its mission to defeat Hamas. Within weeks, however, the script was torn apart. Western leaders denied or obfuscated the severity of the attack; prominent feminists refused to acknowledge the violence Hamas committed against Israeli women; academics and UN officials even celebrated the attack as “splendid,” “glorious,” and a first step towards true “liberation.” In short, “there was an almost unimaginable bias and double standard in handling October 7.” This obscurantism only intensified with Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Before Israel even launched its war, Lévi seethes, Westerners were demanding a “restraint that they have never expected from any other nation that has been similarly attacked and threatened with extinction.” Even American President Biden pushed for a ceasefire only weeks into the conflict. Similarly, pretend friends of Israel implored Israelis to consider the “day after.” Elsewhere, on Ivy League campuses, mass protests condemned Israel for genocide, apartheid, colonialism, etc. In rapid-fire succession, Lévi has a rebuttal to each of these charges. He dismisses early calls for a ceasefire as both hypocritical and “inviting compromise and peace with assassins.” Regarding the “day after,” he assures readers that all will be well; after all, the Allies did not have a day after plan when they decided to defeat Hitler. To charges of genocide, he points to Israel’s stringent rules of engagement and the more obviously genocidal intentions of Hamas and Palestinian leaders throughout history (e.g., Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who curried favor with the Nazis). He has even less patience for charges of apartheid and colonialism. Regarding the former, he reminds readers that Israel is the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world, with twenty percent of its population being Arab. To the latter, he notes that Jews cannot be Western imperialists; they were chased out of Europe after they came close to annihilation.

Lévi does not attempt to solve this crisis of confidence in the Jewish state. Nor does he engage in any sophisticated diagnosis of its origins. Hatred for Israel has less to do with post-colonialism, for example, than with the oldest prejudice in the West: anti-Semitism. “It is not so much that anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitic, but that there is no other way for a present-day anti-Semite to express his hate effectively than through the channel of hatred for Israel.” In the face of “the spirit of Amalek,” Israelis can only do what Jews have always done: remain true to the humanitarian spirit of their faith.

Only here, in the closing pages of his pamphlet, does Lévi caution Israel: resist the punitive fanaticism of the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir; scale back settlements in the West Bank; strengthen a patriotic pride in your impressive country while resisting nationalistic hatred of the other. In the final analysis, continue to embrace civilization even if the civilized world rejects you.

Lévi’s Problematic Moralism

There is something respectable in Lévi’s unblinking faith in Israel. His brazen Zionism is refreshing when one reflects on the surge of antisemitism in the United States and Europe. Though he often overstates his points, reducing complicated arguments to little more than bar-talk, it must be remembered that his book is intended to counter absurd and sophomoric claims lodged by people with little familiarity with Israeli history. To some extent, this modest aim relieves Lévi of the burden to be academically scrupulous in his arguments.

But at important points, Lévi is the enemy of his hyperbole. For example, his central claim that the Jews are more alone than they have ever been verges on blatant dishonesty. Israel retains powerful friends. Lévi says nothing of the fact that Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords have resisted public pressure to cut ties with Israel; even Saudi Arabia has not disavowed long-awaited normalization. Similarly, he only reluctantly notes that the United States remains a “friend,” but chafes at American policymakers’ attempts to restrain Israel.

The discussion of the United States reveals the lengths Lévi is willing to go to prove his point. He considers Americans’ cautioning of restraint as, at worst, a subtle form of anti-Semitism and, at best, a form of hypocrisy. Did the U.S., after all, not take massive unilateral action against Afghanistan after 9/11? Astonishingly, Lévi would consider this simple hypocrisy rather than good-will advice from a friend. After 9/11, the U.S. was in a comparable position to Israel’s today: in the face of “radical evil” and injustice, Americans were shocked and demanded retribution. In the false purity of righteousness, the country plunged into not one but two wars that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives while accomplishing little. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden was killed, but the Taliban again rules the country. In Iraq, American myopia catalyzed a horrific civil war and the formation of a terrorist group somehow less respectable than Al-Qaeda. That America would urge Israel to learn from these mistakes and not let the understandable desire for revenge outweigh concerns for strategic soundness is not hypocrisy; it is precisely the sort of advice a friend gives to one who is grieving and desperate.

But Lévi insists that Israel is planning for the day after. This is only partially true. As I have discussed elsewhere, Israel’s conduct with an eye towards a stable political solution in Gaza has been ad hoc at best. Lévi acknowledges the lack of serious post-war planning when he claims that even if there is no clear “day after plan,” it does not matter; the Allies did not have a plan for Europe when they waged total war with Hitler’s Germany. It is a breathtaking comparison. The European nations, Germany included, had workable political legacies and institutions where none exist in Palestine. What is more, the favorite to govern Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, is pitifully corrupt. UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed ridiculed its leaders as “Ali Baba and the forty thieves.” This is hardly the stuff of De Gaul or Adenauer.

This gets to the problem that has long haunted Levi: his moral outrage is a liability. He is so overtaken by indignation before the face of evil that he refrains from sustained reflection on how best to confront evil. Libya is a telling example. Disgusted by Muammar Ghadaffi’s pledge to make “the rivers run red with the blood” of revolutionaries, he begged then-Secretary of State Clinton to intervene. Clinton was persuaded, and the U.S. led a multinational coalition to stop Ghadaffi. He was subsequently killed, and Libya fell into a civil war from which it never quite recovered. To my knowledge, Levi has never claimed that intervention was a mistake.

A deeper source informing Lévi’s misguided moralism may be found in his account of the nature of evil. In Israel Alone, he describes evil at various points as “illogical,” “for nothing and for no reason,” “something enigmatic, something that defies logic and understanding.” There is nothing reasonable motivating the evil man; he is pure chaos, willing his arbitrary preferences with no end in mind. Such a monstrosity must be ended. Setting aside whether such a human can actually exist, we must ask: if the core of evil is unreasonable, destructive willfulness, surely its opposite would have at its core a reasonable appreciation for the limits of willful assertion and balance its preferences accordingly. But Lévi, by his standards, prefers to confront evil in an evil way: eradicate it and ask questions later. It is an urge more than a conclusion.

Lévi seems to grasp this issue but cannot quite confront it. On a few occasions, he notes, for example, the need for a Palestinian state to have lasting peace. But he is so caught up in demonstrating Israel’s righteousness that he refuses to acknowledge that Israel’s conduct in the war has done little to prepare for a stable political future in Gaza. Should the Gaza strip prove to be ungovernable, should it prove to be a breeding ground for an undying Hamas, it is doubtful that Lévi would say Israel made a mistake.

Max Prowant is an Associate Editor with Law & Liberty. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.