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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Born in 1948 in French Algeria to a family of Sephardic Jews but raised from infancy in France, where he has spent his long and productive life, Bernard-Henri Lévy has led a distinguished career as a philosopher, war correspondent, and prolific author and commentator. Unlike many members of his generation in France, he was not seduced by Marx, and has in fact spent much of his life criticizing Communism and other forms of tyranny, championing oppressed peoples around the world, and defending Israel and the United States at a time when most of his bien pensant French colleagues were doing the exact opposite.
In his new book Israel Alone, Lévy covers in detail the atrocities of last October 7 and their aftermath, and addresses pretty much every question, criticism, and morsel of “fake news” surrounding these horrific events. He traveled to Israel – a country that he has visited countless times over the decades – on the day after the Hamas attacks, and his book brings together on-the-spot reportage, history, philosophical reflection, and unflinching expressions of profound personal emotion. For Lévy, the Hamas incursion into Israel wasn’t just one more terrorist attack. It was, in the context of history, an Event — with a capital “E” – that involved a kind of hostage-taking that was “without precedent since the rape of the Sabine women by Romulus’s Romans” and savages, also without precedent, advertising their villainy “in real time over social networks in posts exulting about bleeding the Jews like sheep.”
Yes, the democratic West knew beforehand about the barbarity of Hamas. But as Lévy says, it “is the eternal propensity of democracies, when faced with unthinkable barbarity, to know without believing, to possess the data without drawing conclusions.” We live in an era, in other words, “defined less by what it sees than by what the structure of its knowledge and the framework of its expectations render invisible.” We knew, that is, but chose not to know. For decades, consequently, Jews around the world, including those in Lévy’s own country, viewed Israel as a “refuge,” a place to which they could always flee if necessary; but on October 7 “the place that was the symbol of ‘never again!’” became the “was where ‘again’ had come down like a bolt of lightning.” Henceforth, there is now “nowhere in the world where Jews are safe….No land on this planet is a shelter for Jews; that is what the Event of October 7 proclaims.”
One major reason why October 7 was able to happen, Lévy posits, is that the West had lost sight of the enduring reality of evil. Even after two world wars, “the moderns…competed to convince us that evil was a thing of the past.” Some saw socialism as a cure-all for human misery; others thought that the very iniquities of those wars, and the founding of organizations like the UN, would snap mankind out of the habit of mass violence; still others bought into the idiotic notion (propounded by a political scientist who is actually still taken seriously by the mainstream media) that homo sapiens had reached “the end of history” and entered “a cool and peaceful world” in which everything that was wrong with human existence would be straightened out by “globalized capitalism.”
To be sure, Lévy doesn’t pretend that October 7 is without precedent. This is a man who covered, among other atrocities, the genocides in Bangladesh, Rwanda, and Darfur; the wars in Bosnia, Algeria, Ukraine, Angola, Burundi, Somalia, and Afghanistan; and the horrors in Syria, “when a dictator ordered his opponents dissolved in acid baths” and in Nigeria, “where Boko Haram and Fulani militants were hacking up Christians with machetes.” And yet most of the Westerners who even deigned to pay any attention to any of these outrages, he observes, saw them as “peripheral, epiphenomenal” – exceedingly minor growing pains on the unimportant fringes of an exciting and wonderful developed world that had reached, yes, “the end of history.”
Lévy knew better. Evil had always existed, and it had no plans to go away. All of these monstrous happenings around the world were about evil, pure and simple, ancient and undying, senseless and ubiquitous: “Evil for nothing and for no reason; evil raw and unadorned. Evil having neither power as its motive, nor pain as its memory, nor Lebensraum or a will to conquer as its obsession. Evil untethered to a war between ethnicities, nations, or ideologies. Evil, true evil, that of the empty railway cars of Auschwitz, the repopulated rice paddies of Cambodia, and the Armenians forcibly marched to their deaths in the desert of Deir ez-Zor.”
Forget Francis Fukuyama’s muddle-headed proposition that after the end of the Cold War, the developed world was sliding smoothly into a golden and never-ending epoch of globalist prosperity and freedom. The end of history? Balderdash. Lévy has a contrary view: at present the West is contracting, and is making room “for five new kings, five potentates” — namely, “Russia, China, the Iran of the ayatollahs, neo-Ottoman Turkey, and the Arab countries prone to jihadism.” And Hamas is, in some sense or other, “the sword and toy” of all five of these powers. Israel, for its part, is often viewed as a colonial outpost of the West, whereas what October 7 demonstrated, in Lévy’s view, is that Israel “is a little more than just Israel.” As he puts it:
Tragedy is Greek, not Jewish.
The major task of a Jew is not, like Oedipus at Colonus, to determine that the gods are cruel and that irreconcilable forces run the world behind our backs; it is to survive.
And from this point of view, yes, the Jews are more alone than they have ever been.
Why? Just look at the way in which so many governments and individuals in the West reacted to October 7 and its aftermath. For months after that diabolic day, malicious, misguided, or just plain moronic souls in cities around the West held pro-Hamas marches and tore down posters depicting children taken hostage by Hamas. They drew (at best) moral equivalencies between Hamas and Israel. More often, dropping Hamas’s actions down the memory hole entirely, they accused Israel of genocide and of carrying out a massacre in Gaza. There were widespread calls for a ceasefire, and even for full Palestinian statehood and UN membership – as if the brutalities of Hamas should not be punished but rewarded. And the perennial, preposterous characterizations of Israel as a “colonial power” were repeated more fiercely than ever.
In a way – in a number of ways, in fact – it’s an embarrassment that this elegant, passionate, and deeply intelligent book should have had to be written. For example, Lévy feels obliged to correct misunderstandings of history – ancient, medieval, and modern – that no remotely educated person should ever have bought into in the first place. He feels obliged to explain why Israel is not an apartheid state or colonial power or satrapy. He feels obliged to explain why Israel has the same right to self-defense as every other country. He feels obliged, ridiculously, to explain that the Jewish presence in the Holy Land predates the Balfour Declaration.
Do I have any criticisms of this book? Almost none. I do think that the author is unnecessarily worried about the sincerity of – and motives underlying – the devotion of most American Christians to the State of Israel. I also balked at his expression of concern about the pro-Israeli credentials of Donald Trump, “who, when asked about his personal relationship with the Jews, responded that ‘short guys wearing yarmulkes’ are the only people he wants counting his money.” I never heard Trump make that joke, but I do know that he has Jewish grandchildren, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and engineered the Abraham Accords. No American president has ever, in his heart of hearts, been a truer friend to Israel. He’s precisely the ally Israel needs, and every supporter of the Jewish state – including Bernard-Henri Lévy – should pray for his return to the Oval Office. Just as every American who has bought into lies about Israel should read this eloquent and powerful book.
IMO, Bruce Bawer has always been the Cassandra to sound the warning of things to come and bad things to come. I read “While Europe Slept” many years ago and it is more prescient than ever today. The people are waking up. If their governments dont follow suit very soon there will be violence and possible civil war. All these things could be avoided if the elites that run things actually started listening to the people instead of labelling everyone “far right”. The West needs a strong leader who will defend it. I am afraid only Trump seems interested in being that leader for now.
The chattering classes in the media and academia in contemporary West would have called The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or the Revolt at Sobibor a “disproportionate response” to Nazism. So would Barack Hussein Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders.
everything is correct but would this be an awakening call?
peope call me cassandra too, from 1995 i preach everywhere what i see everywhere in europe, in belgium, france. holland, germany, spain, italy. i see everywhere the same stupid blindness like had the jews before ww2 in germany (bach, beethoven, goethe, mozart, kant, hegel…)
and i see the ruins built by democracy, dei, fraternite,,,,
they fdo not have a proper police to control the results of angela merkel catasrophic “view”
I guess you’re just another useful idiot without any knowledge of Islam. Muhammad’s entire philosophy of warfare is deception. His principle of taqiyyah, allows the Muslim to lie to the infidel as long as the Muslim does so to defend the faith. Some prophet, he goes directly against the commandment of thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Also Muhammad taught his principle of a hudna, a fake peace if the Muslim finds himself in a weaker position to his enemy. The Muslim will use this lull to get stronger and built his membership for the next attack, where the enemy will be deceived by this promise of peace and will let their guard down. By the way, there was a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, true to Muhammad’s philosophy of a hudna, Hamas attacked on October 7th in force when Israel’s guard was down!
Hamas won’t recognize Israel and doesn’t seek a 2 state solution. Read its charter, it states that any land conquered in the name of Allah must forever remain in the hands of Muslims until the day of judgement. To recognize Israel would go against its charter, it’s the reason why Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map!
Finally, you want to know what a 2 state solution looks like, look no further than Lebanon. When France broke off Lebanon from Syria to create a Christian majority state after WW1, Muslims via Syria and Jordan slowly came into Lebanon. This is stealth Jihad, 50 years later a civil war started between Christians and Muslims. In the end, the Muslims won and the majority of Christians fled their country. Now Lebanon is just a Muslim majority country in name only with a worthless currency and where Hezbollah has created its own mini defacto caliphate in the south. Do you care to speculate what a 2 state solution between Jews and Muslims would look like in 50 years from now?
Get with modern times, you’re referring back to one Ottoman Sultan from the late 19th century. The Turks don’t practise Islam as the Arabs do and in fact, when the Ottoman Empire extended across the Arab world, the Turks looked upon the Arabs with disdain. That’s why during WW1, the Hashemites who lived under Ottoman occupation in the North Western Arabian Peninsula became allies of the British and helped fight the Turks.
Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah just to name a few, fanatically follow Muhammad’s words to the letter. In order to believe any of these groups would ignore Muhammad’s rules of warfare, including ignoring the use of a hudna would mean that these groups would go against their charters and fundamental beliefs. Sorry but you live in a fantasyland, if your ideas are reality then why is it all these Islamic terrorist groups seek to destroy Israel? Not one of them want a permanent peace because to believe that would mean that they would accept Jews living on land that should be controlled by an Islamic Trust until Judgement Day.
You represent the kind of people that believe in fantasy like creating a Palestinian state that would welcome homosexuals and transgender persons. You also represent the mindset of people that like to ignore the realities of Marxism and its results in every country that adopted its economic model. Yet keep promoting it by saying, well in these countries it was not real Marxism that was adopted and if we apply Marxism in our country, we’ll have a different outcome.
That’s you with what you stated regarding a 19th century Ottoman Sultan. You ignore the realities of the Arab mindset along with what drives Muslim extremists today! It’s also called creating a strawman argument, introducing an irrelevant topic and trying to win an argument by diverting the original topic by debating your off-topic subject. Sorry but your attempt to refute Arab terrorists abiding by Muhammad’s cynical ruse of a hudna doesn’t work!
“Aslan” is Turkish for “lion”. Do you need to know anything else about this fellow’s beliefs?
Either you are delusional or you think we are stupid. Or both.
The pre-condition for a two state solution is that both parties can be trusted to maintain a ceasefire. Palestinian Arabs broke a ceasefire on 7th October, and then broke another one during the exchange of hostages for prisoners. When, and if, the Palestinian Arabs demonstrate a smidgen of good faith, and sustain it for a reasonable period, then Israel might relook at the territorial issue. However, given that the Balfour Declaration gave Israel all of Jordan, Judea and Samaria (a commitment on which the British Mandate reneged by setting aside Jordan as “a homeland for West Palestinian Arabs” – who of course were not satisfied with a mere 70% of the land when they think Allah wanted them to have it all) the truth of the matter is that this would be a favour on Israel’s part, not a right. It is very strange that Jordan could conquer Judea and Samaria in 1948, and not count as occupiers, but when Israel won it back in 1967, suddenly they were deemed to be occupying land that the San Remo Treaty originally granted them. Palestinian history in the area goes back to 1850 at the earliest. There are no geographical names, and no archaeological artefacts, that demonstrate an ongoing Palestinian presence, in the way that the Jewish connection to the land can be demonstrated. The fact that the Palestinian Arabs are relatively recent immigrants does not mean that they have no rights – but it does mean that, whatever rights they have, they cannot trump those of the indigenous Jewish inhabitants. Additionally, I would be very surprised if, longer term, the Palestinian Arabs really did sign up to a two state solution, because they would no longer be refugees, so the humanitarian aid jizya would taper off, plus the rest of the world would think that the situation was sorted out, and would respond with an exasperated “Now what??!!” when there was another Palestinian Arab attack on Israel from the vantage point of the new Palestinian state.
Oh brother what a hot bed of propaganda you spout. So, the ancient capital of Israel is just supposed to be given to Hamas? Because that’s what they want?
I D I O T – Sorry but to answer to such BS there is no way write more ! “Your comment is too short—try writing a little “more.
Oct7 was a result of 75 years of seeking utopian peace with people who don’t want peace. And who value death rather than life. Israel had multiple opportunities to defeat he enemies. once and for all . Instead she traded her victories with illusionary peace which only strengthen her enemies.. From giving up control of temple mount, to giving back the Sanai to Oslo accord to withdrawal from Gaza. Blaming others for your own mistakes does not absolve from taking charge of your own destiny. Hopefully Oct7 is the last tradeoff Israel will make. But I doubt it.
Maybe “ASIAN” needs to go home to Beijing, Pyongyang, or Hanoi. Or better yet, a little place called Gaza which hopefully will resemble Hiroshima very soon.