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Responses to the the war in Gaza tend to fall into two camps: those who see it as a monstrous over-reaction to the October 7 terrorist attacks, and a horrific crime against the Palestinians; and those who see the war and its opponents as a new and dangerous frontline in the history of anti-Jewish prejudice.
The second view is summed up in the title of the French liberal writer Bernard Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone, where it’s clear he is using “Israel” in the Biblical sense to refer to all Jews, as well as to Israel the state.
Lévy begins with October 7, 2023, when Hamas murdered 1,200 civilians in Israel and kidnapped 250 people, calling it a “historical, epochal, era-opening” event. He describes the horror of visiting the scene of the crime, where he was reminded of similar massacres of Jews by the Nazis: “I had to be careful and stifle the parade of reminiscences and images in my head. Any resemblance with an earlier situation was meaningless, because we were dealing with something utterly unique.” This injunction is repeatedly broken throughout the book, as Lévy argues that Israel is fighting a form of ‘Nazism’ in Palestine.
There follows a chapter titled ‘Amalek’ in which Lévy picks up Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s Biblical language and runs with it: “Amalek is the terrifying being that has no other attributes or will than the inborn, radical, and eternal hate that he bears for Jews.” Lévy argues that October 7 represents the rise of this eternal enemy, which is described as “Evil” (with a capital “E”), “the beast”, “the serpent” etc., and by implication that Israel is fighting this demonic foe in Gaza.
Things get stranger from here, as Lévy describes a global conflict between the democratic world and what he calls “the five kings” after another Bible story, the kings being Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and Arab states “prone to jihadism”. As he writes, “Hamas is no longer Hamas but, instead, the sword and toy of a counter-empire”.
Set against this Empire of Hamas (Lévy’s term), Israel “carries the message, even if unknowingly”, of everyone from the Uyghurs in China, the Armenians, the Kurds, democrats in “Arab autocracies”, feminists in Iran, dissidents in Russia, “and also, perhaps in spite of themselves, the Palestinians in silent revolt against the Hamas dictatorship”. Amid the broad sweep and condescension of this claim, note the implication of Lévy’s crucial closer: Israel is bombing Palestinians for their own good.
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Despite its noble mission, Lévy writes that Israel stands alone. How can this be said when Israel (alone, if you will) is protected by the world’s largest superpower,the United States, via billions in military aid and a veto and the United Nations, whatever Israel’s government chooses to do? Lévy prefers to focus on shady remarks by some of Israel’s critics after October 7, but his polemic is hobbled by an absolutism about Israel, and this lack of perspective.
On Israel-Palestine, Lévy claims he has “always been a proponent of a two-state solution”, though he adds: “that is, a solution under which the rights of the Palestinians are recognized and granted, provided they do not deny the rights of the Israelis to recognition and basic security.”
That “provided” makes Palestinian rights conditional — a patronising view for a writer who styles himself an internationalist and an heir of des droits de l’Homme. Later he writes of “settlements that Israel will have to dismantle one day” (emphasis added). Again, the author’s moral urgency dissipates when Palestinians are involved.
Lévy brings up the rather salient events of 1948 only in the context of rebutting the charge that Israel was a colonial project. (Anyone interested in a counter argument can read Edward Said’s 1979 book The Question of Palestine.) Lévy gives a familiar pro-Israel version of the history (long challenged by Israeli historians he names but ignores), which in effect blames “the Arabs” for the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, and presumably for their living in exile or under occupation ever since.
People can and do argue about this forever, but it’s clear that so far as Lévy is concerned, Jews have a special claim to the land. As he writes near the end of the book: “I love this little world of people stranded on the tiny strip of land they finally received, three-quarters of a century ago, left there by a West and by a larger world wet with the rivers of Jewish blood spilled into the torrent of centuries.” Edward Said would have got several pages out of “land … left there by the West” and its casual erasure of the Palestinians.
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In a chapter called ‘Radical Islam’, Lévy dwells on the anti-Semitism of Palestinian figures like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was indeed an ally of the Nazis. But Lévy wisely does not extend his argument to say (from France, of all places) that Nazi collaborator countries ought to cede territory for a Jewish state.
Instead he says the Holocaust was a “metaphysical crime” that implicates all of humanity: “for all those haunted, in 2024 as in 1945, by [Theodor] Adorno’s oath to do everything he could, absolutely everything, to ensure that ‘Auschwitz is not repeated,’ Israel is self-evident. It is as simple as that.” Again, for Lévy it seems this universal burden is to fall harder on some people (the Palestinians) than others.
When he finally gets to the current war in Gaza, where an estimated 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, there is a stern throat-clearing: “For my entire life, I have stated in every way that […] to consider the death of a child as a functional requirement, a statistical datum, a mere detail, is to think like a barbarian.” He says this applies to children “pulled from the rubble” in Gaza, adding: “That had to be said. It had to be clear.” Doth he protest too much?
We read on: “But what I do want to say is this, and with the utmost emphasis. The responsibility for these children’s deaths lies first and foremost not with Israel but with those who turned them into human shields.” In other words, Israel is not responsible for the deaths of people it kills.
He concedes that the IDF has made “mistakes”, such as bombing the “clearly marked vehicles” of the World Central Kitchen aid workers, or of “young soldiers, nearly children themselves” (nice) who “fired in panic” and “killed unarmed civilians”. But this too is ultimately Hamas’s fault, because “this war is a horrific war that the Israelis did not want”. Lévy’s bias in the face of evidence reveals his book to be an exercise in nationalism dressed in humanist clothes.
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Lévy closes the book with a plea for Israel not to betray its values which towards the end takes the syrupy form of a Jewish prayer.
Israel Alone might be a quirky example of pro-Israel responses to October 7 and the Gaza war by western intellectuals. But it’s the kind of book which might be given to Western policymakers to help them “understand” the conflict.
Despite its quirks (in particular it’s spiritual overtones) it shares with other texts (Dave Rich’s updated Everyday Hate, Jake Wallis Simons’s re-prefaced Israelophobia) the central problem of seeing the war through the lens of Jewish suffering, which is this: To view the Israel-Palestine conflict solely as an issue of anti-Semitism requires making injustices against Palestinians invisible. If the Palestinian experience is looked at clear-eyed, the whole picture starts to change.
Lévy’s book is also a helpful example of the dangers of abstraction — of imagining an abstract “Jew” or “Palestinian” who is either magically good or evil, depending on one’s point of view. For a conflict so painfully material in its focus on land and people, to transform groups of humans into ideas (or idealised countries), even if well-intentioned, is a kind of dehumanisation, when what’s required is mutual recognition.