Paris
The muted reaction to the murder of six Israeli hostages by Hamas last week fills Bernard-Henri Lévy with despair. It “tragically confirms” his view that the Jewish state and “Jews around the world” are alone. That searing sense of abandonment and isolation gave Mr. Lévy the title of his new book, “Israel Alone,” scheduled to publish in its English translation next week.
In an interview in his home, Mr. Lévy—a liberal Jewish French philosopher and filmmaker—draws attention to one of the hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23. “Hersh was executed for being a Jew,” Mr. Lévy says. “He was also American. Where is the collective rage in the U.S.A.? The collective grief? This indifference pains me.” Mr. Lévy has met Hersh’s parents, “the most resilient, compassionate, freedom-loving Americans.” Why, he asks, has the whole country “not rallied to wrap the Goldberg-Polins in their arms and carried them forward in their painful journey of mourning?”
The solitude is familiar. Mr. Lévy says Jews have “always been alone,” though there was “a golden moment when they had some allies,” particularly during the American civil-rights movement in the 1960s. Now, however, they are “back to the stage before—to loneliness.” It is “fashionable to be anti-Jew in America. Jews have been assimilated into the box of oppressors.”
The U.S. used to be “the most blessed place for Jews in the world,” along with Israel. He pauses and adds France to his small list of sanctuaries, citing an aphorism that is now used less and less: Heureux comme un Juif en France, or “Happy like a Jew in France.” “In reality, it was ‘Happy like a Jew in America.’ ” For all the loneliness, he says, there have always been Americans who feel a “metaphysical connection” with Israel.
Mr. Lévy uses “Israel” and “Jewish” almost interchangeably. “My reference to Israel is a part of my being a Jew,” he says. Israel is at the root of Jewish identity and inseparable from it. The point was hammered home on Oct. 7, the day that scarred the Jewish psyche more than any event since the Holocaust.
Everyone realized “that there is no place in the world where Jews are safe.” Before Oct. 7, “in the worst hypothesis, if things turned bad for Jews in the West, there was Israel. Israel unviolated, unraped, invulnerable. The shock was that even Israel could be more than unsafe—that it could, alas, be the place where the worst happens.”
There was a second shock. Rather than provoke sympathy and compassion for the Jews, Hamas’s massacre liberated hate. “This, for me, was a very big surprise,” Mr. Lévy says. “I expected at least a moment of real solidarity in the face of this enormous crime.” Instead, the murderers were “blessed, excused and praised.” The victims were “accused, cursed and held responsible for their fates.”
Even before Israel’s military response had begun in earnest, there was an “explosion of antisemitic demonstrations in New York and on campuses across America.” Mr. Lévy saw the same in France, which devastated him. “France is my fatherland, and America is the fatherland of my heart,” he says. “I would not be born without the Americans”—a reference to the U.S. role in the liberation of France and defeat of Hitler. “So what happens in America happens as if it were in my own country.”
How does Mr. Lévy explain the outpouring of antisemitism when supporting Israel should have been the ineluctable reaction? “A big part of the world was longing for something like Oct. 7, dreaming of it.” He likens the celebratory reactions to that day to the joyous outbursts in many parts of the world after al Qaeda attacked the U.S.
“People danced in the streets after Sept. 11. And they danced after Oct. 7. They loved the humiliation of the U.S. and Israel.” There was a craving among the “antiliberal, antidemocratic, anti-Western, antisemitic crowds” for “someone to do this.” He recalls “an obscene, disgusting relief that Israel was so vulnerable, that the Jews could be killed again like that in such an easy way.”
Yet for all his despair, Mr. Lévy isn’t despairing. He wrote his book to “instill courage and pride in the Jews, and to galvanize their many non-Jewish supporters in America.” He concludes that “the soul, mind, and genius of Judaism are standing firm amid tumult and torment.” They won’t succumb to Amalek, “the oldest enemy of the Jewish people,” incarnated afresh in Hamas.
That evil, which Mr. Lévy witnessed when he traveled to kibbutzim near Gaza in October, will remain with him forever. “I will never forget my first impressions: the smell of sour milk that filled the bullet-pocked, blasted, half-burned houses.” Still, he’s confident Jews will emerge stronger. “I see light, because the Jews don’t accept darkness anymore,” he says. “They don’t disarm themselves. They fight back. They behave as they should. They are proud.” Most important, “they don’t hide who they are anymore.”
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