BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY, THE EMINENT FRENCH AUTHOR, filmmaker, and public intellectual illustrious enough to be known as “BHL” in his country and even outside it, has devoted much of his recent work to chronicles of places at war: Bosnia, Kurdistan, Syria, Ukraine. These chronicles have won him both admirers and detractors who regard him as a glorified crisis tourist. Yet watching, for instance, Lévy’s 2022–23 documentary film trilogy about Ukraine’s battle for its freedom—Why Ukraine?, Slava Ukraini, and Glory to the Heroes—it is difficult not to be struck by a sense of the filmmaker’s very genuine passion for his subject. Now, Lévy channels the same passion into a short and equally current book whose title, Israel Alone, speaks for itself.

Like Lévy’s documentary films, this slim book, which opens with the words, “I arrived in Israel the morning after October 7,” blends a personal journey with the tragic canvas against which it unfolds. But it is even more personal because of Lévy’s personal connection, as an Algerian-born French Jew and a liberal Zionist, to both Israel and the Jewish tradition. It is a deeply felt connection, to both the country and to friends who live there: “I wake up every morning and I go to sleep every night full of fear and anxiety about Israel,” Lévy told me in a telephone conversation a few days before the anniversary of the October 7th attack.

Israel Alone opens with a dedication to the 131 Israeli hostages still remaining in Gaza when the book’s French edition appeared in March, the dead and the rescued pointedly remaining on the list; it ends with a poignant prose poem that adapts for the present moment the traditional chant of Jews in exile: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my hand wither.” In between, the book examines much else: the horror of October 7th (“the dying, crawling toward their phone to send a last message; the phone with no charge left; a bullet in the head, one last bullet, end of story”); the anguish of the survivors, especially the hostages’ families, and their wrenching testimonies; the world’s reaction, both to the massacre and to Israel’s war against Hamas; Israel’s internal political conflicts and the clash between the humanistic Zionism Lévy admires and the militant, xenophobic nationalism of the Israeli far right today; the history of Israeli-Arab conflicts and the progressive left’s insistence on framing Israel as a colonial oppressor. In particular, Lévy offers a well-argued and well-informed dismantling of the “anti-colonial” anti-Zionist narrative, pointing out that Israel was born very much against the wishes of the regional colonial power at the time: the British empire.

In the stark binary terms that dominate the current political landscape, Lévy, of course, is very much on the pro-Israel side: He believes that Israel’s war is a righteous war against a resurgent evil.  While he devotes a chapter to the war’s civilian casualties in Gaza and refuses to quibble over the numbers provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (“a dead person is a dead person”), and writes movingly about the deaths of children—“the ultimate outrage, as it has been since there has been a world”—he insists that the responsibility “lies first and foremost not with Israel but with those who turned [civilians] into human shields.”

While many people who accept Israel’s right to self-defense nonetheless believe it is not doing enough to minimize civilian death and suffering, Lévy emphatically rejects this criticism. “I was there many times during the war and I am absolutely convinced that Israel does more than any army in the world to avoid civilian casualties,” he told me, citing his past experience reporting from war zones—in particular at the 2016–17 Battle of Mosul, where the Iraqi army, backed by a coalition that included the United States and France, battled ISIS forces.

And yet despite this unwavering support for Israel, Lévy’s view is nuanced and complex. Israel Alone has some scathing words not only for the ultra-right Israeli ministers, “two men whose names burn my tongue”—Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who preach fanaticism and ethnic cleansing—but for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stained by his opportunistic alliance with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and by his pre-war efforts to preserve his political power by “undermining a judicial system that has been the pride of Israel.” (Perhaps, Lévy caustically suggests, “he has served one term too many and has lost his Jewish compass.”) Some may also be surprised to see Lévy declare his support for the two-state solution—one in 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.” He excoriates Jewish activists who, “in the fog of war,” pursue settlements in the West Bank that undermine future prospects for Palestinian statehood. He even agrees that the Palestinian question was “the blind spot of the Abraham Accords” shepherded by the Trump administration to cement good relations between Israel and relatively friendly Arab states.

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JEWISH HISTORY IS AT THE CENTER of Israel Alone, with the atrocities of October 7th seen as the latest chapter in genocidal anti-Jewish violence from European pogroms to the Holocaust, especially the “holocaust of bullets” on World War II’s Eastern front. (Driving home this point, the book’s first chapter is titled “Pogrom.”) And yet Lévy also does an admirable job of balancing Jewish particularism with humanist universalism.  The slaughters of Jews for being Jews provide context; but so does mass murder elsewhere, from Bosnia to Syria to Nigeria to Rwanda to Ukraine. And, while Lévy sees clear anti-Jewish animus in the hostility to Israel in the wake of October 7, he also identifies a larger problem: “The eternal propensity of democracies, when faced with unthinkable barbarity, to know without believing, to possess the data without drawing conclusions”—essentially, to refuse to see until it’s too late. He argues that this willful blindness manifested itself toward Hitler and the Nazis, and more recently toward Hamas and its leader Yahya Sinwar—but also toward Vladimir Putin, whose “Great Russia” ambitions, “obsessive hate” for the West, and resentment toward Ukraine were on display for years before he was finally seen as a serious threat. The same blindness, Lévy believes, led Israel itself to underestimate the danger of an incursion at the Gaza border.

The painful relevance of Israel Alone is evident on the anniversary of October 7th, when students on American campuses march praising violent “resistance” while chapters of Amnesty International, the esteemed human rights group, use the occasion to denounce “Israeli apartheid.” Why these reactions? “One-third ignorance, one-third manipulation, and one-third antisemitism,” Lévy told me. To those who say that left-wing hostility toward Israel is really hostility against the West, he replies that this is, precisely, the nature of the new antisemitism: “If you hate the West and if you decide that the symbol on the West and the scapegoat of the West will be the Jews, what else can you be named if not antisemite?”

Despite Lévy’s revulsion toward the anti-Israel left—and his disappointment in liberal centrists, including Joe Biden, who support Israel but seek to restrain it with artificial “red lines”—Israel Alone also offers a strong voice of dissent against those who see right-wing politicians and political forces, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, as the true allies to both Israel and Jewish communities in the West. Lévy notes, among other things, the right’s enduring connection to more traditional forms of antisemitism, including Trump’s comments about wanting his money to be counted by “short guys wearing yarmulkes”; had the book been written today, he might also have pointed to Trump’s repeated recent comments blaming his prospective loss on Jewish ingratitude. (It is also worth noting that Lévy remains a very strong supporter of Ukraine in its war against Russia; indeed, he told me that Ukraine and Israel are “two frontlines of the same big battle—the battle of freedom against tyranny, of peace against war,” and that both suffer from inadequate support by nearsighted and fainthearted Western allies.)  

In our conversation, Lévy pointedly refused to take sides on the question of whether Trump or Kamala Harris would be better for Israel. Right now, he believes, no Western leader is up to the challenge: “I don’t see any president of America, or any president of France, understand the depth of the problem and the existential threat under which Israel is today.” As for Israeli leadership and its failings, Lévy stresses that justifiable distaste for Netanyahu, and even more so for the far-right ministers, should not undercut support for Israel’s war of self-defense; when it comes to the conduct of the war, he points out, the differences between Netanyahu and his opponents are a matter of “nuance.” Just like Ukraine, he says, Israel has “a right and a duty to win.”

And he also believes that until that victory—and until support for terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah becomes a marginal position among Palestinian Arabs—no talk of a two-state solution can be viable. “I always advocated the two-state solution for decades,” Lévy told me. “I’m sure that I will advocate again for [it] one day. But I’m sure that there is one moment in my lifetime when we shouldn’t even mention the two-state solution—which is now.”

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ONE CAN CERTAINLY FIND WEAKNESSES in Lévy’s argument and message. He is sometimes prone to hyperbole; Israel Alone asserts, for instance, that Hamas’s kidnapping of 251 civilians during the October 7th raids was a “hostage taking without precedent since the rape of the Sabine women by Romulus’s Romans.” (The Islamist terror group Boko Haram, whose depredations against Nigerian Christians Lévy himself mentions in the book, kidnapped 276 girls in 2014, and there have been even bigger mass abductions in just the past century—of South Korean men by North Korea in 1950, for example.) He is, perhaps, too dismissive of disturbing expressions of support in Israeli society for collective punishment toward Gazans; he told me that such attitudes are “marginal” because none of his friends or acquaintances in Israel share them, despite acknowledging in the same breath that “two ministers, or at least one, in the current government” have made such comments.

But while the book and the author are open to criticism, Lévy still makes, overall, a compelling and timely case. It is a case that he may soon bring to the United States in person on a speaking tour. He hopes to reach, he says, those two-thirds of Israel opponents who he believes are reachable. “You can never convince an antisemite,” says Lévy. “You can only oppose to him your moral strength, and if you are in Israel your physical strength. The others, the ignorant and the manipulated, you can talk to them. There is the possibility to make them feel ashamed.”