The greatest French-Jewish intellectual of our time has been trudging through the snow of Pokrovsk, an under-fire city near Ukraine’s eastern front.

It’s a dangerous place to go. But big thinkers, and Bernard-Henri Lévy is certainly one of those, know how to rise above the fear. And in the interview, it becomes clear that the conflict and its implications for Israel and the newly fractured West is at the top of his mind.

For Lévy – who was in Ukraine to chair a film festival, visit the front line and write it up for French and US newspapers – Israel’s war against Hamas and Kyiv’s struggle against Russia are two sides of the same coin: it is the free, democratic world against tyranny and evil. For this reason, he says, he is “terribly worried. You have here two fragile democracies. Two twin fights that should be fought together.

“That worries me: the fact that the US is separating the two struggles. They are thus playing into the hands of our common enemies.”

Lévy, who has been one of the key European voices speaking up for both Ukraine after the 2022 invasion and for Israel in the wake of October 7, has a bleak assessment of the direction of travel for European security.

“We know that Donald Trump’s America will not protect us if one of our countries is attacked. The comfort of the post-Second World War [era] is over. We must defend ourselves and build a European army.

“Europe may have done ‘a lot’ to support Ukraine. But has it done enough? No. Because doing ‘enough’ would have been to help Zelensky defeat Putin. We helped him resist, not win. We ensured that Ukraine was saved without, however, trying to bring about the collapse of Russia.”

What is more, for Lévy, Judaism – as a foundation stone of Western values – may well be in Vladimir Putin’s sights.

“He will destabilise Europe. Ukraine is, for him, only a step on a long road that ends in the weakening of Europe. That is not in doubt. Personal vengeance against countries deemed responsible for the collapse of the USSR? Hatred of Judaism and Latin Christianity? Hatred of the liberal model that remains an ideal in this part of Europe? All of this is part of the long-term war Putin has declared on the European Union and its values.”

Lévy was part of a new generation of French Jewish intellectuals who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, including Jacques Derrida, Jacques Attali, André Glucksmann and Alain Finkelkraut. He was born into an affluent Sephardic family in Algeria who moved to Paris in 1948. His breakthrough came in the 1970s when he and a group of French thinkers called “The Nouveaux Philosophes” attacked Soviet communism.

A key influence on him was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous work The Gulag Archipelago. “Suddenly,” he told me, “everything became clear: that the communist dream could have degenerated into barbarism, that we started from the beautiful project of making men better and ended up with the Gulag and barbarism. Then Solzhenitsyn arrived and the veil is torn.”

A second turning-point for Lévy came with the Bosnian War in the 1990s. “It was the return of war to Europe. People, who have amnesia, say that it is with Ukraine that war returned to Europe. No. It is with the siege of Sarajevo, the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, that war returned to Europe.” 

It was in Bosnia that he shot his first documentary film, the first in a series of documentaries about present-day atrocities and war crimes. There was something else he discovered in Bosnia: “It is the need for intervention. The concept of a just war. The fact that it can be just, for humanitarian reasons, to start a war.”

Where was he when he first heard about October 7? “At home, in Paris. Then I was desperately searching for a way to get to Israel, to the bereaved Israelis, and to report on what immediately appeared to me to be an event that would change the course of our lives and, also, that of history.”

Lévy went to Israel the next day. “I couldn’t be anywhere else. It would have been physically unbearable for me. So the next day I was in Sderot. And then, as soon as it was possible, to the destroyed kibbutzim of Kfar Aza and Be’eri. There were still terrorists lurking in the houses. And the bodies of the victims hadn’t all been collected yet. For a Jew, it was horrific. I still tremble, just thinking about it.”

I asked him about the role of the UN and the NGOs in the war against Israel. “The UN has definitely dishonoured itself. It started with its Secretary General explaining that October 7th had not happened in a vacuum but had a ‘context’. It continued with all its agencies, including those supposedly dedicated to women’s rights and their protection, taking the side of Hamas. And the height of shame was reached when it was learnt that the UN agency Unwra had in some cases taken part in the crimes against Jews.”

What does he think about the demonstrations against Israel in the West? “We expected a global mourning. A solidarity, at least for a time. But it was the opposite. We saw professors, students, city dwellers in general, rising up, but in solidarity with the murderers.”​

His new book, Nuit Blanche (White Night), is about “this madness of the world unravelling before our eyes. This present that says nothing but the most terrible nihilism.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy will be in conversation with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore in London on March 18 in an event hosted by The Hexagon Society. For details click here