The prose style of Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most recognizable public intellectual, is not to everyone’s taste. He is prone to grandiloquence, self-reference, and metaphor salads. In the margins of my galley copy of his latest book, Israel Alone, I scribbled “O.M.G.” next to some of his more rococo flourishes, like his scorn for the “shameful dialecticians” who “could still be found putting themselves in the shoes of the pyromaniacs and seeing in these arrhythmias the last false notes of a concert of nations struggling to emerge.”

It’s easy, almost fun, to mock.

It’s also a mistake. Israel Alone is an imperfect but important book. Its importance stems, first, from Lévy’s unabashed Zionism, which today is an act of moral and even physical courage, especially in Europe. It stems, also, from getting all of the important things about the war in Gaza right: that Hamas, in its bottomless cynicism, is responsible for every death, Israeli and Palestinian alike; that the behavior toward Israel by groups like Amnesty International and the Red Cross is a disgrace; that calls for cease-fire are “merely a disguised manner of inviting compromise and peace with assassins”; that anti-Zionism is the most effective method for today’s anti-Semites to express their hatred of Jews; that the core problem between Israel and the Palestinians is a 76-year Palestinian refusal to genuinely accept a Jewish state in any borders; that the “yes, but” arguments constantly made against Israel by its faux friends are the work of “professional excusers of evil.”

Most of all, it stems from Lévy’s understanding of what October 7 fully laid bare: “a colony of germs that were already present in the sewers not only of Gaza, but of the world.”

Which germs? Anti-Semitism, for starters. The “blunt, mad, almost limitless hatred” of Jews—seen in the euphoria that their mass murder elicited from Times Square to the Sydney Opera House—is the glue that binds militant Islamists to queer progressives, the bien pensant at Harvard to American white supremacists.

Hatred of freedom, for another: As with the invasion of Ukraine, the most significant outcome of October 7 is that it has consolidated a global alliance of despots—China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and its proxies, including Hamas—against the free world, even if the free world has mostly failed to appreciate that Israel’s fight is part of the global fight for freedom.

A third germ: moral inversion. Lévy observes the ways in which October 7 was immediately blamed on the victims and not on the perpetrators; how Israel’s war of self-defense was treated from the start as an act of aggression; how “genocide” became the preferred way to describe Israel’s war against a genocidal enemy.

With those inversions came another: the inversion of reality. October 7 was the most documented pogrom in history, with the murderers filming themselves butchering their victims. Yet within weeks, their deeds were being obfuscated, trivialized, forgotten, or simply denied. Of all the horrors of October 7, none is greater than its attempted erasure.

All this leads Lévy to his central point: “The Jews,” he writes, “are more alone than they have ever been.”

It is, on the one hand, an absurd claim: More alone than they were on the MS St. Louis, let alone at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen? So alone that, as of this writing, so many of the high places in American life are held by Jews—from the secretaries of state, Treasury, and homeland security, to the Senate majority leader and eight of his colleagues, to six of the 10 richest Americans?

Yet Lévy might eventually be proved right. In the early 1920s, the most important political figure in Germany, Walther Rathenau, was a Jew. So was Germany’s greatest scientist, Albert Einstein, along with its most notable philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Within a few years, one was assassinated, the other forced into exile, the third banished and humiliated. The recurring nightmare of Jewish history is that our zenith often proves to be our precipice.

A more decisive point: Until October 7, the idea that the Jewish state was a haven for Jews appeared to be empirically true, notwithstanding the terror, menace, and calumny of Israel’s enemies. A French Jew, tired of hiding his kippah and fearful for the everyday safety of his children, knew that in a city like Ashdod his family could be free and, if not entirely safe, better protected. But now, as Lévy writes, “the refuge has become a trap, and the place that was the symbol of ‘never again’ was where ‘again’ had come down like a bolt of lightning.” October 7, he adds, “marks the alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora.”

In other words, Lévy is suggesting that what might have died on October 7 was the conviction that Zionism still provided the best answer to the Jews’ most pressing problem—the need to survive. Now Jews face the prospect that no place is safer, never mind safe. From Minneapolis to Marseilles to Metula, Jews are at risk, everywhere. And the solicitude that Gentiles feel for our plight seems to be diminishing, everywhere.

*

So what’s to be done?

On this question, Lévy has almost nothing to say. Maybe that’s for a follow-on book. But it’s a subject that thoughtful Jews, with our Gentile friends, must address. The task involves many challenges, most beyond the scope of this essay. But we can begin by observing this: Prior to October 7, Israel’s isolation was diminishing, not increasing.

This was true, most obviously, for Israel’s foreign policy. The 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and Morocco were the capstone of three decades of diplomatic openings for the Jewish state, from India in 1992 to Chad in 2019; the Accords also seemed to anticipate the eventual normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia. It was true for the Israeli economy: The value of Israeli exports more than quadrupled between 2002 and 2022: Israel currently has contracts to provide more than 130 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Egypt and Jordan; supplies the British army with protective systems for their tanks and sells spyware to the FBI (even as the Biden administration was publicly denouncing the company from which it was buying the merchandise). It was true about tourism: Between 2014 and 2019 the annual number of visitors to Israel rose by over 50 percent, to just under 5 million, while the annual number of Israelis traveling abroad also nearly doubled, to 9 million, in the same period. Those numbers fell during the Covid epidemic but had rebounded by 2022. As for universities, in 2019 Haaretz reported that Israel was the “No. 1 exporter of academic talent to the United States,” with enough scholars in America to equal “the entire faculty of two to three typical Israeli institutes of higher education.”

No wonder that Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the authors of Start-Up Nation, wrote a convincing sequel, The Genius of Israel, that was on the cusp of publication last fall and that I reviewed in these pages. For all the unsuspected national shortcomings that led to October 7—to say nothing of the torrent of hate that the massacre exposed and fueled around the world—Israel was a nation visibly on the rise.

This raises two distinct but related questions. How do we reconcile the broad optimism about pre-October 7 Israel with the post–October 7 pessimism typified by Lévy? And what was it that Israel was doing right before that dark day—so that it may do it again?

The answer to the first question is that the picture Lévy paints in Israel Alone is too dark. It ignores the dogs that didn’t bark in the night—the virtual absence of anti-Israel protests on the vast majority of university campuses outside of Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and a handful of other schools. It ignores the support Israel didget, including more than 50,000 tons worth of arms shipments, from a Democratic administration. It ignores the mostly full-throated support the Republican Party gives to Israel, along with some notable progressives like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and New York Representative Ritchie Torres. It ignores Israel’s continued ties, after a year of war, with its Arab partners.

None of this is to deny that things are worse for Israel, and Jews, almost anywhere one looks. But they are not unrelievedly bleak. We continue to have millions of friends and admirers, at home and abroad. Israel maintains an astonishing capacity to persevere through trials that would have broken weaker nations. Israel’s weaknesses were exposed on October 7, but more so were the weaknesses of its enemies, exemplified by the pager explosions in Lebanon and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran safe house. Perhaps most important, an ancient Jewish instinct for danger, dormant too long, has been reawakened. 

Which brings us to the second question: How do we return to our former trajectory? Here it’s worth noting the very separate approaches taken by Israelis and American Jews in the past two decades.

Broadly speaking, American Jews, at least outside of the Orthodox world, opted not just for assimilation. Too often, they went for self-erasure. More than 60 percent of Jews who have married in recent years have done so with a non-Jewish spouse. Non-Orthodox Jewish women have the lowest fertility rate of any ethnic group in America. Swedish, Polish, and German Americans were once culturally and religiously distinctive subgroups in America, before they dissolved into the great American mainstream. That could be the fate of secular American Jewry.

Nor is the problem merely demographic. Secular Jewry has largely embraced identity politics for everyone—except ourselves. We have looked with benign indifference as Jewish enrollment numbers at elite universities fell year by year. We have embraced DEI programs that ignored and despisedus because we are “white” or “white passing.” We have participated in a kind of soft calumny of the Jewish state, meekly defending Israel’s right to exist while endlessly second-guessing the means by which it chooses to defend itself. We have loudly denounced an occupation that in Gaza hasn’t existed for 19 years and continues in the West Bank only because Israel’s enemies remain sworn to its destruction. At a graver extreme, some American Jews have joined sides with our enemies, giving those enemies a veneer of pseudo-respectability. There’s always a wicked son in the mix.

The consequences of this self-erasure bear directly on the return of anti-Semitism, which had been rising before October 7 and exploded after it. Dwindling numbers erode the political power Jews once enjoyed, not least vis-à-vis other minority groups. A diminished presence at elite universities (especially when so many of the Jews on these campuses, both students and faculty, veer left) shaped a campus culture that looked on Jewish concerns with growing indifference and hostility. The koshering of antipathy or hatred for Israel from “As a Jew” Jews (to borrow a term from Eli Lake’s essay in the March issue of COMMENTARY) paved the way for more vicious forms of anti-Jewish politics. The eagerness to empower “alternative voices” in publishing or the arts begat the exclusion of Jews in industries they had once dominated. And the broad failure of Jewish organizations to represent much beyond their parochial interests and obsessions has led to a politics where everyone speaks for the Jews—and nobody does.

If a single word captures this type of Jewish-American politics (in the broadest sense of politics), it’s ingratiation. With noteworthy exceptions, the Jewish strategy in America has been to make ourselves likeable: funny, vulnerable, generous, accessible, transparent, sweetly neurotic, individually successful but always at the side of the needy. When we tell our story, we tend to emphasize what’s universal to it, not what’s unique. American Jews want to be lovable, and loved, not for being different, much less better, but for being just like everyone else.

There are virtues to ingratiation, and often a necessity for it, especially for a minority living amid frequently hostile host nations. But a politics that mainly seeks to curry favor through a combination of conspicuous achievement and constant self-effacement can generate as much envy as it does admiration, as much contempt as it does love. It’s the recipe by which American Jews have arrived at the place we find ourselves today.

*

Now turn to an alternative approach. Throughout most of the 1990s, Israelis also chose the path of ingratiation, beginning with the White House handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat that inaugurated the Oslo Accords. It led to Nobel Peace Prizes, a peace treaty with Jordan, and, briefly, an era of good feelings for the Jewish state, at least in certain corners of the world.

It also led to disaster, for two principal reasons. Israel’s enemies smelled weakness, and Israel’s friends—its supposed friends—expected pliancy. Oslo created a dynamic by which every Israeli concession became the occasion to demand another concession (euphemistically described as “taking risks for peace”), and every concession became an opportunity for Palestinian incitement, terrorism, and rejection. By the end of Israel’s seven-year quest to earn the world’s favor—including the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, most of Gaza, and nearly every Palestinian city and town, along with Israel’s declared willingness to accept a Palestinian state on nearly all the West Bank and Gaza—the Jewish state had conceded, on the ground or in principle, everything it could reasonably concede. It wasn’t, and could never be, enough. When the long train of concessions was met with a storm of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and a lynching, it was Israel, not the Palestinians, who were blamed.

In short, long before Israel was alone after October 7, 2023, it was alone after the outbreak of the second intifada. I lived through that period as editor of the Jerusalem Post, and I recall a time nearly as bleak as the present: cafés, buses, discos, malls, and ballrooms blown up on a weekly basis; a drumbeat of calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions; denunciations of every Israeli act of self-defense as a war crime; endless slander of the Jewish state by the world’s great-and-good; the tut-tutting of experts who declared there could be no military solution to Israel’s problems.

This time, however, the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon defied world opinion—including, at times, the wishes of the Bush administration. It sent tanks into Ramallah to surround and isolate Arafat. It initiated an intensive campaign of arrests and targeted assassinations of terrorist kingpins, from Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti in Ramallah to Hamas’s Sheikh Yassin in Gaza. It built the security fence. By 2004, the second intifada had effectively been defeated. In 2006, Israel went to war with Hezbollah employing a strategy of heavy bombardment intended, as then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, to show that “the boss has gone mad.” The war was in many ways a failure, but the ferocity of Israel’s military campaign did create a stable border for 17 years. In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office and, for all his many personal and political failings—which I detailed in COMMENTARY in the summer of 2021—showed a repeated willingness to defy Western pressure to accept a Palestinian state or go along with the Iran nuclear deal. His 2015 speech to Congress, in which he made the case against the deal and openly defied Barack Obama, did more to cement Israel’s ties to the Arab states than had any Israeli concession to the Palestinians.

Israel thrived throughout these years. It did so, in part, because it stuck to sound economic policies and created an atmosphere of relative security that attracted investors and retained entrepreneurs. But it also succeeded because it ceased hankering for the love and approval of liberal Western elites and instead demanded, and showed itself worthy of, the respect of adversaries, allies, and potential allies. It was not concessions to Mahmoud Abbas that persuaded Emiratis and Saudis to grow closer to the Jewish state; it was Israel’s demonstrated ability to infiltrate and humiliate Iran and set back its nuclear programs. It was not Israel’s popularity on the streets of Cairo that led Egyptian strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to strengthen ties with his eastern neighbor; it was the capabilities Israel brought to the fight against ISIS in the Sinai.

*

There is a lesson in this for how Israel should move forward. As I write, in late September, the Netanyahu government is under intense international and domestic pressure to reach a deal with Hamas that might free at least some of the hostages in exchange for a cease-fire that would effectively guarantee Hamas’s long-term survival as Gaza’s dominant political and military entity. It’s a deal fraught with peril, because Hamas will use the hostages it doesn’t release to extract ever-greater concessions (and treat those remaining hostages even more cruelly), and because a Hamas that survives will eventually recover its strength, resume its assault, and re-gain an aura of invincibility.

But the greatest danger will be to Israel’s reputation: to the belief, among enemies and allies alike, that the Jewish state knows how to pick itself up, that it can win wars against inferior enemies, that it doesn’t capitulate in the face of moral pressure, that it is the strong horse of the Middle East.

Precisely the same logic applies to Israel’s other conflicts, above all with Hezbollah. The brilliance of the pager/walkie-talkie strike in Lebanon has done more to restore Israel’s regional reputation than 11 months of relative restraint and tit-for-tat reprisals against enemies to the north. A similar lesson will also have to be given to the Houthis, especially since the Biden administration seems incapable of doing so. “Who Dares, Wins,” the motto (borrowed from the British) of Israel’s special forces, should be the motto for the Jewish state as a whole. The path out of loneliness is always a path of action.

What about American Jews?

The resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States has begun to force a fundamental rethink of the way in which at least some American Jews contemplate their place in society: I call them “October 8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the attack with a clear understanding of who our friends are not. Those Jews include the donors who revolted at the idea of continuing to give money to Harvard, Penn, Brown, or Columbia; who are investing heavily in new educational institutions that adhere to classically liberal values; who are calling out the DEI/anti-racism com-
plex for being the anti-Semitism incubator that it is; who are breaking out of the stale orthodoxies of traditional media; who are investing all of their philanthropic energies in strengthening Jewish life.

They are the vanguard, but we are only at the beginning. So many institutions in American life that were once welcoming places for American Jews have turned bad: elite private schools; human-rights organizations; the literary world; social work; Mideast-studies departments; public-school curriculums—the list is long. In every one of these fields or institutions, October 8 Jews have a clear choice: Reject, reform, or reinvent them. What’s no longer possible is to pretend that what we have now is acceptable, or that indifference and inaction are viable options.

Just as the Bush administration spoke of a “whole of government effort” after September 11, 2001, we need a “whole of American Jewry” effort after October 7: to make high-quality Jewish day-school education available and affordable to every Jewish family that wants one; to cut off all giving to colleges and universities that are hostile to open and vibrant Jewish life and Zionist expression; to create a new ecosystem of literary prizes, faculty chairs, “genius awards,” and grants that reward and celebrate true merit; to fund and tell stories on large and small screens that richly and empathically explore the Jewish experience; to deepen American ties to Israel through corporate and academic partnerships; to expose and shut down the opaque and potentially illicit networks that fund and support the anti-Israel student protests.

This is a partial list, but you get the point. If we don’t want to wind up alone, we cannot afford to stand still, think small, or look back. The questions are no longer “Who betrayed us?” or “Why is the world this way?” They are “What do we do now?” and “How soon can we get it done?”

Israel and the Jewish people aren’t alone—yet. Ensuring that we never wind up alone is going to take courage, work, nerve. And a demand for respect.