Israel Alone (Wicked Son)
By Bernard-Henri Lévy. Translated by Steven B. Kennedy

Passion, anger, fear, sadness, steadfastness—a score of emotions—pour out of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in his concise, impactful new book, Israel Alone. The prominent public intellectual, known simply as BHL in France, flew to Israel on October 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas terror attacks. He has returned numerous times since to chronicle the ensuing war and its ramifications for Israel, the Jewish people and what he calls the “Global West”—Europe, America and those countries in the world that “have faith in Western Enlightenment.”

This is Lévy’s first book about Israel in a nearly 50-year career that has spawned books, films, articles, essays and countless media appearances. Over the past year, he has been a steadfast supporter of Israel in his native country, despite significant pushback in the media and among the intelligentsia. Indeed, this book resulted from his promise to survivors, former hostages and their families that he would use his platform to bear witness and defend the State of Israel.

And defend it he does. In three chapters titled “October 7 and After,” “Negation in Our Time” and “History and Truth,” he offers erudite and cogent arguments to support Israel against charges of racism, apartheid, “colonial settlerism,” military overreaction, genocide and Islamophobia. Along the way, he references philosophers, arcane French politics, even his own works, as he marshals his sources to support his main theses.

The first is that Israel is alone in this conflict because of moral and intellectual turpitude of the Global West. “Today, there is no question more pressing for humanity than that of the evil that one man can do to another. The question has been off the West’s radar for a long time,” he writes. “The banishment [of that question] was the work of religions teaching that evil will be redeemed and that we must not settle for the idea that the world is a vale of tears.”

The second is that the anti-democratic axis of Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Islamist Arab nations is abetting and delighting in the spectacle of Israel’s estrangement.

He also discusses how the realities of Hamas’s depredations are already being whitewashed and covered up.

And finally, he determines that antisemitism, that hatred of the Jews that Lévy calls Amalek, is behind it all. “No land on this planet is a shelter for Jews; that is what the Event of October 7 proclaims. Never and nowhere will it be possible to say that Jews can live in the world the way the French live in France, the English in England, and the Americans in America—and that will be true until the end of time….”

Nevertheless, he insists, Israel and the Jews must never deny their exceptionalism and unique characteristics, which he describes as “rejection of anything resembling contempt for the stranger, hate for the other, racism, or chauvinism, all of which are forms of idolatry.”

For Lévy, the term “chosen people” means that Israel and the Jewish people are “the secret treasure needed by nations that wish to renounce their part in inhumanity and join others on the path of redemption…. The task of the Jews is to repair the world.”

He also doesn’t mince words about the violence done by Hamas, describing his visits to towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza border. “I will never forget my first impressions,” he writes.  “The smell of sour milk that filled the bullet-pocked, blasted, half-burned houses; the contents of their kitchen cabinets scattered in the rooms, as if blown away by a hurricane.… Or, finally, the vegetable storage shed where unidentified body parts that had just been collected were stacked in a small pile of flesh, indistinct except for the stench.”

First published in France in March, Lévy’s book earned a plethora of reviews and debates, due to his national celebrity, with responses varying based on the political leanings of the outlets. He is less well known in the United States, so it is uncertain whether the new English-language version of the book will cause the same sort of ripples. Regardless, it is an important read, for those familiar with Lévy and those who are not.

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Alan D. Abbey is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute with a 40-year career as a journalist, teacher and media professional in both the United States and Israel. Born in Brooklyn, he moved to Jerusalem in 1999.