French public intellectual and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy made his first visit to Israel in 1967, the year of its triumph in the Six-Day War. On October 8, 2023, he returned to a very different country, one reeling in the wake of a terrorist attack that had killed more than 1,200 Israelis and others. In response, Lévy has written Israel Alone, a brief but eloquent defense of the Jewish state in the face of the war it has waged against Hamas, and an exploration of some of the roots of what, in truth, is a new, but painfully familiar, antipathy toward Israel and the Jewish people.
Lévy (The Genius of Judaism) dedicates his book to the 120 hostages remaining in Hamas custody at the time of its writing. From its opening pages, he looks without flinching at the reality of Hamas’s barbaric attack on October 7--one that involved unspeakable sexual violence and other atrocities against women and children--"a slaughter paired with a hostage taking whose scale, savagery, and implementation resembled nothing previously known."
But Lévy is quick to recognize that much of the world almost immediately moved on from the horror of what he calls a pogrom to unite in near universal condemnation of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, a conflict he describes as a "horrific war that Israel did not want." As much as Israel seeks to eradicate Hamas as an act of self-defense, Lévy also sees that conflict as a manifestation of a larger one between the Global West and an axis comprising "Russia, China, the Iran of the ayatollahs, neo-Ottoman Turkey, and the Arab countries prone to jihadism," in which groups like Hamas and Hezbollah serve as proxies for these powers. And even as he embraces a two-state solution, Lévy also concisely rebuts what he calls the "traps of common sense," like the demand of "82 percent of the world's nations" for a "restraint that they have never expected from any other nation that has been similarly attacked and threatened with extinction."
Pointing to the "tempest of hatred for Jews without precedent since the Second World War" as the war in Gaza grinds on, Lévy reserves special condemnation for the presidents of elite universities who insisted on understanding calls for the eradication of Israel in "context." In the concluding section of his book, he rebuts the idea that Israel is a colonialist state, explaining its origins out of the ashes of the Holocaust and fiercely defending its legitimacy. With the benefit of time and distance, others will make a more thorough case for Israel's response to Hamas's attack, but it's unlikely any will do so with more fervor than Lévy does here. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Bernard-Henri Lévy offers a passionate defense of Israel in the wake of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and Israel's prosecution of its war against the terrorist group.