Israel Alone: a book by Bernard-Henri Levy
Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
What’s at stake for Israel and the world
French philosopher, filmmaker and writer Bernard-Henri Levy—widely known as BHL—has witnessed and documented man’s inhumanity in many wars, in Bosnia, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan besieged by Isis, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ukraine. But nothing has moved him as profoundly as the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, their devastation of the kibbutzim and the atrocities depraved Hamas militants inflicted so gleefully on men, women, children and babies on 7 October 2023. Levy flew to Israel on 8 Ocotber and, as one of the first to bear witness to a living hell—’Evil was there. Pure evil, plain-faced, gratuitous, senseless evil’—he entered a charred landscape of human remains with terrorists still on the ground. It ignited his resolve to write a book, Israel Alone, in support of Israel’s war against modern radical Islam, highlighting the country’s determination to neutralise the threat of any repetition of Hamas’s unimaginable brutality that shocked and traumatised Israel and the Jewish world.
It was a heinous invasion that we all felt disrupted the sacred notion so central to Zionism that Israel is a sanctuary where Jews are safe from harm. Suddenly, Israel and its people seemed so vulnerable, and we had lost the reassurance we all held dear for so long, that there’s a place of safety and security for us in times of crisis. The invasion, the atrocities and especially the kidnapping and torturing of hostages re-shaped our lives, emotionally, intellectually and politically. As Levy states, it was ‘a hellish plunge into an unknown abyss’.
Since then, geopolitics in that volatile part of the world has evolved in unexpected ways. It is almost impossible to keep up with the rapidly changing scenarios in the Middle East, notably the routing of Hezbollah and the fall of Assad’s Syria that few could have predicted. What can contemporary writers do other than document the rapidly turning pages of history for us and future generations? Levy, however, does so much more in this slender volume that gives a moving account of his visit to Israel; after all, the horrors inflicted by Hamas provided the raison d’etre of the book. But Levy is also more than a chronicler of history, he is a brilliant analyst and philosopher and, therefore, we expect so much more from him than the average skilled observer. And, in that respect, he delivers in terms of historical background, originality, interpretation and analysis.
Levy’s record of events is much more than a litany of sorrows. He highlights the political heavyweights and the interventionist roles of Russia, China, the ayatollahs of Iran, neo-Ottoman Turkey and Arab countries prone to Jihadism, all aspiring to become powerful empires. ‘We are seeing the five… consolidating their alliance and submitting us all to a new test, this time on the Israeli front,’ he writes. When he focuses on France, Levy uses some of his bitter barbs to skewer his French compatriots, especially Jean-Luc Melanchon, who refused to characterise the Hamas killings and kidnappings as acts of terrorism. Levy concludes, ‘His outbursts, interventions, and dreadful displays placed him squarely in the dirty tradition of leftist French anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus affair’. The ‘progressives’ of the Democratic Party in the United States are also berated.
Levy, who has consistently brought to the world’s attention the plight of the hostages and their families, condemns the NGOs theoretically responsible for the kidnapped, especially Amnesty International, which denounced the Israeli response; and the Red Cross that ignored the captives, at time imprisoned in tunnels under the very building that housed Red Cross staff. ‘But it was hard to tell what game these Red Cross representatives were playing when they emerged from their ethical discretion and appeared before the cameras,’ Levy ponders, ‘Were they escorting hostages whom they said earlier they knew nothing about? Or were they moved by the torturers…presenting themselves to the world as polite considerate young men honestly concerned with a “regional conflagration”?’ He also lambasts the United Nations and Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who set the tone initially by condemning ‘the suffocating occupation’ endured by the people of Gaza, while ignoring the inconvenient fact of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Levy’s comments on bodies such as UN Women and UNRWA is also insightful.
There is a fascinating chapter on radical Islam and its debt to Nazi ideology and, indeed, the part played in the Nazi project by the Arab-Muslim world. To cite but one example of the many Levy provides: Hassan al-Banna, co-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, stated, ‘Is Nazism not a great ideological invention of our time….And why should the Arab nation deprive itself of the benefits it stands to gain from a regional version of the Nazi model?’ Levy notes that al-Banna was thinking of Nazism when, in a 1938 editorial, he lauded the ideal of an Arab ‘industry of death’. The Muslim Brotherhood, with 200,000 members, distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ‘as brown-shirted students staged violent demonstrations shouting, “Down with Jews!” and “Jews out of Egypt and Palestine!”.’
There are revelatory insights into the linkages between Nazism and Islamic leaders—with the notable exception of Morocco—that includes confirmation of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini’s advisory role in Germany. Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, declared at the Nuremberg trial that the Grand Mufti, who lived in Berlin from 1941, ‘played a role of non-negligible importance in the German government’s decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews’. Levy concludes, ’The fact that Arab commentators (including Palestinians) ignore this dark page of their history; that this part of the world should be the only one never to have acknowledged, documented and taught its participation in the supreme crime of the Holocaust; and that PLO leader Yasser Arafat should have continued to the end to embrace the Mufti—all of this speaks volumes about the appeal and ongoing vitality of this unspoken Nazism.’ Levy’s account ‘negates the myth of an innocent Palestine uninvolved in Hitler’s war against the Jews that has been made to bear the burden of reparations for the crime of the Holocaust’.
This slim volume reinforces Levy’s reputation as a defender of democracy and humanism against totalitarianism and fascism; and provides a further chapter in the annals of his humanitarian activism.
Israel Alone
Bernard-Henri Levy
A Wicked Son Book
Post Hill Press, New York, 2024
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
