Bret Stephens
Commentary, November 2024
“Broadly speaking, American Jews, at least outside of the Orthodox world, opted not just for assimilation. Too often, they went for self-erasure.”
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.” … [To read the full article, click here]
