Intellectual Warrior
THANE ROSENBAUM: Bernard, we’ve been friends for many years. Even though you’re in France and I’m in New York, we share a lot in common. We’re children of immigrants; we’re both writers with interests in human rights and justice; you’ve made several films and I’ve written novels. Yes, we are separated by an ocean, but we can still take a walk and talk, digitally, about your latest book, “Israel Alone.”
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY: I am ready, my friend.
TR: This might be the first time in Jewish history when a French Jew and an American Jew, on different continents, can look out their windows and see the exact same thing. American Jews did not experience the Dreyfus Affair in the early 20th century. A French Jew’s experience in 1941 was vastly more perilous than for someone in Brooklyn. “Israel Alone” not only has this evocative title, but it reminds me of Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse.” Like Zola, you are sounding the alarm about a false accusation, this time not against a Jewish military officer, but a wrongly accused country, Israel.
BHL: It’s true that if I look through my window and you look through yours, we see the same thing, and this is new, a first. Such a globalization of antisemitism has never happened in history. It’s a real globalization. People always speak of globalization, of the economy, of ecology, but never the globalization of antisemitism. From east to west, north to south, the word “Zionism” has become an insult, though for us, it’s a source of pride. It’s the name of a great, noble adventure. But elsewhere it has become infamous, an “offensive” word. And, yet, the hatred on the campuses is the same in Pakistan, at UCLA, and at Sciences Po. So this is tragically true, yes. I totally agree.
“Such a globalization of antisemitism has never happened in history.”
TR: Another area that we have in common is that after the massacre on Oct. 7, we both had the same impulse to respond with a book. I have a book about Israel coming out, as well. Your book is very much a literary memoir and intellectual polemic in defense of Israel. Mine is about the legal aspects of Israel’s response. We both ask: “Can Israel be honestly judged?” But even asking that question is a risk in this culture, since among writers and intellectuals, Israel is automatically judged guilty. There is a great deal of fear and self-censorship. Most writers would not undertake such a risk.
BHL: For me, the biggest risk is not the fear of being shunned. I don’t care if I stand alone. In my professional life, very often I was alone: when I defended Darfur, when I pleaded for the bombing of Serbian militias around Sarajevo, when I went to Bangladesh at 24 years old, when I defended the Kurds or democracy in Syria. For me, the biggest risk is not standing for the truth. When you take the risk to think in medias res, in the middle of things, you take a huge risk — which is to be wrong. My way of writing is to write in the middle of events, when things are going on, to try to influence the events. My way of operating, as is yours, is serving as an intellectual weapon for people who need ammunition.
“For me, the biggest risk is not the fear of being shunned. I don’t care if I stand alone.”
TR: Like Zola.
BHL: Zola was a giant. But the method of Zola, yes, when he wrote “J’Accuse.” It’s not just to denounce a disgusting injustice; but it is to repair, to make a difference. To stop the process, to press the pause button on the madness.
TR: And not to analyze the aftermath.
BHL: No, that is left to history. It’s a noble activity. But I am writing here in the middle of the noise. My dream for this book is that at Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and MIT, it should be used and appropriated by brave young students who want to oppose the wave of fascism which invades the university under the Hamas flag.
TR: But so few will are willing to take that risk. What you write in “Israel Alone” is simply not permitted on a university campus. This is the stifling world of universities right now. Will students have the intellectual freedom and courage to read what you have to say?
BHL: They have to earn this freedom, and fight for it. My modest contribution would be to help them stand up and make the argument,
TR: When we both looked out our windows, should we have been so surprised by what we saw? For instance, as a French Jew, you’ve lived in a country that saw Ilan Halimi tortured by a self-described gang of Islamist barbarians. Two Jewish grandmothers, one a Holocaust survivor, one torched in her apartment, the other thrown from her balcony. Both actions preceded by “Allahu Akbar!” The massacre at the Jewish day school in Toulouse. The kosher market killings in connection with Charlie Hebdo. I wonder whether your book was already in the making — France was a rehearsal for the Nova Festival.
BHL: Oct. 7 was an “Event,” as I say in the book, an event with a capital “E.” Oct. 7 was unprecedented. Oct. 7 was without premonition, without announcement. It cannot be compared to what happened before — either in France or in Israel. It was a massacre of such barbarism. And then the cry of joy, this shameful howl of joy, that followed in so many places around the world.
“October 7 was unprecedented. October 7 was without premonition, without announcement. It cannot be compared to what happened before—either in France or in Israel. It was a massacre of such barbarism. And then the cry of joy, this shameful howl of joy, that followed in so many places around the world.”
TR: You mean celebration.
BHL: Celebration, yes. Including in America, including by professors whom I cite in the book, whom I name and shame in the book for having rejoiced over Oct. 7. This whole segment of history was morally inconceivable. Yes, of course, there was the killing of Sarah Halimi in Paris in 2017. In the early 21st century, France had become a place where you could kill Jews again in succession. This had not even happened in the 1930s.
TR: Exactly.
BHL: But what happened on Oct. 7, and the celebration that followed in United States and in Europe — this was something completely and significantly different in quality from all the rest. Again, it was an Event, which means that nothing foretold it.
TR: Or even to process the warning signs?
BHL: When the war is over, there will be investigations to find out what failed. How can it be that the best intelligence service in the world did not anticipate the attack? And so, we will probably discover that some pieces of information were known in advance. But the core of the problem is here: no one could believe what they heard; no one could even conceive it.
TR: Reminds me of an anecdote you tell in the book. When Jan Karski, who had seen Auschwitz, came to the United States to warn Franklin Roosevelt, the president wouldn’t listen. Karski next visited the Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter apparently replied, “I’m not saying you’re lying, but I still can’t believe you.”
BHL: That’s probably what happened before Oct. 7. It was unfathomable. Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, was saved by an Israeli doctor. He had been negotiating some new elements of the blockade. He was being perceived as a new man, not necessarily a terrorist, not as “bad” as before. He was receiving people, sometimes officials, from all over the world. Why would he do such a thing?
TR: You spent a year of your life that culminated in a very important book: Your search to understand what happened to Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was an early victim of Islamic extremism. Pearl was beheaded. I see Ilan Halimi, butchered in Paris, and now the Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, executed in a tunnel in Gaza, as an un-Holy Trinity of Islamic barbarism, the sadistic murder of Jews in Paris, Pakistan, and Gaza.
BHL: I agree with this linkage you are making. And let me tell you a foreboding anecdote: A few months ago, I was with Rachel and Jon, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, in Jerusalem. I was so impressed by their dignity, courage, their endless determination. I told them a lot of things, like my theory about hostages, my hopes, how millions around the world were holding their breath in solidarity with them, and so on. But I did not dare confide in them that I was thinking about the ghost of Daniel Pearl. I was haunted by him. And, while speaking and listening, I silently prayed for Pearl’s ghosts to stay away, for Hersh not to become the next Danny Pearl.
TR: When the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, you were a young man living in France and raced off to Israel to join the fight, but the war ended just before you arrived. You exhibited this same crusading spirit in Ukraine, and with the Kurds. But you did it again immediately after Oct. 7. There’s a parallel connection between the young BHL who rushed to Israel during the Six-Day War, and an older, wiser, more hardened, perhaps more cynical BHL who dashed off this time.
BHL: Not more cynical.
TR: I would think you would be.
BHL: I’m not more cynical. But it might be true that I am wiser. I know more things today than before, but I’m the same. When I arrived on Oct. 8 in Tel Aviv, at night, there was a collapse in my mind, a compression of time I felt the same as the 19-year-old BHL in 1967.
TR: Like a parallel universe, the same person, separated by decades, but the same impulses, same heart.
BHL: The two events, however, are not the same. First, the enemies of Israel have become much more barbaric. The second is that Israel is more vulnerable today than it was in 1967. Contrary to an old cliché, everybody believes that in 1967 Israel was very vulnerable, because it was a new state, with a new army, and so on. But today, the new conditions of war, and the horror on Oct. 7, unleashed a different kind of vulnerability. Plus, there’s the huge danger of Iran.
TR: “Israel Alone” is a wonderfully written literary memoir, sprinkled with philosophy, and philosophers: Hegel, Levinas, Sartre, Theodor Adorno — even Rashi. For a slim book, you packed it with a lot of big thinkers that infuse the conversation with ideas. But as a French intellectual, you are a man out of time. Books and ideas are out of fashion. Today people on campus worship barbarians, not the great books, but the great killers — we are left with intellectual barbarism. The Dreyfus Affair was marked by debate. Today, discourse has surrendered to a death cult.
BHL: No, it is not so different. In the time of the Dreyfus Affair, you had chanting, slogans, insults in the streets of Paris. Among the best-selling morning newspapers was L’ Anti-semite. You had powerful gangs filled with antisemites.
TR: Did you have the murders of an Ilan Halimi, or the two Jewish grandmothers in Paris?
BHL: No, you did not have that, but in terms of thought reduced to insults, and some violence, that you had. One of Zola’s lawyers was shot in the back with a pistol.
TR: You’re not worried that France and Europe have lost the intellectual vitality that was crucial to the Enlightenment? You’re a follower of Emmanuel Levinas. He wrote about the ethics of responding to the “Other” by engaging with human beings face-to-face. And your friend, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, once proposed a burqa ban. Now we see the keffiyeh covering faces on streets and campuses. Islam has not only imported a unique form of violence to Europe, but also face-covering, which makes it impossible to see people as human beings.
BHL: A few points about the hijab, burqa, and full-face veil. First, you are right: when you don’t see the face of the other, it’s a negation of any possible ethical relationship. It is a conception of the world where women are veiled in order to keep them outside the bounds of humanity, preventing them from having normal relationships.
Your worry about the European Enlightenment, Islamism is not the only threat. In France, we have a big antisemitic party, a party that openly preaches antisemitism. It is called La France Insoumise, “France Unbowed.” Which, by the way, is not unbowed at all. They are bowing to dictators all over the planet. But they are not Muslims, and …
TR: But what are they politically? Are they on the left, or right?
BHL: They are on the left. And they are antisemitic, but they are not an Islamist party.
TR: I know. But Bernard, I’m sorry … I need to push back here. You’re in France. I’m not. You’re telling me that this party is not energized by what they see Islamists do on the streets? They may not be Islamists, but they draw strength and solidarity with what Islamists have done to Europe — the No-Go-Zones, the open acts of violence and flag burnings. They might not have the same power or popularity if not for Islam.
BHL: Not as much as you might think. First of all, if they were in power, they would certainly be very tough against these “No-Go-Zones.” You have Muslim antisemitism, sure. But you have also, especially in France and probably in America, antisemites who are not Muslim. One can feed the other, but there are many roots in France Unbowed other than radical Islam.
If you really look at what the majority of French Muslims believe, you will find that the majority are not antisemitic. So, if only for electoral reasons, it would be stupid to be antisemitic. There are better ways to attract the Muslim vote in France than antisemitism. Antisemitism is felt as an insult by many Muslims, and as an embarrassment by others.
Finally, like the Dreyfus Affair, behind any slogan lies a theory. The theory is always there. Even in America, on the campuses, where you have students who just shout, “Zionists Out!”, behind their ignorant chants you have theories, those of Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and other intellectuals. They are the silent fuel that is powering these onomatopoeias, the unspoken words behind the spoken words.
TR: In your documentary, “Peshmerga,” where you were embedded with the Peshmerga Kurdish army in their fight against ISIS, at one point you say that in the Kurds you discovered an “enlightened Islam.” I remember thinking: “Bernard, the Peshmerga, the Kurds, are the exception of Islam. They are the aberration.” It would be great if Muslims looked to the Kurds and said, “This is how we want to practice our religion in the 21st century.” But, instead, we are forced to make excuses for Islam, to engage in moral relativism — “Who are we to tell them how to live? If they want to cut off heads … that’s their business.”
BHL: I don’t make excuses for Islam. I am a son of the Enlightenment, I have thought at length about democracy, I feel qualified to say—from my experiences in Panjshir, in Dhaka, in Rojava — what a democracy should be. And why it is absolutely conceivable that the politics of Muslim countries can be compatible with democracy. And I also hoped for that in Libya, for example. I spent months and months in Benghazi, in Tripoli.
TR: Well, we know what you think, but you are largely alone among intellectuals? When most people look at the amount of violence in the world in the name of “Allah,” when you see how widespread Islamic violence has spread in enlightened societies, one would think there would be a revolution among Europeans, Americans, Canadians and Australians, and say, “Not in our country.”
BHL: And what I am waiting for, too, is a revolution in these countries of Muslims, saying, not in our name. Not only not in our country. And I am confident that more and more Muslims express this: “Not in our name.”
TR: I don’t see much evidence of this. Yet you remain hopeful?
BHL: This is the battle of our time. Inside Islam, the battle between those who want a dark Islam and those who long for an enlightened Islam. And it’s not only the Kurds who see the light. If it was only the Kurds, okay, I would say it is an exception. But you also have Bosnia, Sarajevo, and enlightened Islam among so many Iranians. The women who chant in the streets for dignity and freedom: you will not hear antisemitic slogans in their mouths. You have a real movement in the Islamic world that is pleading for democratization and friendship with Jews. It’s a war inside Islam, a war to the death. Who will win? I don’t know. But we should help those who are ready to embrace the cause of democracy.
“The women who chant in the streets for dignity and freedom: you will not hear antisemitic slogans in their mouths. You have a real movement in the Islamic world that is pleading for democratization and friendship with Jews.”
TR: After Oct. 7, the world should have stopped spinning once the gang-rapes and beheadings were discovered. Millions should have screamed: “We will not allow this on our planet.” Instead, we were told that Palestinian “resistance” against Israelis is acceptable in any form, even against babies. And the denial that all of it even took place! We saw this with the Holocaust, and we now see it again. Both the celebration and the denial.
BHL: Denial, celebration, appeals to do it again. When people on Madison Avenue, on the Brooklyn Bridge, at Grand Central Station, chant, “From the river to the sea, there will be only one Palestine” — what do they wish for? What are they calling for? They are calling for a repeat act. They call for a thousand Oct. 7s. This is the main topic of “Israel Alone”: That Israel is alone. We have articulate minds who praise Oct. 7 on campuses in America, in the newspapers. This is what drove my revulsion and anger. “Israel Alone” is a book by a man in revolt, and with knowledge, because I have known Israel for 60 years.
TR: How do we account for the world not revolting in anger? A million children were killed in the Holocaust, but the world learned of the atrocities later. On Oct. 7, the world knew about the gang-raping and beheadings, instantly. And, yet, no outrage. What is the mentality of someone who rips down posters of the hostages?
BHL: First, hate. Pure hate. A symbolic repetition of the crime. Then, you have something else: Those who rip off the faces are people who believe that other faces should be in that same place. There are people who believe there is no room on the same wall for two faces, who don’t believe there is space in one heart for two stories of grief and mourning.
TR: Because it raises a question of moral equivalence, right? “Our dead people are as valuable as yours, and I don’t see their faces on posters. The Palestinian prisoners you keep are no different from our Israeli hostages.”
BHL: It demonstrates a stingy heart. I believe you can mourn the Sudanese, who die of hunger; and you can also mourn the Syrians killed by Bashar Al Assad. And, you can also mourn the Jews killed on Oct. 7. None are incompatible. Those who tear down the posters are buying into a poisonous theory: that there is competition between victims, and one must choose.
TR: “Israel Alone” has some original observations that many readers may not know. It’s not just that there has never been a Palestinian country, anywhere, so the lands were not stolen by colonialists, unlike, say, French-occupied Algeria. But unlike Algerians, Palestinians never thought of themselves as a separate people; they always saw themselves as part of tribal Arabs and Syrians.
BHL: Yes, the feeling of being part of a Palestinian nation is a rather recent development. Israel did not colonize anything. They decolonized the whole area against the colonization of the time, which was British, and against the Nazis, with whom a lot of Arab countries of that time were allied.
TR: This was another interesting point you raised in the book. We hear the argument, “Why is our land treated as reparations for Jews who survived the Holocaust when it was a European crime that had nothing to do with us?”
BHL: Nazism was a world phenomenon. Nazism was not a European phenomenon. It was born in Germany, but then it spread. It was global. There was a globalization of Nazism that reached Japan, which reached many countries, including some Arab countries: Iraq, Syria, some Palestinian groups, and some dignitaries like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the mentor of Yasser Arafat.
TR: The Grand Mufti spent the war years in Germany.
BHL: He didn’t just spend time in Germany; he was active in the very worst of the worst. He visited Dachau. He advised Hitler to go even further with respect to the Jews. He said he was ready to help finish the job in Palestine. There was a special battalion of SS composed of followers of the Grand Mufti based in Athens. He was a true Nazi, like the Nazis in Romania, Hungary, collaborationist France. Many regimes and dignitaries embraced Nazi ideology, some for tactical reasons, maybe because they were against the Anglo-American world, but also for deeply ideological reasons. So, the Arab world is not innocent in the matter of the Holocaust. I should add, others chose an opposing path, like the King of Morocco, who protected the Jews of his country.
TR: You’re making a complicity argument.
BHL: More than complicity, participation — participation in the process. You are a philosopher of law yourself. But the crime of the Holocaust can be charged to all humans. Not only the Germans; not only the Europeans. You can level it against the whole of humanity. Some by complicity and some by active participation, including in the Arab world.
TR: Your connection to Judaism is both a birthright and as a secular humanist. And in “Israel Alone,” you speak about an essential contribution Jews have made to humanity in the innovation of human rights. But that’s why I used the word cynicism earlier. Given what happened on Oct. 7, is Jewish exceptionalism, and repairing the world, meaningless? How can Jews maintain any optimism about humanity given the resurgence of antisemitism, and the world’s indifference to it?
BHL: Because we’re Jews. We have no choice. This is who and what we are. The haters will not suppress the Jew in me, or in you. I will certainly not give them the power to erase the Jew in me, whatever they do. Whatever the reply, I will remain a Jew; I will keep on being a Jew, and being a Jew means defending certain values, ideals, a creed, and a form of exceptionalism. Even if we are completely alone in the world. I think of Rabbi Akiva who, when he was being killed by the Romans, continued to sing the Shema.
TR: I fear I have lost my voice. Let’s end with a complicated moral question. What should Israel do about the remaining hostages, and the competing mandate to destroy Hamas? There are Israelis who would say, “We demand the release of the hostages, but not if it means not punishing the terrorists and Gazans who committed these crimes.” The release of the hostages cannot be the golden ticket for Sinwar to survive.
BHL: My reply is as follows. I have two concerns. My concern is not Sinwar. My concern is that there should never be another Oct. 7. Really, never again. The tough task is to reconcile the return of the hostages and the prevention of a new Oct. 7.
TR: But the Israelis remember that Sinwar was once in their prisons. He was released and returned to Gaza, along with hundreds of others, in exchange for Gilad Shalit. They have been here before. The moral universe demands justice, but at what cost?
“In a hostage deal, you have to make concessions. That’s a requirement. The only concession that cannot be made is to allow Hamas, therefore Iran, to declare victory.”
BHL: In a hostage deal, you have to make concessions. That’s a requirement. The only concession that cannot be made is to allow Hamas, therefore Iran, to declare victory. They have to be defeated, defeated like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, like ISIS in Mosul. But I believe that these two goals, with political will, can be achieved. And as for Sinwar, he deserves the same fate as Eichmann.
Bernard-Henri Lévy will discuss his new book, “Israel Alone,” on Sunday, Sept. 15 at 4:30 pm at the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Culver City.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself,” and his forthcoming book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Is Israel Fighting a Just War in Gaza?”
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