Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Israel Alone contains much truth, but its title is fundamentally false. And this means that as insightful and eloquent as the author of this volume often is about the threats Israel faces, his thesis reveals that there is much about the world, and the Jewish place within it, that he does not understand. And for Jews to embrace this book is to countenance a calumny against some of the best friends Israel has in the world.
Lévy, a French-Jewish philosopher and public intellectual, begins Israel Alone by telling us how shocked he was by the events of October 7 and movingly describes how he visited Israel immediately after. His pain is evident as he decries the use of the word “context” utilized in defenses of Israel’s enemies, in statements that were “sung in unison by France’s politicians, the editorialists of the global South, and, in the United States, by the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.” In fact, he asserts, “Israel was defending itself. Struck in the heart, Israel was attempting to neutralize the Nazis that had drawn its blood precisely to ensure that they could never do it again.”
All this is laudable. Israel is indeed at war against a Nazi-like evil, and many in European parliaments and palaces around the world have turned against Israel—as they have in the past. But is Israel, as the book’s title claims, truly alone? Are there not prominent political figures that have stood with the Jewish state? Lévy’s reply is that figures such as Donald Trump or Viktor Orban are unworthy of a Jewish embrace. “No accord is possible, no historic compromise is conceivable, with ‘friends’ such as these. The Jews are therefore alone.”
Yet whatever one’s views of Orban, or the once and future president of the United States, it remains clear that millions of regular Americans also stand with Israel. The exit polls of the recent election reflect that almost two thirds of voters advocate American support of the Jewish state, with half of those voters contending that the current administration has not supported the country enough. If these polls are even close to being correct, this would mean that at least many tens of millions of Americans harbor an affection for Israel.
What this means is that in fact, the exact opposite of Lévy’s contention is the case: Israel is less alone than it has ever been. In a certain sense, this is more historically wondrous than the rise of modern Israel itself. For consider: The Jews have had sovereign states before, first in the biblical period, and later during the reign of the Maccabees. Throughout these periods, one may have seen a world leader that reflected an affection for Jews. Hiram, king of Tyre, was an ally of David’s; Cyrus of Persia allowed for the Jewish return to Jerusalem; Julius Caesar was grateful for Judean support and bestowed special liberties on Jerusalem for as long as he led Rome.
Suddenly, for the first time, millions of citizens of the most powerful country on earth care deeply about the Jewish future in the world. This has never happened before. The striking nature of this phenomenon, from a historical perspective, can only be appreciated if we put it this way: For the first time in the story of the Jewish people, more Gentiles than Jews care about us and our future. Lévy, in his book, tells us that the Jews are not only alone, they “are more alone than they ever have been.” In fact, the marvel of our present age is that Jews are less alone than they ever have been.
Is the author unaware of this? In fact, for Lévy, the multitudes of Americans who support Israel are unworthy friends, whose friendship should be rejected. This is what Lévy has to say about religious Christians in this country:
And how should we view, in the United States, the evangelical Christians who are a mainstay of Donald Trump’s support? Yes, they are nominally “Zionists.” But only to the extent that they expect on Judgement Day to take Israel’s place on the very land where the Jewish state presently and provisionally stands. Are these really Israel’s friends? Isn’t theirs a path opposite that of the Christians of integrity who consider the Jews, not mere guardians of the holy sites who will be, at the end of time, converted or destroyed, but as brothers in faith?
It is in reading this paragraph that I was immediately inspired to ask: How many American Evangelical Christians does Bernard-Henri Lévy actually know? They are indeed Israel’s friends. And, if asked why they care so much about a Jewish state on the other side of the world, their response has nothing to do with visions of the end times, and everything to do with a citation from Genesis, God’s words to Abraham: And I will bless those that bless thee, and curse those that curse thee, and through thee will all the families of the earth be blessed. And, having read Genesis myself, I can confirm: They are right, Hebrew Scripture does indeed say that.
Contra Lévy, American Christians do not consider Israelis “mere guardians of the holy sites who will be”; they see the story of the Jewish state as the ultimate sign of the fulfillment of God’s promises to the Jewish people. To say these many millions of Evangelicals are not “Christians of integrity” is a calumny. And they are joined by millions of other American Christians who are not Evangelical, and still support the Jewish state because of the bond between America and Israel: because they understand, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once put it, that Israel, ancient and modern, and America, are the only examples of nations founded in conscious pursuit of an idea.
Meanwhile, Lévy joins his denunciation of millions of American Christians as lacking in integrity with a description of the Israeli prime minister as an unworthy Jew. Writing of Netanyahu’s political alliance with Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, leaders of religious parties on the right, and of the controversy surrounding Israeli judicial reform, Lévy fumes:
I see a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who—perhaps to please these two, perhaps for base political reasons, perhaps because he feels his time is coming to an end, or perhaps, alas, because he has served one term too many and has lost his Jewish compass—was busy before the war undermining a judicial system that has been the pride of Israel. With all its qualms and uncertainties, with the renewal, deepening, and continuous reinvention of its laws, with the limits it places on the hubris of cynical actors, isn’t democracy the least bad secular translation of the instruction given to the people of Israel to remain a just people?
It is odd that, with the exception of Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.), so many of Israel’s defenders who are not the political right constantly join their stated support for Israel with indignant denunciations of Israel’s prime minister. But the fact remains that nothing in the above paragraph is true. The legislation to reform Israel’s judiciary was not driven by Netanyahu, whose focus was on Saudi Arabia and Iran. Nor was it pushed first and foremost by the two religious figures to whom Lévy refers. Rather, the drive was led by Yariv Levin, a secular member of Netanyahu’s own party; and, whatever one’s views of the legislation may have been, a democratic vote relating to the judiciary is, by definition, not undemocratic. Tony Blair’s government abolished, by majority vote, rights of most hereditary peers in the House of Lords, producing one of several fundamental changes in British government and society, but Britain—which, like Israel, does not have a written constitution—did not cease to be a democracy. It is Lévy’s right to oppose this legislation—but that does not make those that feel otherwise devoid of a “Jewish compass.”
Netanyahu, like many seminal leaders, may have flaws, but there is one deep truth that he has shown he understands: that Israel is not alone, and that a true defense of Israel involves engagement with, and embrace of, Israel’s friends around the world, and especially in America. When the Obama administration advanced an agreement with Iran, Netanyahu seized on Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress. The speech was criticized by allies of the White House—yet the Arab world, terrified of a nuclear Iranian regime, was impressed, and this set the stage for the Abraham Accords that followed. Recently, Netanyahu’s cultivation of pro-Israel Americans has helped set the stage for the support that it will receive from the next administration—and from the new Congress, which was elected by millions of non-Jewish Americans that do not wish for Israel to be alone.
As I write these words, a socialist Jewish senator has recently submitted a Senate resolution advocating a ban on American offensive arms shipments to Israel. The measure has received the support of a Jewish senator from Georgia, along with a third of the Democratic caucus. Meanwhile, the incoming Senate majority leader, South Dakota senator John Thune, stressed that the Congress that will be sworn in on January 3, 2025, will ensure that Israel receives all the materiel it needs in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah. Thune also insisted that the new 119th Congress would seek to sanction the International Criminal Court if it did not cease targeting the Jewish state. “To our allies in Israel,” Thune said, “and to the Jewish people around the world, my message to you is this: Reinforcements are on the way.” Thune represents a state that has, to put it mildly, few Jews. The same can be said for his colleagues in Alabama, Arkansas, and elsewhere. That such a speech can be given should be seen as one of the marvels of Jewish history, and it shows that there are millions of Gentiles who stand with Israel as it wages what Lévy rightly recognizes as a war of self-defense.
Lévy has declared his admiration for Alexis de Tocqueville, and, years ago, he sought to imitate the French aristocrat by taking a journey around the United States. But whereas Democracy in America remains the best book through which to understand this country, Israel Alone, by its very name, reveals that Lévy has a great deal to learn about America, and about the friends Israel has inside it. For Lévy to assert that Jews are alone is essentially to say that it is supported by multitudes of non-Jews of whom he does not approve, non-Jews who also admire a Jewish prime minister he does not like. It therefore falls to American Jews, blessed by America and its citizens, to declare: For a Jew to write of millions of our ardent allies the way Lévy has, and to declare their friendship unwanted and unworthy, is gross ingratitude.
Israel Alone
by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Wicked Son, 164 pp., $18.99 (paperback)
Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
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