Since the 1970s, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been one of France’s leading public intellectuals, and has distinguished himself for possessing moral clarity about subjects that usually provoke moral confusion, or worse, from French public intellectuals. Yet this perceptiveness does not make him correct about all particulars. Meir Soloveichik in 2017 dissented from the conventional wisdom about the Algerian-born Jewish philosopher’s The Genius of Judaism. Now he takes issue with Lévy’s post-October 7 book.
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.
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.
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.
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