In one of modern philosophy’s most celebrated scuffles, Jean-Paul Sartre derided Albert Camus for rejecting violence committed in service of noble ideals. If you snub your nose at movements that practice armed resistance, Sartre warned, you’ll end up standing by yourself. That may be so, Camus shot back, but without my stance, millions of men and women would be truly alone.
That the exchange is alluded to in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone, is hardly a coincidence. Like Camus, Lévy, the French activist and philosopher, understands that, though many of his colleagues swoon over the Hamas savages who executed men, women, and children a year ago in Israel, the West remains blessed with those who display solitary courage.
This short list includes, of course, Lévy himself. One of the world’s most celebrated writers and thinkers, he would’ve been excused had he offered his opinions from the comfort of a Parisian café. Instead, he demonstrates a remarkable commitment to bearing witness, relaying raw and stirring dispatches from the front lines of the world’s deadliest wars. His new book is no different: Lévy arrived in Israel immediately after the October 7 attack and was among the first journalists allowed on the killing fields.
With Hamas terrorists still hiding among their victims’ homes and human remains still souring in the late autumn sun, Lévy realized immediately that he was not looking at just another round, however deadly, in the decades-old conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Instead, he was witnessing what he calls an Event, a dark and unpredictable occurrence that “breaks history in two.” Its aftermath is terrifying.
The GoPro-wielding torturers, Lévy writes, pierced the global Jewish consciousness, shattering the notion that the existence of a strong and independent Jewish state would suffice to prevent the Holocaust’s horrors from recurring. The attack also dispelled the notion of our self-proclaimed intellectual and moral elites, in whose minds “evil was transformed into an illness and politics into a clinic.” The world, Lévy observes, wasn’t ready for the sheer brutalities of that day, from the machine-gunning of infants to the sadistic rape and murder of young women. “More than the Israeli or Jewish soul was murdered here,” he concludes; “it was our common conscience.”
The violence also underscored how poorly prepared we are to fight the dark armies that have gathered at our gates. What Lévy calls “the Global West” has grown increasingly unwilling to defend its values and interests, and he argues that the space it vacated has been seized by the Five Kings, an allusion to the biblical story of Abraham fighting five ancient potentates to free his nephew, Lot. Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and the global Islamist-jihadist movement, in Lévy’s telling, are the malignant forces eager to erect a new global order, with each rushing to Hamas’s defense.
But Israel, Lévy argues, isn’t a pawn in this new and little-understood global conflict. It is, instead, “the hearth that radiates a light and a language without which a part of humanity would be lost.” Israel, too, stands alone—just ask anyone on an American college campus these days. And yet, Israel’s solitude, like Camus’s, is a blessing, not a curse, as it shines a light for those who still believe in our better angels.
Having made this searing statement, Lévy sets out to support it, in short chapters that weave together passionate polemics with philosophical insights. First, Lévy skewers those who denied or belittled the atrocities, from progressive American politicians like Jamaal Bowman, who dismissed accounts of Hamas’s atrocities as “,” to international organizations like the , which, according to Middle East Forum, “made no effort to visit the hostages while they were imprisoned.”
Rather than merely point out their misdeeds, Lévy, ever a believer in reason’s capacity to vanquish ignorance, dismantles each talking point of Israel’s detractors. Is the Jewish state committing genocide in Gaza? Lévy unpacks the meaning of the loaded term and shows why Israel—which warns Palestinian civilians before striking targets in Gaza, allows humanitarian aid in and a stream of refugees out of the strip, and is still eager for its murderous opponent to agree to a ceasefire deal—doesn’t come close to qualifying. Are Israelis colonizers with no business being in the region? Lévy delivers a knockout argument that begins with a reminder that Jews have always lived in the land promised to them by God and ends with a history lesson about Zionism, an anti-colonialist movement that pushed away not one but two usurping empires—the first British and the second an invading Arab army inspired by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, an acolyte of Hitler’s who spent vast portions of World War II in Berlin.
Readers new to this history—including many American Jews who woke up on the morning of October 7 only to realize that the universities they attend, the newspapers they read, and many of the institutions they had revered sided with pogromists—will appreciate Lévy’s crash course. But even more astute students of Israel and its history will find much to admire in his distillation of complex ideas into a brief and moving cri de coeur.
Israel’s loneliness, and that of its supporters, must never harden into another false idol, Lévy concludes. The Jewish state must fight for its survival in a war certain to be long, arduous, and bloody. But it must never abandon its commitment to waging war justly, to caring for the fate of innocents on the other side, even when the enemy fails to repay the courtesy, and to living up to the ancient promise, first uttered by the prophet Isaiah, to turn God’s House of Prayer, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, into a house of prayer for all nations.
Our challenge, then, in the wake of October 7, isn’t just waging war against evil incarnate or standing up to its mindless and heartless apologists. Our challenge, Lévy reminds us, is to live up to the West’s best virtues, many rooted in the Jewish tradition. If we do that, he promises, we will unite millions who may be confused, afraid, and lonely—but never, hallelujah, alone.
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